Who is Yuri Milner?

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.popsci.com/who-is-yuri-milner

WHO IS YURI MILNER?
THE MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD
By Mary Beth Griggs

Yuri Milner is making a big announcement today. If that statement leaves you wondering 'Yuri Who?' then we have some answers for you. Let's start with the basics.

Who is Yuri Milner and where is he from?

Yuri Milner is best known for investing in insanely profitable start-ups including a little one called Facebook. He's also known for using the resulting profits to fund big-picture science projects and awards.
Milner was born in Moscow in 1961, and was named Yuri after Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space.

How did he get his start?

Milner grew up in the Soviet Union, and first entered the business world by selling personal computers on the grey market. He then started working at brokerage firms, and eventually began investing in companies.
Milner has been interested in science for quite a long time. He has an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics from the University of Moscow and started a PhD in the subject, but left to pursue business opportunities (for some reason he thought those personal computers might be a big hit).

"The universe is not teeming with life, but we're probably not alone. If we were alone it would be such a waste of real estate. But I don't want to be the judge, I just want to help find an answer."
Yuri Milner, Time Magazine 2015

How did he make his fortune?

Milner has amassed a personal fortune estimated at $2.9 billion. How did he do it? By investing heavily in Silicon Valley at exactly the right time. In 2009, he invested $200 million in Facebook, buying two percent of the company. That was swiftly followed by a series of investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in Zynga, Spotify, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter.
Not all of that money came from Milner's personal coffers. By 2009 he was a successful venture capitalist, rounding up large amounts of money from individuals and businesses to invest in other businesses--in his case, he started by investing in Russian dot-coms. By 2015, he had gained such a reputation for making good investments that his venture capital firm, DST Global, attracted $1.7 billion for future investments.

What are his big goals and mission statements?

In addition to funding some of the biggest names of Silicon Valley, over the past few years, Milner has been pouring money into scientific endeavors, pushing for scientists to be recognized in the same way athletes and artists are. And what better way to make scientists rockstars than by paying them like rockstars? In 2012, Milner established the Fundamental Physics Prize, surprising nine physicists with awards of $3 million.
The Fundamental Physics Prize morphed into the Breakthrough Prize, gathering support from Mark Zuckerberg along the way. It still gives out its $3 million prize annually to a select number of deserving scientists, but the idea has expanded beyond fundamental physics to Life Sciences and Mathematics as well.
Then, last year, Milner announced the $100 million Breakthrough Listen effort, teaming up with none other than Stephen Hawking to announce the endeavor, which is dispersing the money to help search for alien life in the universe.
When the prize was announced, Milner told Time Magazine: "The universe is not teeming with life, but we're probably not alone. If we were alone it would be such a waste of real estate. But I don't want to be the judge, I just want to help find an answer."

[BridgeTroll]

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-billionaires-plan-to-send-robots-powered-by-lasers-to-alpha-centauri

A Billionaire's Plan to Send Robots Powered by Lasers to Alpha Centauri
The trip to the star system, which is 4.37 lightyears away, could take just 20 years.

By Erik Shilling APRIL 12, 2016

Here's something amazing. While you were busy today patting yourself on the back for taking out the trash, Stephen Hawking and a billionaire were announcing a plan to send robots to a star system 4.37 lightyears away.

How would they do this? Thousands of tiny robots, some very powerful lasers, and a massive scientific collaboration, of course. (Not to mention some rich friends on the board, like Mark Zuckerberg.)

The project was announced on the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space, preceding the U.S.'s so-called moonshot. The new project's name has a similarly lofty title: Breakthrough Starshot.


It is being funded initially by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who invests in tech companies (including Facebook.) Milner said Tuesday that he's investing $100 million to begin research on the starshot, but says it could cost $10 billion to finish the job, which, by the way, won't be done anytime soon.

Even if everything goes right, it could be nearly a half-century before we get data back from Alpha Centauri, according to The New York Times.

As for the technical details, the project's announcement outlines a simple eight-step plan:

Building a ground-based kilometer-scale light beamer at high altitude in dry conditions.
Generating and storing a few gigawatt hours of energy per launch.
Launching a 'mothership' carrying thousands of nanocrafts to a high-altitude orbit.
Taking advantage of adaptive optics technology in real time to compensate for atmospheric effects.
Focusing the light beam on the lightsail to accelerate individual nanocrafts to the target speed within minutes.
Accounting for interstellar dust collisions en route to the target.
Capturing images of a planet, and other scientific data, and transmitting them back to Earth using a compact on-board laser communications system.
Using the same light beamer that launched the nanocrafts to receive data from them over 4 years later.
So, nothing to it.

Or, as Stephen Hawking said, according to the Times:

"Earth is a beautiful place, but it might not last forever. Sooner or later we must look to the stars."

[Jason]

I wonder if that technology could be used to send people to Mars?

[BridgeTroll]

Yes... but... you would need even bigger Lazerbeams...