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Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

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Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#251

Post by lanfeust6 »

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…

I expect a kind of leapfrogging. Scout ahead, build a gate and/or infrastructure/terraforming, then a small fraction will decide it's worth migrating. Repeat.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#252

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #12
codeulike wrote: post #2

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

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.

Speed isn't the problem... time is. Long term travel in space will destroy the body. Even with artificial gravity, cancer is nearly inevitable. I am ignoring the mental and emotional issues.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#253

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

jvanderbot wrote: post #50
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.

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 4…

Imperium of Man?

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#254

Post by gus_massa »

b112 wrote: post #192
vl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool concept, but some things are just strange: 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…

Belts and suspenders? 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.

I'd want tri-redundant systems at a least, for everything, and zero gears to keep the rotation of the concentrical shells at the correct speed.

My washing mashine self destructed a few times. I don't want to put my children inside one for 400 years.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#255

Post by gus_massa »

mighmi wrote: post #131
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…

Sweden did not have a mask mandate and did very well.

Here in Buenos Aires we had a complete lockdown for 6 months, I coud only go walking only up to 1/4 mile and only to buy food. For longer trips I needed a writen authorization.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#256

Post by andrewla »

On this thread people are pointing out many potential problems with all of these solutions. I think all have an element of validity but in the end a much bigger problem is the complete unknowns.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#257

Post by m4rtink »

KineticLensman wrote: post #249
m4rtink wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this again shows an unhealthy fixation on planets. Sure, they are nice and big and if you are very lucky might be even habitable. 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 a…

Yes, exactly. Why not mine a few asteroids, deploy comms and mapping sats, etc. 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.

Yep - it really makes sense to do it like that - I don't say planets are useless, but if you just arrived after possibly hundreds of years in deep space, you might as well par you ark somewhere safe and resource rich, do any repairs or upgrades, gather some resources, while possibly doing some initial exploration by probes or even small initial crewed missions.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#258

Post by m4rtink »

vl wrote: post #96
yincrash wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason Star Trek teleporters have a "Heisenberg compensator", we cannot record both the position and momentum of a particle precisely. Scanning the "configuration of particles" to transmit to this theoretical printer is the first impossible roadblock. The human you scan can never be the same exact person printed.

If you can scan, why transmit at all? Just put the scan in simulation.

Simulations still need to run on something & need energy to power them. The better, more stable, higher fidelity simulation you want, the more mass & energy it will need. And that needs to come from somewhere - a thing many infomorphs tend to conveniently forget far too often.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#259

Post by NoGravitas »

svachalek wrote: post #106
jmyeet wrote: post #69

An interstellar ship is indistinguishable from a generational colony ship because there's no way to realistically travel between stars in timelines that don't span generations unless we extend human lifetimes to centuries or longer. That's possible but doesn't change the trael times. It just means you live to the destination rather than your descedants do. And let's aside the serious ethical issue of you choosing to…

It's interesting how frequently the issue of unborn children's consent is brought up. This consent is impossible, it's never existed and never will exist, and the only alternative seems to be nihilism.

I strongly recommend "The Conspiracy Against The Human Race" by Thomas Ligotti in the context of this line of thinking. The main point he makes is that acceptance of reality as it is, is unthinkable to almost everyone, and we all use different strategies to avoid facing it, at least some of the time.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#260

Post by NoGravitas »

lerp-io wrote: post #123

space is for boomers, just fix earth.

Indeed, the challenge of fixing Earth is much, much simpler than that of constructing a contained self-sufficient habitat that can operate without input from Earth for hundreds of years. And maybe doing the first will produce useful knowledge for if we ever are ready to try the second.
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