The agency that helped develop the Internet is looking into ways to send humanity to the stars and beyond.

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) will award $500,000 to a group later this year to study what it would take to get humanity exploring the universe.  The exploration plan would consider a variety of challenges faced in exploring the universe including what it would take organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically to send us to another star.

The program could take decades if not hundreds of years to complete, reports the New York Times.

The grant winners will be announced later this year on November 11 (11/11/11). The project is a joint effort for DARPA and NASA called the 100 Year Starship Project.  A conference for the project will be held in late September in Florida.

The half-million dollars DARPA will award is not enough to build a starship or even to buy a modest office in which to imagine one — but it is enough to start serious fund-raising.

An actual human launching is at least a couple of centuries away and, barring the invention of  warp drives, could take additional centuries to complete. Whoever goes on such a journey will not be coming back.

But there are plenty of reasons that humans will eventually summon the political will to make the trip, scientists say, if not for human restlessness that has taken us out of the caves and across the oceans, then to escape being wiped out when the killer asteroid appears or the Sun boils the oceans, which it will do in a couple of billion years.

Another lure could be the discovery of a habitable planet elsewhere, something that could happen in the next few years through the efforts of NASA’s Kepler satellite and related astronomical efforts, according to Jill Tarter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who has devoted her life to the search for extraterrestrials. “This will get real when we have an Earth analogue as a destination,” she said.