David Kipping

You know TARS from the movie?

What was TARS?

It's like a robot thing that's in the movie.

It's called TARS.

And so I came up with a twist on their idea.

So let me explain their idea quickly first and then I'll give you my twist.

Their idea is like if you really want to go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship.

That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now.

The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny, thin sheet of material, like imagine a piece of mylar, a piece of aluminum foil, and blast it with light, with a laser.

And so they're talking about sort of 100 gigawatts of laser power, right?

So just kind of crazy amounts of energy.

So here's the sail being ejected.

And then back on the Earth, you're going to have this huge array of

of mega lasers, and they're all gonna point up at this thing and blast it.

So this thing will accelerate due to just light from the sun, but this is like on steroids, right?

You're just kind of bumping it up to whatever speed you want.

When people saw this idea, physicists saw this idea, there was a lot of questions about how, isn't that gonna destroy the sail?

You're firing a 100 gigawatt laser at a sail?

Isn't that gonna obliterate the thing?

So this thing has to be outrageously shiny to avoid burning up in the beam.