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Thursday, August 18, 2011

Reaching For The Stars, At Your Expense

DARPA is reaching for the stars. Literally. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plans to award a half-million-dollar grant to study what it would take for humans to travel to another star, The New York Times reports. The study would cover more than just the technology to take people on journeys lasting hundreds or thousands of years; it will also explore the sociological, ethical and even religious questions behind such a project. In fact, the study itself could take a century. DARPA said it will announce the award on November 1, the culmination of a year-long collaboration with NASA called the 100-year Starship Study.

1 comment:

lmclain said...

I'm all for science and technological development/advancement, BUT unless DARPA, one of the most secret and secretive agencies of our government, has some technology they ain't telling us about (actually, they have a LOT of tech they ain't telling us about...LOL), this is a HUGE waste of money. Somebody must have some connections to have got THIS through and approved. We still have a hard time landing on the moon. The nearest star (and we would need a habitable PLANET to land on) would take us thousands of years to reach. Even if we developed some new propulsion method, it would still be HUNDREDS of years. Its like commissioning a study to see how we would adjust to being able to "transport" (as in Star Trek) people to the moon. Pure fantasy for at least the long term, forseeable future.