DARPA Lays Out Tech for 100-Year Starship Program

Credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center

A Pentagon effort to enable a human journey to the stars within 100 years aims to enlist the brainpower of science fiction writers, ethicists and researchers. This new call for ideas covers innovations such as faster than light travel and life-sustaining technologies as well as questions about who gets chosen for the starship crew and what happens if alien life turns up at the end of the journey.

This latest step for the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study would lead up to a space technology conference scheduled to take place in Orlando, Fla., from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. The new call for papers differs from a past request for proposals about setting up the organization that would lead the charge into the future of interstellar travel.

But the joint project between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA still represents the earliest stages for considering how to create a starship. The required technologies may seem as distant now as the technologies needed to send humans to the moon seemed back in 1865, when science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote the book From the Earth to the Moon. [10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True]

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