This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

In the last two years, astronomers have found seven exoplanets around the star Trappist

1 only 40 light years away as well as a planet called

Proxima B orbiting Proxima Centuri a mere 4.2 light years from us.

I think now that we have these very nearby planets, what I'm seeing in the community is all kinds of ingenuity

in terms of designing ground-based telescopes, small space-based

telescopes that are specifically, they're specifically intended to do just this one job.

Jill Tartar of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

SETI stands for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Tartar was the inspiration for the Jody Foster character in the movie Contact.

And I'm really amazed at what I'm seeing in terms of what might be possible,

not 20 years from now, but in a five years from now,

force reasonable amounts of money.

So the fact that these planets are now becoming places

really is changing the sea.

Tartar spoke on a panel October 29th at a SETI session at Berkeley that was part of the

Biennial World Conference of Science Journalists.

Also on the panel was Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist at the Berkeley

SETI Research Center, who talked about a proposal called Breakthrough Starshot.

And the idea is to go and get there in 20 years and take a picture of approximately.

It's a one-gram spacecraft, four meters across, and it's a sail, and you deploy it in space and you shine a laser, 50 gigawatt laser on it for about two minutes and in the two minutes it accelerates at 50,000 geez and gets up to about 20% of the speed of light and then it goes there and takes

a picture and sends it back.

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