NASA and Nanobots Nearing the Speed of Light

This is about a star-traveling nanochip and Stephen Hawking is part of team of NASA astropeople who are concocting the notion.  (RT:  NASA designing nano-starship which travels at 20% the speed of light)

The US space agency and a team of scientists, including Stephen Hawking, is developing a nano-starship made from a single silicon chip that can travel one-fifth the speed of light. 

In theory the miniature spacecraft could arrive at Earth’s closest star system, Alpha Centauri, in 20 years – 100-times faster than a conventional spacecraft can achieve.

Hawking announced the ground-breaking project back in April which aims to slash interstellar space exploration times by using lasers to propel a nano-spacecraft the size of a postage stamp, called StarChip.

- RT

Here's a pic from the article:

The laser beam won't expand like that over such an incredibly short range but it looks cool.

There's some wild science in the article so have a ball with self-repairing chips if you like.  The specific interest here is the time dilation effect inherent in speed approaching the speed of light.

They estimate the vehicle will take twenty years to get to the target star.  Even at twenty percent light speed, there should be significant time dilation and that which took twenty years on the ship in subjective time is much longer in our objective time back on Earth.

The article didn't have anything in particular to say about time dilation but that's one of the biggest problems for sci fi in how to deal with that effect for star travel with using a gimmick like a warp drive or a hyper driver or some such.

The Rockhouse sure doesn't have an answer or they would calling me for the Nobel Prize and scheduling ticker tape parades.  The phone ain't ringing.

We have played with time dilation previously and about all we can really conclude is, yep, it's a problem.  If there's a question it's does anyone know of some whizzy new physics which gets them past the time dilation problem in some novel way.

Also some physics for lasers is how much power does it take to drive the beam interstellar distances.  It seems like it would take so much power it would need a nuke the size of North America to drive it.

We love this kind of research and hope they find success with it but they seem kind of blasé about time travel so that's a curiosity.  There's a link to a paper from Hawking and Milner if you really want to drill it.

Note:  unknown who Milner may be.