Stephen Hawking wants to send tiny lightsail spacecraft to Alpha Centauri (Tomorrow Daily 347)

[MUSIC] Greetings citizens of the Internet. Welcome to Tomorrow Daily and the best [UNKNOWN] talk show in the known universe. I'm Ashley Esqueda. I'm Jeff Cannata, hold on to your socks, it's time for headlines. Some of Earth's biggest minds want to send space craft at a fraction of the speed of light to their nearest star system. They're calling it Starshot, famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking and investor Yuri Milner unveiled a plan to send tiny nano craft into space. Those nano craft would use light Sales and a ground base light beamer to propel themselves up to a hundred million miles an hour or 20% of the speed of light. That would make the four year light trip to Alpha Centauri take about 20 years which they much quicker trip than traditional spacecraft which were take about 30,000 years. Hacking stress beneath to look to the stars because earth quote might not last forever unquote. That's pretty cool, but how long will it take to get information from those spacecraft back to us? About 30,000 years. No, I don't know. That's too long, that's too long for the info. I mean, a really cool idea. We'll have to do some research on that. Hey, street art may be changing forever with an introduction of a smart spray can. This motion sensing spray can was developed by a team at Dartmouth University This invention allows for large scale replication of images without any skill on the part of the artist. Two webcams and a cube with QR markers keep track of the can's motion and position relative to the wall and an algorithm controls how much paint is released and where as the painter moves the can along the wall. The team responsible for the can says it's kind of a modern spray paint by numbers. It's played paid by numbers. You don't need any artistic skills to be able to make a giant street art mineral as amazing. I guess that's really cool. I guess that's cool. I feel like I like the idea of wanting to be a really good artist Yeah And maybe this but really are you the good artist or is it the spray paint can? I don't know I mean if it's is it now just a fax machine or like a copy machine? Kind of yeah just a live copy machine I said fax machine like people use those You're the copy machine essentially Yeah. Stuff. Pretty cool. Which one do you think we should talk about? I'm kind of intrigued by both of them. These are pretty good stories today. I think it's gotta be Starshot, I feel like we gotta talk about getting into the next star system over. At 20% of the speed of light. That's pretty amazing. It's pretty I mean to think that we could actually explore that far into our galaxy is pretty wild. I'm interested. Let's talk about it on Thursday. Yeah. You can be a part of that conversation by using our hashtag HeyTD. Yeah and if we like your tweets We'll put it in Thursdays show but you gotta tweet fast because we have some scheduling stuff. [LAUGH] Tweet it quickly. Tweet right now. That being said, let's check out our photography of the day. [MUSIC] Todays phonetographer of the day is Osmar who took this picture with his iPhone 6S PLUS. Yeah, Osmar write and says hello, Ashley and Jeff. My name is Osmar and you have my permission to use this picture of my wife and I we're at the Cloud Gate Culture in Chicago a.k.a the Chicago Bean A friend of ours took this photo on my iPhone 6s plus and boy were we surprised at how well it came out. Especially since the weather kept switching from snowing to sunny. I hope you show it for your April monuments and points of interest seen. Love the show, watch it all the time, your fan from Purdue University Osmar Lopez. And then he says, he tells us how to pronounce his first name but I thought this was cool. His name is combination of his mom and dad's name Oscar and Martha.And also because his name is Martha,his mom's name is Martha in common he had also name in common with that man is superman.>>Yeah I have my own version of that exact picture along with other pictures>>I love that so much>.yeah>>If you guys want to send your landmarks.monuments points of interests picture this month Email them to Tomorrw@Cnet.com. Yeah, make sure you tell us which device and take a picture. Give us the pronunciation of your name. We really appreciate that. We do. Give us permission to use it on the show. And we always love a little story about why you took that picture. Well so everyone on social media, and if you wanna share the show with friends and give the gift of Tomorrow Daily, you can send them to TomorrowDaily.com. It'll send you right to To our show page on CNET. That is it for us today. We will back tomorrow with Clayton Snyder. Fun, fun, fun interview with Clayton. Fun guy, actor, all around cool guy. Yeah. Friend of producer Logan. Indeed. We're gonna do that tomorrow. We also have a lot Of interesting conversations that we're gonna have. So until then. Be good humans. Bye, guys. [MUSIC]