Boldly Going Nowhere

April 20, 2009 | Source: New York Times

NASA should re-energize its development of nuclear-powered rockets, with the intention of building a craft able to send clusters of micro-bots into deep space at velocities of, say, one-tenth light speed, says SETI astronomer Seth Shostak.

“By the middle of the following century, on-the-scene data from Epsilon Eridani, the nearest known planetary system, could be in our hands.

“These microbots would supply the information that, fed to computers, would allow us to explore alien planets in the same way that we navigate the virtual spaces of video games or wander through online environments like Second Life.”