Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
projecthyperion.org
projecthyperion.org
Teams would submit proposals for the design of a permanent space settlement (sometimes on the surface of a body, sometimes orbiting). Winners from across the world were invited to compete together live in 4 huge multi-national teams to design and pitch another settlement over a long sleepless weekend. As a two-time finalist, I can say it was an incredible experience for so many reasons.
This new competition seems like its goal is to actually take the design/ideation of working professionals as a serious output, as opposed to the educational value of simulating this sort of thing for students, which is what drove the ISSDC.
Coincidentally, it has been exactly 10 years since and my photos app resurfaced some of the memories. Good times.
While it’s interesting, the only things that sell trips to space are cheap ways to get additional resources (information or materials), steady flows of income (from recurring tourism, travel, services), or war/defense.
Long, expensive one-way trips that require incredible amounts of money to pull off will never, ever make business sense.
The only reason explorers were funded hundreds of years ago was the promise of vast amounts of gold, magical life-extending water, mysterious new jewels and materials, wild native art, new sources of food, beautiful mostly naked natives that would look to you as gods and be your slaves willingly, and a shitton of fertile land to farm and colonize; and it must benefit the homeland within a reasonable time period, preferably not more than a year or two.
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
Power provided by toroidal nuclear fusion reactors in the outer shell of the living module, but why do you need such reactors if your primary propulsion is provided by Helium 3 - Deuterium Direct Fusion Drive? If you have direct fusion technology, you don't need toroidal reactors.
Rotating inner shells mechanically for 400 years is terrible design, it's much easier just to rotate entire structure. Once it's going it keeps rotating inertially!
Another comment points to error in speed calculation - at declared acceleration they should go at 0.1c, not 0.01c!
And what is missing of course is the calculation of how many years of current world's GDP is required to complete such project event if all yet-to-be invented technologies exist.
Regarding the GDP needed once you have a working "mine from the moon and send to orbit" economy it doesn't seem to be too bad. The assumption would be that a lot of technology is already developed for other projects. Launching it all from earth obviously wouldn't be possible even with vastly cheaper launch. That's why they put the build into the moon-earth L1 lagrange point to be easily reachable from the moon.
For propulsion and reactors, but there are multiple projects today working on all of this. Building a life support system for 400 years is still an unsolved problem however.
Re: spin. I still claim that the best design is to rotate entire living module as one. Most of the activity is going to be on the outer shell. Warehouses, etc will be in the lower gravity inside. No moving parts.
The only question is what to do with fuel and retro engines. Rotate them as well? Fuel tanks need to be stronger. Do not rotate? Then maybe living module can undock for the flight and rotate separately.
These are supposed to be generational ships. Now imagine you need to take the primary drive down for maintenance? What does the moving colony have for power?
I'd want tri-redundant systems at a least, for everything.
My washing mashine self destructed a few times. I don't want to put my children inside one for 400 years.
I'm sure every parent has thought the opposite at least once.
I guess they were replaced a few times during the non harvesting season.
To replace the main gears of a rotating shell in space, you must "turn off" gravity for a week (or month).
The winning proposal coasts at 0.01c. Propulsion systems--not the speed of light--and thus engineering, not phsyics, are the relevant limitors.
We couldn't even reliably get people to put a piece of fabric over their face to stop killing their own relatives. Even if we could build a generation ship, it would turn into an Event Horizon hellscape if we don't figure out better cultural, communication, and sociological tools to enable us to get along and work together effectively.
Rural Americans couldn’t. But I don’t see anyone proposing we put high school dropouts and polio patients in space.
China, India and Japan managed to pass that test just fine. I imagine one of the former two will be the first to colonise deep space.
One of the primary causes of our cultural disfunction is our seemingly intrinsic compulsion to separate ourselves into groups of Us and Them, and have no limit to the amount of disparaging, scorn, and dehumanization we are willing to dump onto Them.
> Rural Americans > high school dropouts
Lol HN you really are too much sometimes.
Covid went really well in all the intellectual bastions of liberal democracy right? NYC, SF? California famously no downsides from their policy choices at all.
And then to top it off, you compare response to China - the government that lied through it's teeth about covid from the beginning, jailed journalists and destroyed evidence.
Unreal
If you entered a bus or any public space during that time, most people were wearing masks. And bus schedules were heavily adjusted to decrease density of people. Society did a lot to fight the virus, just not based on mandates but based on getting people to voluntarily do what was necessary because they in majority used common sense and an undertanding of what's the danger and what is needed. Similar to what an intergenerational space ship would need.
So, if your argument is "you can solve big problems without coersion" then I'm with you. You need a high trust society.
Though if your argument is "the mask stuff was just BS, just look at Sweden, they didn't use any and turned out well" then you just don't have a clue what you are talking about.
Most people used mask, even in the street, nobody complained, but a few morons used it in the chin that is not very effective.
Anyway, we got more death per million than Sweden.
>Limiting Factor
I see what you did here.
We're never leaving because "woke."
/s
My guess is that we will colonize the asteroid belt (Palladium! So much palladium!) and send lots of interstellar probes long before we try to send humans outside the solar system. Right now we're like a village that lives by a river and has never reached the mouth talking about sailing across the ocean. There are a lot of intermediate stages.
The book Delta V [1] explores that scenario, with an asteroid on an orbit close to Earth to minimize the delta v to ship things back home.
And that’s an enormous understatement. Let’s say the villagers have travelled a meager 10 km of the river. Then, the ocean is, ballpark, at most 1,000 times as wide as the distance to the sea.
A thousand times the distance between earth and moon (the farthest humans have travelled) gets you, ballpark, to mars.
A lightyear is ~50,000 times the distance to mars or 50,000,000 times as far as humans have travelled. And yet, in interstellar travel, a lightyear gets you nowhere.
Cathedrals were built over 100s of years. Imaging just living in a massive one and your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread.
It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen, and pretty reasonable we'd be able to build it with planet scale effort, but sadly quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years.
Whipple shields [1].
Vs
> 0.1c
Off by quite a bit
> your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread.
Go forth, and multiply.
"We" are not even able to sustainably inhabit our current planet. We have hundreds of millions starving every day, we have wars in many places, the threat of thermonuclear war looming as strong as ever, and are still using natural resources at an unsustainable rate even though we know that that's the case. Settling on other planets has all these problems plus the issue of getting there plus the issue that the environment you find there is more hostile than the most hostile desert areas here on earth.
We currently live on paradise planet and can't even make things work well around here. Hard to see how you could make things work on Mars where you can't just go outside pick a leaf to eat and get some water to drink. Or just, you know, breathe.
It's fine if you believe we should not go (but I disagree), but the state of the world is not evidence of failure of the mission.
Which is wrong. Direct-drive fusion fits the bill. It’s also easier than terrestrial power-generating fusion since you don’t need to convert to electricity.
Then double that to slow down. And remember efficiency and that well you need to spend some to keep people alive...
Seems like energy in general is one of the true problems.
This math is wrong.
Back of the envelope: accelerating 250 x 10^6 kg to 1% of c over one year is about 310,000 TWh. That’s like half of current annual energy production.
Even at like 10g, which would accelerate that mass to 1% c in less than half a day, you’d only use like a tenth of our 10^22 joules of fossil fuel reserves.
> double that to slow down
Why the asymmetry? 1x to accelerate, 1x to decelerate. (Less if you can aerobrake and/or use gravity assists.)
Taking the 310k TWh from earlier and doubling it, and assuming 18 MeV for D-T direct-drive fusion, and you need 6,600 kg fuel for the journey. (Plus propellant.) 100x that to account for inefficiency and cooling and you have 660 metric tonnes of hydrogen. That, if kept in its bastard liquid form, takes up about 3 Olympic-size swimming pools in volume.
Still, even half of current annual production is quite a ask. For single ship, and I might venture to guess that 250e6 kg might be light for what is needed...
Shame we don't have a way to efficiently convert fuel energy directly into a ship's kinetic energy, and have to go via conservation of momentum… though I suppose magnetic launch of interstellar vehicles would be a neat use for a Dyson shell or Niven ring?: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5+*+1+gee+*+%280.01c%...
“The indefatigable spirit of exploration” isn’t the answer. People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return.
If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun.
Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder.
Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence.
An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.
Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media.
> thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return
Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.)
Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion.
> If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems
The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.
A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…
We'd have to completely re-think industrial processes. I'm in favor of realized nanotechnology and 3d printers at an atomic level. Evolution stumbled across carbon based lifeforms as it's answer on Earth.
Why? If we can accelerate a small city to 0.01g in a year, we can accelerate smaller packages to catch up with it once a year.
Isn’t this impossible? Doesn’t entropy preclude perfect ongoing repair?
With exponential growth and the second law of thermodynamics, there’s no such thing as solving resource scarcity, only delaying it.
Astronauts are extremely tough individuals.
Now, if we can figure out some form of suspended animation, that fixes many problems for long range travel.
I am much more convinced that our best way to leave our solar system will be without our physical bodies. Some form of synthetic or uploaded consciousness would be much easier to move around. After constructing a network, they could even be transmitted instead of shipped.
This is obviously in the range of science fiction but if we exist long enough, who knows.
The show, Pantheon, did a fairly decent fictional take on the idea.
You'll still need someone awake to pilot the ship, otherwise you'll end up crash landed on a planet with Riddick running loose.
[0] https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_North_(shor...
An atomic (fission) Orion can achieve perhaps 9–11% of the speed of light. [...] At 0.1 c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1 g or 9.8 m/s2).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
The problem with using thermonuclear explosions to produce that level of thrust are more "but can we actually do it safely" than "but can we do it in a way that generates more that it takes to produce", but that's a not inconsiderable problem even without all the international agreements about where we shouldn't be exploding nuclear bombs...
No, we had not. That was only theoretical work, no real technology, not even a prototype.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but it's kinda boring out there. We'd certainly not want to make the trek until the robots had scoured the galaxy looking for a fun place to visit. And by that time we'll all be living in some post-Singularity holodeck and won't give a hoot about some empty rock 600 light years away.
Send the bots. I'll watch the highlight reel from my pod.
Expansion will only go as quickly as travel time allows. Even the speed of light seems insufficient beyond a certain point. We will want to manipulate space.
Are all of these handwaving propulsion? They seem to all be habitat designs.
Ok I'll take my shot at propulsion:
Pulse nuclear BUT:
For acceleration, we have a launch gun that fires more fuel at the ship, and the ship catches the fuel, imparting momentum from the catch, and more fuel for acceleration.
For deceleration, we have pellets that it catches up to and uses the catching to slow down with, AND gains fuel to decelerate.
If the catch can be done like an ion drive in efficiency, then you get ion drive efficiencies while gaining fuel for the pulse nuclear accelerations/decelerations.
The real problem would be timing the deceleration "catches", and a HELL of a railgun.
We aren't really doing this in current physics without a massive and functional orbital/planetary economy that gives cheap nuclear fuel and materials. We'll probably need solar wind antimatter harvesters as well, if those are actually a thing.
In your design how is it going to catch up to pellets if it's decelerating? I.e. pellets need to be pre-decelerated for this. Which raises the question, would it be cheaper just to bring all deceleration fuel onboard.
Even without taking this into account all systems are going to need active guidance - there is no way you do single burn and end up in the same place in the same time few light years away.
The best schema is probably launching all fuels containers that should be picked up for retro burn at the same time with much higher acceleration (orbital rail gun and then a burner), and with very slightly smaller final speed.
Then on the main craft you do short retro burn to match speed to fuels containers, attach them and do full retro burn for orbital insertion.
Benefit of this schema is that you don't need to accelerate everything slowly using main engine, so your original booster can be way smaller. (Energy-wise it only works if you have stationary means to accelerate high-g-capable payloads, i.e. orbital railgun, in this case you don't have to accelerate extra fuel required for initial burn)
I hope durable file formats regain popularity before humanity starts embarking on interstellar voyages :)
But yes, it's a work of design more than a blueprint.
The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations.
> life will get boring and pointless fast
Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy and the unknown.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
[-1] Possible counterfactual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818098
Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
I'm sure it was a lot of fun, in the Dwarf Fortress sense.
The double exclamations signal that an object is on fire in DF.
Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime.
Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.
Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with no hope of survival. I’ve no problem with a carefully judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has to at least be a reasonable chance.
Like do you really care how long it takes to get somewhere if it subjectively happens in the blink of an eye? Would you even necessarily be likely to lose your own peer group if you all spent significant time in hibernation travel between meetings?
Many colonies, research stations and logistic hubs have been established with fast and dependable sub-light ships traversing between them.
On such a ship most of the crew is in hibernation at any one time, with just a couple people taking shifts from the hibernation to stand a watch during the flight.
Even with the ships reaching high sub-light speeds, the voyages take decades from outside perspective. But that might not be a problem! If you are one of the crew it might seem like a couple weeks as that's how long you flight crew shift took. If you are a passenger - it takes not time at all, you just go to hibernation & wake up at you destination!
So as long as you are a spacer or part of the wider community (e.q. space scientists who either study a wonder of space or are in transit to another one) this is fine - you will meet you friends again in a couple flight, in days or weeks of subjective time.
But if you befriends someone outside of the community or decide it was enough and settle down, you might never see them again.
Can really recommend the novel - has much more than this topic & quite a few other surprises. :)
What makes an object unique then is the specific configuration of the particles that make up that object. This configuration is a form of information.
Fortunately, we already know how to transmit information at the speed of light; no new physics required. This then reduces the problem to transporting the ‘printer’. No generation ship required. You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print. You can bootstrap this, send a tiny particle harvester/printer that can print a slightly larger printer, etc.
It's easier to see why if you think about Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnnXbOM5S4&themeRefresh=1
TLDW: an infinitely long wave does not (cannot) have any definite location, but it does have a definite periodic wavelength; conversely, a single impulse noise (a shockwave from e.g. a bullet or an explosion) has a definite location (in the direction of motion and at any given point in time) but no meaningful wavelength.
The more you constrain the possibility space of one, the looser the other becomes in a physical sense, not just the information you have about it.
That said, we definitely don't have the means to 3D print even relatively simple tissues, last I checked we are still limited to structures thin enough to be kept alive by oxygen diffusion.
One of my open questions on this topic is: given we can cryopreserve small tissue without the freezing-damage problem, why can't we do a repeated process of:
1. cell culture tissue sheets that are ~1mm (or whatever) thick
2. cryopreserve each sheet
3. then assemble those sheets, still frozen
4. then thaw out as per normal procedure for cryopreserved organs
Caveat: I have minimal knowledge of biology, this may be a stupid idea for a whole bunch of reasons I don't even know the names of.
Originally developed in-universe when a bunch of immortal cyborgs got bored on a colonization ship & decided to instruct a precursor probe to print a machine that prints a machine that will print their bodies on site. :)
The engenerator technology is completely safe[1] and can't be misused in any way.
The most likely way to move in the Universe is through something along the lines of von Neumann probes, which can be small machines sent at relativistic speeds across the whole galaxy, setting up these "spawn" points. Even at 10% speed of light it would take 1 million years to get such probes in strategic points to cover most of our galaxy.
Look into Assembly Theory as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory They already developed some kind of chemical printer for simple molecules.
It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex biological object, like a human.
There's also no point in talking what can be done today, since such a project would take quite a while, both to assemble and get anywhere close to destination. Just because we cannot do it today doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered as a possible approach since we might get there in 30-50 years, which is nothing for the scales of time we're talking about.
Cryo tech is quite primitive, you are fighting to maintain a structure instead of saving its data and rebuilding it later when tech allows. Imagine 3D printing a benchy and freezing it so it stays "fresh" for 50 years (for some potential use at that time), instead of saving the benchy stl file and printing it in 50 years.
Plans for potential human expansion into our galaxy must include potential tech developments, can't block it to the tech that is available today. The way things are going there's no reason to discard full scan and reassemble of a full human being, in some future. Let alone moving consciousness on other type of more resilient hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)
A particle spins on any number of axes
> You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print
You cannot obtain that data because this spin is impossible to measure)
You assume a human is the same as a chair? seems like a stretch
I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing 99.9999% of the spaceship we're already riding (Earth).
Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.
(small case in point - back in USSR we were happy that we were born in that wonderful country USSR and not in those decadent dangerous inhumane capitalist societies of the West where people were forced to struggle everyday to avoid becoming one of those numerous hungry homeless filling to the brim the dirty decaying cities of the West which they were showing us on the Soviet TV while we were supposedly on a mission to build better/higher/ideal society consisting of a new better entity "Soviet man" - "The Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy, muscular, and enthusiastic in spreading the communist Revolution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man - note how the first 4 qualities work for interstellar, and they are pretty common among various other ideologies and religions, and the specific target for the 5th - for the enthusiasm - is just adjusted according the specific ideology or religion, and "spreading human civilization" wouldn't be even half-bad like some others out there)
Bur personal and in private, it was very different.
>But personal and in private, it was very different.
Deep down unfortunately the ex-Soviet people, me included, are damaged goods :)
Basically an unhollo combination of Kafka and Truman show, keeping the community stable until arrival. :)
If they did rebel it would probably be more along the lines of reaching the target inhabitable planet and refusing to leave the ship. Just grab enough material to set a new course for the next one and keep going.
The next set of rebels would be the ones who actually fulfilled the mission.
All it takes is one short-sighted group to break something important to protest real (or perceived) injustice.
It already happens in the real world all the time.
Remember, a lighter ship can start slowing down later so it will arrive to its destination faster. This might be important if you are traveling with a flotilla of ships & decide for a little race at the end. Also helps if you have some heavy hibernation pods on board[0].
Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.
Would such a project be particularly volume constrained?
> doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years
I don't. You'd be selecting for extraordinary individuals and educating them. These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in antiquity just fine.
The colonists be in a life-or-death system in a community small enough that everyone knows of everyone else personally. To the extent humans are almost uniquely exceptional at one thing as a hominid, it's exploration and colonization--I woudn't be surprised if this group winds up more functional due to scratching an underlying human need to explore and push boundaries.
It would be mass constrained because of the sheer cost of getting it all into orbit, even with advanced tech such as space elevator. And more volumne = more mass.
There is a saying in aerospace design along the lines of 'weight breeds weight'. Heavier components necessitate stronger, and therefore heavier, supporting structures.
As for democracy "These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in antiquity just fine" - I don't know of any that practised the consensus driven democracy that almost all these proposals use. Ant if you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies. Unless you're talking about a Athens with their slaves and adult male citizen population having a vote. In which case sure, I can get behind that but that's not what those spaceship designs propose. They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law.
In actual fact history proves the opposite and all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations and the idea that you can fly a spaceship across light years without a captain who can condemn people to death is laughable.
At the point that we're building 60 km spaceships, yes, I think that's a possibility.
> you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies
The further back we go the more consensus-driven small societies get. I'm also reaching back due to familiarity. There are plenty of small island communities that did fine for generations on their own.
> They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law
Sorry, I missed this in the winning design. Where does it say that?
> all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations
If you need to bring an army, yes. I don't think we know how hierarchical Polynesian settlers were.
I didn't notice any prisons included in the design, so that assumption seems fair.
Does it?
You don’t need dedicated prison space as you won’t have a permanent prison population. (Depending on labour requirements and resource availability this may not be a choice.) Nothing about not having a prison implies no hierarchy. And you don’t need prisons to “condemn people to death.”
"(TBD ethics of voluntary euthanasia)"
And let's aside the serious ethical issue of you choosing to board such a ship vs the offspring you have who definitely did not consent, some of whom may not even make it to the destination.
So a generational colony ship looks a lot like an O'Neil Cylinder [1]. It can spin to create 1g gravity and support enough people to make it to the destination.
The issue is energy. An orbital can support itself with solar power when around a star and doesn't need a form of propulsion. An interstellar ship will need an alternative energy source and also have a propulsion system that can sufficiently accelerate and decelerate. The energy budget for the propulsion is so large that the life support energy budget is a rounding error.
The only realistic policy I see is solar sails. This avoids the reaction mass issue. You need to decelerate at the other end. Part of that you get from drag in the interstellar medium. You either carry reaction mass for the rest or you go ahead and use automated systems to build the solar sail equivalent on the other end to decelerate you.
Controlled fusion has a fundamental problem: neutrons. Even if you solve the problem of container destruction (ie neutron embrittlement), which is significant, you still face the problem of significant energy loss to the system through high-energy free neutrons.
Stars solve this problem by simply being really large so a free neutron can't really go that far without hitting another nucleus, particularly because fusion happens at the core.
The hope with commercial fusion research is that we can somehow avoid the container destruction issue and have sufficient energy generation (given the energy inputs) despite the free neutron energy loss but it's unclear if that'll ever happen.
I think they just wanted a plausible future energy source that they didnt have to look at too closely.
My first issue with the design is that it looked like a decent percentage of the planet would have to be launched into space just to build the thing.
A lot of the space math looked alright, but theres several issues of practicality.
>Even if you solve the problem of container destruction
No idea if this is related, but everywhere they needed 1 reactor, they had 4. 2 in active/active failover, and 2 cold spares. It seemed relatively easy for them to perform maintenance on these. But its just heaps more launch mass, heaps more acceleration fuel, and a lot more deceleration fuel.
My favorite idea is "water" injected into a contained environment to produce a particular pressure and or flow setting with a scuba type hose for breathing. All liquid is evacuated through the base and an air jet helps produce a drying effect plus clear out the capsule before exiting. The same water is recycled as much as possible after a filtering desalinization and any chemicals used for the washing process would be closely matched with the recycling process. I toyed with the idea of multiple pods in a spindle rotating to simulate gravity but I'm not sure it's worth the effort since you can produce a type of pressure through controlling the liquid syrup injected into the limited space.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1j1ijsw/...
https://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/thl...
It worked well enough, but ISS opted for wet towels & I am not sure what the Chinese are using currently. Will be interesting what some of the upcoming commercial space stations opt for. :)
That eliminates biology as a constraint. What a life for our descendants so consigned, generations to live and die on a ship so that their descendants in turn could one day revolve around a foreign sun. I'm sure at some nth generation they will resent us for sending them away from the happiness of Spaceship Earth.
It would be an amusing result if the only ones with the fortitude necessary to endure this are those religious enough in belief and purpose.
It would be good to see some discussion of how you can bootstrap a colony (let alone a civilisation) under these very tight constraints. For example, whether flight systems would be cannibalised to support the colonists, and how the colonists would establish a viable, self-sustaining tech tree (including critical life support) after landing, where there may be essentially no immediately accessible raw materials.
But given that you already have a massive mobile self sufficient workstation in space it would IMHO make much more sense to start with setting up some simple in space infrastructure first upon arrival & then using that to run a space to ground transport link. That should give you all the benefits of starting with a space based civilization in the new star system rather than stranding 2000 at potentially hostile planet with no means of support and space based assistance, battling for survival.
Well, unless you really like all those lost colony novels with low tech human societies existing on exotic planets that were not able to keep their tech level. ;-)
Building a ground civ from scratch would be hard enough for anyone, let alone a space-adapted population who have spent generations being coddled by AI, and who have exactly zero experience of planet-side ops with hostile terrain and meteorology, with physical tools that they have never used in an operational setting.
It might be different for other missing profiles, like some very compact minimalistic missions where everyone is in some sort of suspended animation & you dump the whole ship into a suitable planetary environment, as to ship is just not setup to sustain them for any period on board. But this requires quite substantial advances in both stashing colonists for possibly hundreds of years without killing them as well as getting a compact ship to a star system with habitable planet, decelerating it there and landing it.
Seems more likely we will have the first trillion of extra terrestrial humans living in diverse habitats built from local materials at a nearby star much sooner than something like that.
Sort of like sending a cell capable of life and creating more life.
Aliens are always sending such probes here in scifi, so why don't we do it, too?
Solar sail or nuclear?
How big would the payload be?
Given that the payload would be tiny compared to a generation ship, I expect the powerplant would be able to get it there much faster.
> Solar sail or nuclear?
Solar sail won't work outside the solar system.
> How big would the payload be?
We cannot build it yet. But I expect the technology to do it seems possible.
Being a probe sized craft, deceleration as well as a very close flyby close to a star should be much more doable than with a big honking interstellar ark.
As for power - even a small nuclear reactor would be fine initially if it can last long enough for it to land somewhere suitable and start spamming solar panels. Then you are finally ready to get going on you first extra-solar Benchy. ;-)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect [1] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/10/06/assessing-the-obe...
If you can somehow obtain the knowledge of how to get a sexually reproducing population of n awake behaving human beings to successfully live in a tin can for 500 years then it is hard to see why you wouldn't just make more tin cans and replicate the process.
Just what sort of population would enter that risk profile? Especially when there is little to gain for themselves.
This kind of system is the only way to:
1. Escape the tyranny of the rocket equation and
2. Harness the power of solar energy for transportation to its fullest
I wrote a draft proposal about this if anyone is interested!
The good news is that there is a system for measuring the effectiveness of the potential solutions. That system is called "reality". If humanity builds a single "ark" then it is very likely to fail. The trick is that we need to get the technology to the point where we're launching dozens or hundreds of these. Only then will we discover what the actual problems and limitations are, and how many of the worries and problems will simple be irrelevant because human ingenuity will find workarounds.
Joseph Henrich, the anthropologist, characterized human technological progress and innovation by saying:
"I think that humans are pretty bad at designing institutions from the top down, but we do know how to design variation and selection systems"
We don't need one correct solution, we need some attempts and some bad copies of those attempts to collectively move towards solutions.
If you can refuel a fucking interstellar ark in field conditions, you totally can also keep it running and expand it and your living space using local resources instead.
In Aurora society took a one-shot approach. This strikes me as unrealistic; why weren't there dozens of competing attempts? I thought the book was one of the best treatments of generation ships that I've ever seen in scifi except for this. And I don't love the "also we discovered new physics and made a sentient AI on our ship somehow" plots (the latter is also a reason I never liked "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"). I get that it feels unjust or unfair or morally wrong to subject new generations to an experiment that they never signed up for, but that's just the way that humanity works -- all of our children are part of an experiment that they never signed up for, because none of us know (or can even conceivably know) the "right" way or environment in which to raise children.
Earth biomes will be kept intact with respect to their natural evolution. But human society will be treated as an amoral engineering problem seeking to optimize a few measurable parameters chosen up front. There is little sense in this proposal that human beings will bring along with them original sin or whatever you want to call it. But what allows human beings to flourish and keeps societies together, especially in conditions of scarcity (very much unlike the conditions of say the past half century), may not be obvious to the project planners.
In fact, much of what has been handed down to us in the legal and opaque cultural and religious traditions that have successfully survived such stresses in the past, is gleefully discarded.
The social engineering proposed is of the most dystopian and heavy-handed variety: it involves taking a group of volunteers to Antarctica to format them to a supposed sociocultural blank slate, followed by "characteristics monitoring". Despite the apparent care for superficial day-to-day happiness, human beings are to be indoctrinated to see themselves as discardable resources. They are not just governed with "mere" discipline, but with a program of violent population control (e.g. "maximum 2 childrens", "not necessarily with the same partner", "euthanasia", "not owned by the individual", ...).
So humans on Chrysalis will decide over every single aspect of life and death, not for themselves but for each other. But this time, unlike all earlier times, it will work because they're going to keep "governance architecture liquid, horizontal and inclusive" and "open source communities" and "not ethically compulsory" and based on "deep scenario exploration".
I'd love to see an actual blueprint for making this work. I don't believe in it at all.
> They are not just governed with "mere" discipline
Unclear to me what discipline exists. There's no mention of crime and punishment or enforcement. It seems assumed that you'll have indoctrinated everyone sufficiently to not need it?
My working model of indoctrination and control is based on power imbalance. Once they're on the ship, I don't think "the AI's will control everything" is gonna fly forever.
Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
[1]https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article-abstract/229/1/iya...
[2]https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733
[3]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1
Well, that, and how do you ensure that the people 400 years from now would know what they are for or how to implant them?
Lots of unknowns. Would make for an interesting story though
A ship travelling at 0.01c for 400 years could get 4 ly away. They'd still be able to be coached. More likely: their computers would still be able to be updated.
The question specifically was:
> Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
Through the use of technology, this limit can be completely sidestepped.
Aside: The biblical story of the Ark and the flood in ripped off wholesale from Sumerian and Akkadian narratives.
What's a rough idea about how much Chrysalis would weigh?
2.4M tons it says. ~2.2B kg = $8.8 trillion dollars just for the launch costs alone?
I also thought this was interesting from the 2nd place booklet. Did not know this.
>The chance of a successful pregnancy in deep space without a geomagnetic field is essentially zero.
>During mitosis and meiosis, microtubules depend on a stable magnetic field to orient the mitotic spindle and ensure accurate chromosome segregation — processes critical for embryonic growth. A spacecraft lacking any magnetic field would halt human reproduction, dooming both the mission and the survival of the colony.
That seems wrong to me. The last time I calculated it out, the Earth's magnetic field isn't that strong, and for someone on earth's surface is dwarfed even by high voltage power lines. This is due to the Earth magnetic field radiating out from the iron core which is much farther away at the surface compared to the power lines, and declining by the square root law.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5h9is2/why_does...
It makes sense because if any of what they said was true we would have to constantly be worrying about magnetic fields around us, which are much stronger than the earth's, affecting our mitosis and meiosis. Your sperm would be completely screwed up if you had a magnet in your pocket when they were created.
Speaking as a biologist that's not true.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
He looks like one guy you don't want to end up cohabitating with you for centuries on a generational starship.
What a shame -- their basic premise is grievously mistaken. When we have the means to launch interstellar pioneering craft, people will have figured out the most logical, sustainable approach -- launch a set of frozen embryos, not a set of arguing adults.
The craft would gain speed toward a suitable target, then drift for centuries, no need to waste resources on living, arguing human beings. When the destination is reached, the craft will land and spawn a human crew at the destination -- using artificial wombs and robots to guide the children into adulthood.
Someone might object to the idea of letting robots teach humans, but hey -- look around. It's already true.
I bet that their descendants would find the idea of seasickness amusing, since they would probably be nearly immune to it.
I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
I guess that's just too far out in the fictional physics system weeds for even the more dedicated of authors.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mathematician-has-proposed-a-...
> Now, Füzfa has shown, mathematically speaking, that by stacking large superconducting electromagnets we would be able to produce a very weak gravitational field, and that we'd be able to detect it using highly sensitive interferometers. These interferometers would work by basically superimposing gravitational fields on top of each other so that physicists could obtain information about them.
The linked article is interesting. I'm amused by the mental image of the Millennium Falcon crumpling like a tin can into a singularity when magnets of ludicrous strength under the deck plating are suddenly switched on.
Yeah, I’m just suggesting maybe there just haven’t been any hypothetical speculative physics concepts that could explain artificial gravity. At least with FTL we’ve got wormholes, the Alcubierre drive, zero-point energy, etc.
> any explanation would be difficult to work into an interesting narrative
With sci-fi people seem to like explanations of FTL well enough, both the soft fantastical kind and the hard speculative physics kind. I think artificial gravity just needs its own visual/conceptual equivalent to the going into hyperspace effect, or warping space, or stargate relays, etc.
But artificial gravity itself is indeed conceptually and perhaps literally “low” because it’s much more mundane than other aspects. You might as well explain it away by everyone wearing magnetized boots. Tractor beams / interdictors with gravity well projectors are neat, though.
Is it though? It brings to mind the humorous essay that attempted to extrapolate in a hard sci-fi manner the consequences of the existence of phasers and teleporters in star trek. It seems likely to be a mundane usage which is merely the tip of the iceberg for an absurdly powerful technology.
> the hard speculative physics kind
Apologies if I'm off the mark but just to be clear you don't need speculative real world physics for a "hard" take. All you need is an author dedicated enough to invent his own set of rules and then faithfully "simulate" it. It's just that most authors are lazy and go with speculative real world physics as the base.
At some point I started seeing people conflate hard sci-fi with real world physics and I'm not sure where that came from.
It does do a lot with ship to ship fleet combat and at least some implications how ships work inside the constraints.
-require vast amounts of power
-be so heavy that most of the 1g would come from the mass of the electromagnets!
-destroy anything for quite some distance (including themselves)
Surprisingly, the wikipage fails to mention it was a failed experiment and doesn't mention the ocean issue at all.
Its not like sustainable extraterrestrial habitats will not be needed elsewhere anyway, so it should be hopefully long established technology (by the lava tube settlers of the Moon or the Oneil Cylinder bunch from L3) when you do the first interstellar ship.
Feed them like Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
I am a big space exploration fan, but beyond our solar system, it's probably best thought of as a fantasy entertainment genre.
That is totally something that can happen if you have a high performance interplanetary craft that does trips between planets in weeks - any trajectory is likely hyperbolic and if your drive fails before you brake again & no one can catch up with you in time you are kinda screwed.
That's why none of this is going to work. Is that blunt enough for you? Have any of you asked a woman about the utter insanity of generation ships? Do you think maybe the tech industry still needs to do some work about gender equality, and the resulting quality of decision-making in tech management and investment?
Isn’t submitting the proposal to a jury that is 40% women explicitly asking women?
You need to be able to run a fusion reaction in space, for 100+ years and have absolutely nothing in the system break or require maintenance.
Until you do this, these spaceship competitions are just fancy CGI renders.
My thought is to use fission for powering the ship, and fusion for the drive. The fission reactors can start the fusion drive as needed and you can have multiple portable fission reactors like the NASA kilopower designs in an offline/inert state that could be powered on in an emergency.