Announced in April 2016 by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg, Pete Worden, and Avi Loeb with $100 million in seed funding, Breakthrough Starshot proposed reaching Alpha Centauri, 4.34 light years away, within a human lifetime. The plan: accelerate a one gram StarChip carrying four sub-gram processors, five two megapixel cameras, and a 150 milligram atomic battery to 20 percent the speed of light using a ground based, multi-kilometer phased array of lasers firing 100 gigawatts for ten minutes at a four meter graphene light sail.

This episode digs into every part of the engineering: why the rocket equation makes chemical propulsion a 70,000 year trip, how a microscopic RTG uses the Seebeck effect, the 10,000 G acceleration only a solid state chip could survive, the three kilometer synthetic aperture built from wave interference, a ...