Sounds like a riveting to-do list, with lots of big implications for the folks back home.
> We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe
Game changer for nuclear power and propulsion, in terms of safety. If we did this with matter, that means we can get closer to hot things [1]. If we did this with energy, ha! - we can now start harvesting edge-of-magnetosphere antimatter and explore mining and terraforming using directed energy.
> as well as some sort of beam propulsion system
If we can beam massive amounts of power out that means we (a) have massive amounts of power up there and (b) can beam (a) home [2].
> and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances
Either we figured out how to keep lasers (or some other stream of stuff) columnar over super-long distances or we broke new ground in information theory. Either way, getting a grainy picture home from Proxima Centauri on an apple of an energy budget means getting lots more closer to home around faster and more efficiently.
> We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe
Game changer for nuclear power and propulsion, in terms of safety. If we did this with matter, that means we can get closer to hot things [1]. If we did this with energy, ha! - we can now start harvesting edge-of-magnetosphere antimatter and explore mining and terraforming using directed energy.
> as well as some sort of beam propulsion system
If we can beam massive amounts of power out that means we (a) have massive amounts of power up there and (b) can beam (a) home [2].
> and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances
Either we figured out how to keep lasers (or some other stream of stuff) columnar over super-long distances or we broke new ground in information theory. Either way, getting a grainy picture home from Proxima Centauri on an apple of an energy budget means getting lots more closer to home around faster and more efficiently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere