Mission to Alpha Centauri
The cosmologist Stephen Hawking and the entrepreneur Yuri Milner released a simulation that shows how a project called Breakthrough Starshot aims to send small robots to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
By BREAKTHROUGH STARSHOT on Publish Date April 12, 2016. Photo by European Southern Observatory.We have been honoring the top winners of our Seventh Annual Found Poem Student Contest by publishing their work in alphabetical order by last name for the last two weeks. This one, by by Mariam Van, is our final favorite, but you can read the whole collection here.
“Space Migration” was taken from two articles by Dennis Overbye, 2016’s “Reaching for the Stars, Across 4.37 Light-Years” and 2015’s “So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes.”
Space Migration
In the quest to end cosmic loneliness,
We are migrating butterflies across the universe.
The right doses of starlight and water could turn those that survive
To transcend human limitations.
We are human and our nature is to fly.
Even ice plumes contain tiny forms of life,
even the elements in smoke detectors unfold to catch laser light.
It is too late to adapt to a starshade and block light from a star.
Better to hang on to gas and lighter components,
Concentrate our search for cosmic company.
We are not alone.
Accelerate the butterfly probes,
and we become
thousands of lasers firing in perfect unison.