Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition • Hacker News Board

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#41

Post by XorNot » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #19

poisonborz wrote: post #13

I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…

I suspect it’ll be easier to adapt the human species to be compatible with long-duration travel than to design spaceships to accommodate humans as-is.

The whole equation changes pretty drastically if we had a practical hibernation or biological stasis technology (I hate saying cryosleep, though in practice we know freezing things pauses them - see the 31 year old embryo baby recently).

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?

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#42

Post by ofalkaed » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

poisonborz wrote: post #13

I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…

People are not the monolithic group you seem to think them to be and in my experience most people adapt fairly quickly to their situation once they realize there is nothing they can do to change it.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#43

Post by hermitcrab » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35

Paul_S wrote: post #18

I love that most of those designs give bigger houses to people in a spaceship than modern houses in the UK on planet earth. Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.

> love that most of those designs give bigger houses to people in a spaceship than modern houses in the UK on planet earth 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 an…

>Would such a project be particularly volume constrained?

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#44

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #38

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a problem that's easy to fix with a fridge and a bunch of embryos. They take practically no space.

The question is how well will they hold up for 400 years? 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

> how do you ensure that the people 400 years from now would know what they are for or how to implant them?

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#45

Post by Aaargh20318 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

poisonborz wrote: post #13

I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…

Particles are indistinguishable, this means that the specific particles that make up a physical object (like a human) are not important, you could replace all of them with different particles, ship of Theseus style, and it would be the same object.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#46

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #34

trhway wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give the people some Minecraft on steroids and they wouldn't notice how half-century flew by. Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.

I think the problems would come in the 2nd generation, who didn't choose to go on the mission.

To be fair, no human born on our current Earthship asked to go on our current mission.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#47

Post by trhway » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #34

trhway wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give the people some Minecraft on steroids and they wouldn't notice how half-century flew by. Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.

I think the problems would come in the 2nd generation, who didn't choose to go on the mission.

I think we even today have enough propaganda and religion experience to make sure that the next generations would be happy to see themselves as the chosen ones, etc.

(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)

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#48

Post by jvanderbot » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #2

Link to Canva presentation for the winning entry https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...

Pretty awesome. I feel like Paul Chadeisson should do a reward render of the assembly/flight. Nobody does space "big stuff" like he does.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#49

Post by silverquiet » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #34

trhway wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give the people some Minecraft on steroids and they wouldn't notice how half-century flew by. Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.

I think the problems would come in the 2nd generation, who didn't choose to go on the mission.

Heidegger would say that all humans are thrown into existence and into circumstances that they did not choose. In some sense, we are currently on a large spaceship, and I assume some mission chosen for us by our predecessors.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#50

Post by jvanderbot » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #29

virgildotcodes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading through this in detail just cements that we are never leaving this solar system unless we discover some new physics to get around our speed limitations.

> we are never leaving this solar system unless we discover some new physics to get around our speed limitations The winning proposal coasts at 0.01c. Propulsion systems--not the speed of light--and thus engineering, not phsyics, are the relevant limitors.

We're one good new religion away from colonizing the solar system.

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.