Scientists are plotting an interstellar mission to send a satellite into the heart of a black hole.
The audacious plan would see a miniscule laser-propelled spacecraft, weighing roughly the same as a paperclip, travelling to almost the speed of light.
The price of attempting such a mission would soar into 13 figures - the lasers alone are estimated to cost up to £1trillion.
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Scientists are plotting an interstellar mission to send a satellite into the heart of a black hole
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However, the technology necessary to build the tiny spacecraft does not exist yet and the project may take up to 100 years to get off the ground.
But some scientists are hopeful that the mission could be the launched in just a matter of decades.
Professor Cosimo Bambi from Shangai's Fudan University said: "The technology can be developed... It is just an issue of time, money, and motivations.
"f we consider the trend of the past 20 years and we extrapolate this trend to the future, we find that the cost would reduce to something like £1billion in 20-30 years - £1billion is roughly the typical budget in today’s large space missions."
Professor Bambi believes that the project could be ready for take-off in within a few decades
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Black holes are areas in space where gravitational forces are so overwhelmingly strong that nothing, not even light, is able to escape.
They are created when massive stars die and collapse into an ultra-dense point.
These mysterious objects emit no light or radiation, presenting scientists with significant challenges in studying their behaviour.
To pull off the mission, scientists would need a spacecraft capable of surviving the perilous voyage and a black hole to be close enough to visit.
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The spacecrafts that the world's space agencies currently boast are too slow to accelerate to the necessary speeds to reach a black hole.
Bambi's proposal is to use a "nanocraft", a tiny theoretical vehicle that would be able to reach velocities close to the speed of light.
However, the mission's biggest challenge is finding a black hole close enough to send a nanocraft towards.
Bambi said: "In my opinion, the key point is that we need to be lucky and have a black hole within 20-25 light-years from the Solar System."
The spacecrafts that we currently have are too slow to reach the necessary speeds
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But the physicist warned that if the closest black hole is more than 40 or 50 light-years away, then humanity may have to "give up" on the idea.
"The motivation of such a mission would be to test the gravitational field around a black hole, compare the measurements with the theoretical predictions of General Relativity, and hopefully find some deviations," he said.
This could give scientists crucial answers to the effects of black holes on the laws of physics themselves.
It could also shine a light on whether Einstein's theories work under the most intense conditions the universe has to offer.