A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)

I’ve put this in my “other ideas” section in YC applications for a couple rounds now. No luck yet.

Would love to send 1,000 probes to 550AU+ out in order to observe 1,000+ ‘nearby’ exoplanets, hopefully find life, make contact, start trade…haha. Or otherwise defend the solar system from invaders that are perhaps already on the way!

Maybe YC rejects me specifically because I put that there…hm.

how much analysis have you done on this? I'm working on a series around Kardashev II work - space solar, asteroid mining, dyson spheres and the real work that is happening to support this now. contact me if you'd like to discuss - @bensand on X

What kind of ROI would attract a VC to this kind of project? How could they monetize it?

Would each image created be proceeded by ads that you can skip after 5s or would they be unskippable? Data harvesting is kind of the point of the platform, but maybe they could track that data and get the PII/deanonymized information? "This user spent 104 hours continuously staring at the sun. Maybe they would be interested in sunglasses, or maybe some sun block"

Sadly I am still at very early stages of this idea. However I will save this thread and contact you if I make progress!

I mean it's a great idea and all and probably not original, but it needs billions if not more in new spacecraft that can travel 3-4x as far as the furthest human-made object is (Voyagers) in a reasonable time, a scalable launch system that can launch the probes (1000x payload + fuel with the delta-V required to get there), probes that go to the destination, and a new almost interstellar communications network to get the data and commands there and back again.

Basically your idea would be the biggest, most expensive and longest undertaking in space exploration system, ever. I can see why investors would be a bit hesitant about that.