Advanced methods of mirror construction for exoplanet detection

Nice merchandise, but I am highly skeptical.

The ExoLife Finder, or ELF for short, will be the world’s first telescope to create surface maps of the nearby exoplanets, including Proxima b. ELF is a circular array of sixteen 5-meter (16.4 feet) mirrors and uses the thin “printed-mirror” technology that finding life signatures depends on. With a total diameter of about 25meters (82 feet), ELF is large enough to begin a dedicated program of imaging dozens of exoplanets within 25 light years of Earth and will enable a new field of exoplanetary and exolife research.

Nowhere is it stated what advantages ELF will have over the other giant telescopes being proposed/constructed that are already at much more advanced stages of technical and financial development. Well OK, it's got some new lighter mirrors, yay, but ELT will have a filled 30 m mirror whereas ELF will have a 25 m ring of mirrors i.e. with a great big hole in it.

Typical telescope mirrors are many centimeters thick and take a long time to polish. We have been developing a new way to make very large telescope mirrors by taking thin, inexpensive, fire-polished window glass and slumping it in a specialized kiln that allows us to make very accurately shaped paraboloids. Surprisingly, the fire-polishing process to create typical window glass makes it incredibly smooth. When we combine this with electronic "muscle" Electroactive Polymers, we can create mirrors that are never abrasively polished that are orders of magnitude smoother and lighter-weight than traditional large scale telescope mirrors.

OK, that's quite interesting.

Our team lead by Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina and Dr. Jeff Kuhn have created a unique algorithm that will be able to image these exoplanets and see things like continents, oceans, and life. Assuming we are looking at exoplanets similar to Earth, we will see in their atmospheres molecules like water (H₂O), oxygen (O), methane (CH₄), carbon dioxide (CO₂), and ozone (O₃), and on the surfaces - colonies of photosynthetic organisms or even thermal waste from civilizations not much more advanced than humans.

I don't see how that's possible. The diffraction limit will be about 100x greater than the size of Earth at the distance of Alpha Centauti, so imaging continents and oceans ? How ? Time to investigate the linked presentations...

EDIT : OK, the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pec4CMijEh4&feature=youtu.be) is better. It's not direct imaging, it's a fancy reconstruction based on the albedo variation as the planet rotates (both around its own axis, if not tidally locked, and around its parent star). This works if you have enough signal to noise and contrast ratio, and enough data points (i.e. you need to observe the planet through its whole orbit, so results take years to achieve). Oddly they don't discuss the telescope requirements until near the end of the talk (~14 minutes), but this may be because the conference from which the talk comes. For Earth you'd be able to reconstruct the broad outlines of the continents, but we're still talking of images of only maybe a dozen or so pixels across. A 20m+ telescope that takes years to make an image of a few pixels - that I'm much less skeptical about. So I revise my status from "highly skeptical" to "highly cautious, but intrigued".
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exocube/exolife-finder-a-new-telescope-to-find-life-on-exo