I think the first probe to proxima centauri launches in the 2040s and reaches 30% the speed of light

So first information sent from proxima centauri somewhere in the 2050s

@MalachiteEagle Why?

Space based laser system. Lots of other projects happening around that time to send probes to various parts of the solar system. Technology and infrastructure requirements in space will come online in the 2040s. I think it's more a question of opportunity cost vs other projects than hard physical limits. Unless of course we discover that the interstellar medium has many large dust particles or something that makes this sort of approach unexpectedly challenging.

The nearest star system is 4 ly away, so information takes 4 years to travel all the way back here. Means any probe needs to arrive there by 2096, or 72 years from now. Traveling 4 ly in 72 years requires an average speed of c/18.

At first I'd thought "no way, José". Then I remembered we'll have AI.

@BrunoParga Alcubierre drive something something?

@wadimiusz laser powered light sail swarm.

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3

Meaningful info about the Star system? Barring info from launch and travel?

@LoydWeldy I guess at least info like "I arrived near the destination". It's easy to imagine that the probe had functional telemetry during some part of its travel, and then the communication equipment failed, so we don't really know if it's arrived or what.

@wadimiusz The nearest star system is 4.2 light years away. At the speed voyager 1 is travelling it would take 10s of 1000s of years to reach it. I’m pretty sure we won’t have any info by 2100. I can check if we have made advancements in propulsion technology since then, but I’m guessing this could be resolved by inspection.

@LoydWeldy yeah, we'd have to do something really smart to achieve this, but, like, the rate of progress can surprise me sometimes.

@LoydWeldy the efficiency of chemical propulsion engines has a hard limit that we've almost hit, so probably no breakthroughs there

But it feels like we haven't tried everything:
- What about that things with blowing up nuclear weapons behind the probe to make it move really fast?
- What if we make a revolution in the energy industry, make electricity really much cheaper and easier to get than now, and then make ion engines go brrrrrrrr much faster just because we can throw out the ions at a much higher speed?
- What if we manage to get some version of the Alcubierre drive that enables practical FTL travel?

- Some time-travel crap that is not excluded by general relativity?

Having trouble imagining a plausible scenario where we receive "non-meaningful" info and no "meaningful" info. Did you have something specific in mind when I chose the criteria?

@jskf I only meant to exclude the cases where we send it there and it’s going to arrive in a thousand years or something. It also doesn’t count if it’s supposed to have reached its destination but we don’t know if it’s succeeded because transmission broke down.

Anecdote I heard about the Soviet space program: iirc, after they received the first photograph of the far side of the Moon (its quality was shitty), someone excitedly asked the team behind that feat what the Moon looked like on other side, and they replied, “it’s round”.

If the probe sends something like “this star is round”, I guess that already counts as meaningful information.