The project will be led by the former director of NASA Ames Research Center Pete? Warden leads a committee of world-class scientists and engineers to provide advice, and its development may take several years. Although Milner invested 100 million US dollars in advance, the entire laser pointer project research and development may cost 5 to 10 billion US dollars. At present, Hawking hopes to attract other international investors. But how many rich people will participate in this money-burning cause? This is full of considerable uncertainty in the future.
It is also facing these many challenges that the current scientific community does not believe that this ambitious space exploration program can be implemented soon. Although some ideas of Hawking and others are good, they still have the color of science fiction at present. Therefore, Hawking fans who are eager to follow Hawking’s interstellar exploration may be disappointed.
Of course, on a longer time scale, Pang Zhihao believes that this laser propulsion method may be promising, but the premise is that major technological breakthroughs must be made, which is still unpredictable. However, he believes that Hawking’s laser “spacecraft” can be used as the subject of science fiction for exploratory research.
Maybe one day in the future, this technology will really become a reality? In fact, to realize the interstellar travel of the Milky Way and beyond, mankind has fully expanded the wings of imagination. For example, the curvature drive in Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel “Three-Body”, and the propulsion device “curvature engine” of the superluminal spacecraft in the American science fiction series “Star Trek” are all good methods, but these methods are the same as Hawking’s laser. “Spaceship” is more sci-fi. Despite this, many scientists have begun to study these imaginations in recent years.
Wang Sichao, a researcher at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believes that the plan proposed by Hawking is bold and adventurous. It is theoretically advanced in thinking and has great inspiring significance to the scientific community. It is like the first human being to think of using rockets to fly into the sky. The “world’s first man in aerospace”, the Ming Dynasty expedition madman, has the same inspiration for today’s aerospace, but the green laser pointer “spacecraft” is now very advanced and the implementation is quite difficult.
We can strive to achieve this in laser pointer technology, instead of pursuing its practical value in interstellar navigation across the solar system. For example, we can first carry out some related engineering experiments between the earth and the moon, the earth and Mars, and wait until it is successful. Try to explore the space a few light-years away, so the investment will be much less.