Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

I have grown increasingly to think that interstellar travel will be done by acceleration/decceleration superstructures; moon sized railgun loops like particle accelerators except for spacecraft. Some form of Von Neumann machinery will be required to construct and maintain these.

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!

No opinions on the ship itself, but the social proposals are very interesting :-)

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".

Just to let you know, I fell for that

I spent some time contemplating the analog of a shower or a bath and generally washing oneself and how that would look in a zero gravity based environment.

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.

> If used Wolfram Alpha right for reasonable comparison that is largest cruise ship with mass of 248663000 kg to speed up to 0.01c mentioned the kinetic energy would be 2.9 times the worlds fossil fuel reserves

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.