Yuri Milner.
Billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner wants to use a giant laser to blast small silicon chips deep into space. He’s trying “to answer one of the most existential questions,” he told Forbes assistant managing editor Kerry Dolan at the annual Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy on Tuesday. “Are we alone in the universe?”
Last year Milner funded a $100 million “Breakthrough Starshot” project to test the feasibility of the light-sail approach. He brought on Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg as board members. It’s an unusual cause to take on, even for a Silicon Valley mogul, and the potential payoff would be decades away. “Philanthropy is a very broad space. 99% of it should focus on what people need today,” he said at the event. “At the same time, there should be a relatively small amount — less than 1% — that would explore more outward kinds of things.”
Milner, whose investment firm DST Global once owned 8% of Facebook, thinks his project has slim odds of answering the big question, but the upside is so big that he can’t resist trying. “The chances we’ll find something in the next 10 years are 1%,” he said. “But the significance is such that, if you multiply 1% by the significance, it’s worth it.”
Private investment in space exploration has grown over the past fifteen years, from Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Meanwhile, U.S. government investment in the field has stagnated. The current state of public funding is a far cry from six decades ago, when the country spent more than $100 billion in today’s dollars to send astronauts to the moon. “Somehow, that was possible in the 1960s. Some of it was probably Cold War fears with the country where I was born,” Milner said. Since government spending has declined, private companies and backers like Milner are stepping in to fill the gap.
Breakthrough Starshot aims to send tiny, quarter-inch by quarter-inch devices containing cameras and transmitters to the closest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri. It’s four light years — or 25 trillion miles — away. To get there, Milner wants to use a laser that would need to be an astonishing one kilometer by one kilometer in size.
To launch each “StarChip,” the laser would blast it for a few minutes, causing it to fly one-fifth the speed of light, Milner said. The chip would take 20 years to arrive. More traditional spaceships are useless in this effort because they move way too slowly. Even today’s fastest spacecraft would take 30,000 years to travel the same distance.
Once the star chip arrived, it would beam back images to Earth using its small laser. Technological developments over the past 10 years have made this possible. “If we didn’t have iPhones, we wouldn’t’ be able to do this,” Milner said. “Billions of dollars have been spent on making things smaller and moving information faster through lasers.”
Breakthrough Starshot is just a testing phase for the larger, more expensive projects of building the laser and setting a stream of chips on their path to Alpha Centauri. So 55-year-old Milner will need to wait decades before he comes within striking distance of answering his question. “I hope you live a long life,” Forbes’ Kerry Dolan told him.
He’s okay with the wait, he said. “Maybe just to see the launch is enough.”
