David Kipping

It's not powerful enough to do that.

If you want to do that, you'd have to visit the system.

And so we're talking about doing that as well.

So there was this project Starshot that wanted to fly a probe directly towards the nearest star, fly by super fast, snap a photo, and beam it back.

Because that way you could actually get even better resolution, right?

You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.

How long would it take for that beam to get back to us?

Well, it's four light years away, 4.2 light years away.

So it would take four years?

Yeah, and it would take about 20 years to do the journey at the speeds they were talking.

They want to get 20% the speed of light.

So they'd take 20 years, take a photo, so 24 years altogether.

So this was Yuri Milner's brainchild, and his dream was that he could see a photo in his lifetime of another Earth-like planet.

And that's pretty much the best way we have to really pull that off.

Is there work being done to try to make that happen?

Yeah, so I'm not sure the current status of Starshot.

Yuri put $100 million up, I believe, for his own money.

And I think Mark Zuckerberg came in on it and they were like, we're going to try and do this.

I wasn't part of that project, but I was inspired by it.

And I actually came up with a twist on it recently called TARS from Interstellar.