The Galaxy Missions

[Raphael]

The main Incatena page says:

Thanks to the mighty Galaxy Missions, launched starting in 2882 and now almost 1000 light years out, and still gathering data, humanity has caught a glimpse of the galactic culture in which we live— a dizzying range of natures and peoples, worlds and cultures. Yet the Missions have visited less than 1% of 1% of the stars of our own galaxy.

Are those missions crewed or uncrewed? And can you tell us anything else about them?

[zompist]

Are those missions crewed or uncrewed? And can you tell us anything else about them?

They are uncrewed, as these are one-way trips, and creating life support systems would vastly increase the ships' mass.

There are really three waves. The first is a large number of probes that were accelerated to about half lightspeed, and never decelerate. Each contains an array of sensors, a comm laser aimed at an Earth colony, a subsmart AI to run it all, and enough power for these elements. Each was aimed at a star; at that speed, it has about a day to examine the entire stellar system. It has no ability to decelerate or even change course, so it just keeps going, sending back what information it can about the vector it's on.

The second wave is a bigger payload with enough fuel for course corrections (but they still don't decelerate). Because something moving at relativistic speeds takes a lot of energy to change course, there are far less of these. But they can go from star to star till they run out of fuel.

The third wave is smaller yet, and much slower, but consists of ships big enough to decelerate. They are sent to an interesting system-- based on data from the first two waves-- and stay there for a few years gathering data. They can pick up fuel from gas giants and move to another star.

At least, I think that's how it'd work! After the Fermi Paradox discussion, I'm not claiming that this discovery procedure will even find any sentients on its path: we may not know what to look for, and sentients may well not be concentrated on planets. But stars and planets are the obvious thing to investigate.

[Raphael]

Ah, thank you!