The United States Government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take - organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically - to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
The awarding of that grant, on November 11 - 11/11/11 - is planned as the culmination of a yearlong DARPA-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Florida, starting on September 30 on the whys and hows of interstellar travel. The DARPA plan has generated buzz as well as befuddlement in the labs, pubs, diners and Web sites that ring NASA centers both physically and virtually, where the dream of space travel has never died.
China Daily's perspective about the DARPA 100 Year Starship Study. Jack Sarfatti is giving a paper at this meeting entitled "Low Power Warp Drive." To read the rest of the article, click here.