Breakthrough starshot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

Tiny spacecrafts and sails with lasers. Yeah pretty sure that was it. Such a cool idea, and it would only take 30 years, which means a lot of us will still be alive to see it. Imagine seeing actual closeup pictures of “earth 2”.

Anyway if they used the same technology, but sent spacecraft out into space from locations all around the Earth at the same time, then we could gather data as this fleet headed into deep space.

Like one of those big planet explosions in science fiction movies, but instead of an explosion, just tiny space crafts.

There's no way to get a gravity assist in directions orthogonal to the solar plane, which makes travel in those directions either far more expensive or far slower.

I hadn’t thought of that, but your totally right. In the article’s picture, one of the space craft appears to be heading off in a direction outside of the solar plane, but it’s not by a huge amount.

That’s why we need a way to create gravity artificially if we are going to do any space exploration. It would be a bit crap if we could only move in 2 dimensions.

That might be our best bet to get to other systems. But it’s still pretty much a fantasy. The engineering challenges behind that project just seem insurmountable unless we work on it as a planet, not just NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc.

It doesn’t sound that hard, it’s just laser kites. I bet Elon could do it.

Apart from the insane amount of power required to use lasers as propulsion in this way, they also require a camera, computer, interstellar communications system and nuclear power source within a mass budget of a few grams. It's complete science fiction.

Literally everything in this area starts out as science fiction. I think the general idea of sending lots of small craft is a good idea. It would be great to hear from the people building these things which parts are not possible currently.

Given the crazy high amount of laser power this requires, maybe placing a satellite close to the sun, and having it focus solar radiation, would be better than an earth based laser grid?