Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner are launching a $100-million initiative to send 100-million-mile-an-hour bots to Alpha Centauri

Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking are teaming up to send 100-million-mile-per-hour bots deep into space.

The $100 million initiative intends to develop light-propelled nanocrafts that will get us to Alpha Centauri, the next closest star system to the Solar System. Keep in mind that while it's the next closest, it's still roughly 25 trillion miles away. And they're planning to make it happen in the next 20 years.

"Technologically, there's a feasible path to getting to a star within our generation," said astronaut Mae Jemison at the initiative's press conference. 

Researchers are interested in Alpha Centauri because it has exoplanets that could possibly contain an Earth-like one that could be habitable.

The new space exploration initiative is called the "Breakthrough Starshot" and it's being livestreamed at 12 p.m. EDT today. (Watch it below.) Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be joining the group's board.

Hawking has previously said we need to colonize space to survive as a species. 

"Earth is a wonderful place, but it might not last forever," Hawking commented in a press release. "Sooner or later, we must look to the stars."

Milner is best known for his investments in companies like Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter. For his part, Milner has invested in other science initiatives and worked with Hawking in the past. Most recently, in July 2015, Milner announced he would spend $100 million on massive telescopes in search of other planets. 

Here's how the mission to Alpha Centauri, which would require a budget roughly the size of the largest existing scientific experiments, would work:

1. Build a ground-based kilometer-scale light beamer at high altitude
2. Create a system capable of generating and storing a few gigawatt hours of energy per launch
3. Launch a "mothership" carrying thousands of tiny, iPhone-seize bots to a high-altitude orbit
4. Focus the light beam on the lightsail to accelerate the individual bots, or "nanocrafts," to the target speed
5. Take images of a planet and transmit them back to Earth with an on-board laser communications system
6. Use the same light beamer that launched the bots continue pulling data from them four years later

Watch the livestream below:

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