Scientists plan to send tiny chips pushed by a laser beam to photograph a planet that is very similar to Earth and is believed to harbor life.
In August 2016, in the Atacama desert in Chile , at the La Silla observatory, some astronomers in search of exoplanets announced a planet very similar to planet Earth that orbits the star that is closest to our solar system Proxima Centauri and they call the planet Proxima b and describe it as very similar to Earth and close enough to its star to be capable of supporting life.

According to Amy Shira Teitel, author of Breaking the chains of gravity , she says that next b is one of the most interesting exoplanets that they have found in recent times and that this exoplanet is 1.3 times the size of planet earth, which is why scientists They point out that in principle it could be rocky, which means that it could be very similar to planet Earth. According to planetary scientist Michael Summers , the exoplanet near b could be habitable and we could study them in more detail with large telescopes and in the next 10 years we could even take photos of the planet.

Proxima b is located only 4 light years from planet earth, a very short distance in terms of astronomical distances, approximately 40 billion kilometers. Despite this immense distance, an ambitious program is already underway to send a spaceship to study it. Its name is Breakthrought Starshop. The program began with the combined creation of the philanthropist Yuri Milner and the late and very famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

In the words of Yuri Milner: for the first time in human history we will be able to do much more than just look at the stars. We will be able to reach them!

The goal of the Breakthrought Starshop program is to send very minuscule zondes just centimeters thick to the very close planet Proxima b. What they do is they take a computer chip they energize it with a laser beam and a parachute and what the laser beam does is it cools the parachute and shoots the chip at the nearest star. You throw that in and you basically travel and you could possibly speed them up a lot to 20% the speed of light and getting to the closest stars to our solar system becomes very reasonable indeed.

Even traveling at such speeds these probes would take 20 years to complete their journey and it is because light travels at a finite speed and a very simple example of that is that the sun is 8 minutes from the earth because of the way light travels and most things in the universe are thousands or millions of light years away, which means that if we manage to pick up a signal from another civilization it will be something very important but at such a distance we might never get here and we might not know each other for the enormous distances.

Yes, as astronomers think of ancient astronauts, our planet Earth has already been visited by alien entities that come from other exoplanets that are only now being discovered. These entities would have to overcome the obstacles of space travel. The vast distances between objects!

Physicist Michio Kaku says that if you managed to talk to scientists, they would tell you the same thing over and over again: the distances between the stars are so far away that it is practically impossible for these aliens that speak of legends to visit us. Think for a moment that these beings are a million years more advanced than us and take into account that our technology with all these wonders is only 300 years old.

In recent years a growing number of astrophysicists have proposed that our humanity’s ability to unlock the secrets of interstellar space travel could be much closer than long previously thought and they think that the key lies in using a structure theoretically possible that it is known as a wormhole that is a deformation in space time that was proposed by the German physicist Albert Einstein and that the travel time between the stars could be not only much shorter but almost instantaneous.

From one point of view wormholes are just taking space that can be warped into our theory of relativity, generating modern theory of gravity and folding it back on itself to get two separate layers and connecting them with a tunnel and that tunnel is what is called a wormhole called as star gates star gates because they give you a way to travel faster than light for long distances.

In theory, if a ship existed that was capable of creating wormholes, it could be able to travel to distant exoplanets in just hours and quite possibly even seconds.

If there really are extraterrestrial civilizations more advanced than humans, could they see the secrets of space travel discovered thousands or hundreds of years ago?