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This is a spacecraft conceived for Project Daedalus, which was a study of the British Interplanetary Society during the 1970s to design an interstellar spacecraft. Like 100YSS, the goal was to design a spacecraft that could get to the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light-years away in a human lifetime. Any conceived Daedalus craft would have been robotic, but it shows the size our manned craft could potentially reach - probably even bigger, since it would hold hundreds to thousands of people and everything they would need to survive for decades. Where will human culture be in another century? Some good guesses can be made. The science of extrasolar planet hunting became a realization in the 1990s. In 1992, the very first planets outside our solar system were detected circling a pulsar. In 1995, a gas planet the size of Jupiter was definitely shown to be circling a star like our own. Since then, and especially with the launch of the Kepler telescope in 2009, methods have improved so quickly that we now know of thousands of definite and candidate planets, including about 50 rocky worlds. Planned projects that will start in the next decade are predicted to find tens of thousands of planets, and the search will have a huge focus on detecting life. A few future projects include Earth-based telescopes that will be able to directly image extrasolar planets! We have to consider the likelihood that planet-hunting astronomers will find convincing evidence of life in another star system before we are ready to head to Alpha Centauri. This will profoundly alter the human conception of a species hierarchy that deems which species are more worthy than others. It is a particular human arrogance, and we are almost at the point when that arrogance will be challenged. Even if the evidence simply shows non-threatening plant life living on another world, the unknown possibilities of other intelligences will make our perceived superiority collapse in on itself. We may still be in the throes of this transition by the time our starship is www.astronomy-wise.com