Forget thinking big. Scientists including Stephen Hawking hope tiny spaceships called nanocraft can cut the 30,000-year trip to the Alpha Centauri star system down to 20 years.

Stephen Hawking. Image via Twitter
Stephen Hawking. Image via Twitter
As Britain’s Independent paper reported, “Tiny rockets are going to be sent into space to study the far universe in the most ambitious space exploration project in history.”

Hawking was quoted Tuesday as saying: “What makes us unique is transcending our limits. Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America. How do we transcend these limits? With our minds and our machines.

“The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars. But now we can transcend it, with light beams, light sails, and the lightest spacecraft ever built. Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos, because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

With financing from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and a Russian billionaire, the so-called Starshot Project hopes to send 1,000 craft 25 trillion miles at incredible speeds.

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