Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition • Hacker News Board

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#151

Post by mjevans » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 5:16 AM UTC

os2warpman wrote: post #97

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you can build and maintain a system capable of sustaining the lives of 1,000 humans for 400 years, why do you care about interstellar travel anymore? “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 retur…

In that timeframe it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#152

Post by mjevans » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #74

silverquiet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

"Sorry for the inconvenience" -- Hitchhiker's series

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#153

Post by pmontra » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 5:30 AM UTC

scythe wrote: post #101

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Relativity isn't the problem. The problem is that hitting a grain of sand at 0.1 c delivers the energy of several tonnes of TNT. 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 acr…

It's not only about palladium or any other kind of ore. It's that you can launch from there to Earth orbit and spare most of the costs of lifting mass from the surface of our planet. Then you build habitats and ships with that stuff because it's much cheaper. Too bad we don't have neither mining nor factories in space yet. Two not trivial technologies to develop.

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.

[1] https://daniel-suarez.com/Delta-v_synopsis.html

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#154

Post by philistine » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 5:40 AM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #128

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.

Adding to the issue that it is relative pointless (IMO) to send meat popsicles all that way when a robot can make the journey about a million times easier and just send us some postcards. 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-Sing…

Said like a true citizen of the Culture. And I mean that as a compliment!

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#155

Post by kryogen1c » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 5:54 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112

munificent wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am increasingly certain that culture is by far the biggest limiting factor when it comes to large-scale problem solving now and in the future. 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…

> We couldn't even reliably get people to put a piece of fabric over their face 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.

>> kill their relatives

> 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

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#156

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 6:01 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #150

Apocryphon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most popular sci-fi in visual media up until recent examples like The Expanse and Cowboy Bebop (though only because the remake revived interest in the original) are soft sci-fi when it comes to walking around in spaceships.

This got me thinking. There are fairly hard takes on most fictional technology but I don't know that I've ever come across one for artificial gravity. At least no examples immediately come to mind. I guess that's just too far out in the fictional physics system weeds for even the more dedicated of authors.

Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions (albeit the weakest one), perhaps trying to create it artificially is a bit beyond even hypothetical physics. Sounds like the latest suggestion for it is from 2016:

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#157

Post by Simon_O_Rourke » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 6:03 AM UTC

You'd think A. Scott Howe might at least smile in his photo bio.

He looks like one guy you don't want to end up cohabitating with you for centuries on a generational starship.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#158

Post by pmontra » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 6:03 AM UTC

eamsen wrote: post #66

hermitcrab wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is not clear to me that getting an autonomous 'printer' to function from 4 years away is any easier than creating an interstellar colony ship. It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex biological object, like a human.

You are being printed, every day, cell by cell.

But the process have been bootstrapped billions of years ago. They would have to print a feconded egg cell and make it grow. I think that the best we can do now is to freeze that cell and ship it to the next star. Then build the womb, which we can't do yet. And a zillion of other problems to solve.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#159

Post by urban_winter » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 6:17 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #125

os2warpman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media. A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…

> A week in Bali Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?

Yes.

Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#160

Post by tgbugs » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

One thing I find amusing about generation ships is that the prerequisite understanding of systems ecology, biology, political organization, etc. required to actually make them successful completely obviates the need to actually go anywhere with them.

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.