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Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

projecthyperion.org

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Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#301

Post by munificent »

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.

> Rural Americans couldn’t.

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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#302

Post by random_is_rando »

zdragnar wrote: post #270
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now, if we can figure out some form of suspended animation You'll still need someone awake to pilot the ship, otherwise you'll end up crash landed on a planet with Riddick running loose.

Some sort of AI algorithm? Don't think anyone pilots the SpaceX Dragon.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#303

Post by random_is_rando »

icetank wrote: post #246
varjag wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europeans" is kinda broad brush. Norwegians around me had little trouble following the safety instructions. Still not sold though that the cohesion in an small, resource constrained, artificial community can hold over a few generations. Huge risks of it degrading into some cult/dictatorship.

I don't see why smaller societies should not be able to thrive. My grandparents said once that back in the day you could identify what rural village someone was from by their accent. Meaning populations inside of villages changed very little. And most of these villages did just fine with populations as low as 200.

The real question is what stops them from declaring independence and cutting ties with Earth. Especially after generations of people? They'd need strong ... propaganda, for lack of a better word.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#304

Post by m4rtink »

Someone wrote: post #265
scythe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Right now we're like a village that lives by a river and has never reached the mouth talking about sailing across the ocean 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, b…

Sure, but the speeds you can realistically reach on the surface of a planet for any lenght of time is also many orders of magnitude less than you can reach in space & you also don't really loose speed by friction. That at least partially compensates for the mindboggling distances in space.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#305

Post by m4rtink »

M95D wrote: post #219
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the propulsion system design? 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…

And if the ship misses one catch, trajectory changes and it misses all the next ones that were already on their way.

You could build in some redundancy into the system, but indeed, it keeping to schedule would be a matter of life and endless travels in deep space.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#306

Post by stronglikedan »

gus_massa wrote: post #254
b112 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#307

Post by thmsths »

gus_massa wrote: post #254
b112 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your washing machine probably used cheap nylon gears which self destructed. There are windmills older than 400 years old that still operate today despite using gears :)

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#308

Post by trhway »

m4rtink wrote: post #275
trhway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Um, did anyone actually believe that in practice ? Of course, if you asked them, they would say so, to 105 socialistic percent, comrade! Bur personal and in private, it was very different.

Of course the religious fervor of the first post-Revolution years wasn't there say in 197x, yet so many people in Russia have during the last 30+ years been wanting back to USSR. The propaganda shapes your brain, especially if they hit you while you're young.

>But personal and in private, it was very different.

Deep down unfortunately the ex-Soviet people, me included, are damaged goods :)

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#309

Post by m4rtink »

random_is_rando wrote: post #302
zdragnar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, if we can figure out some form of suspended animation You'll still need someone awake to pilot the ship, otherwise you'll end up crash landed on a planet with Riddick running loose.

Some sort of AI algorithm? Don't think anyone pilots the SpaceX Dragon.

Looks like it is x86 + Linux and C++: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/10/the-usage-of-embedded-linux-...

Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

#310

Post by m4rtink »

Paul_S wrote: post #52
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Are you telling me a country is more constrained by space than a spaceship? 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 s…

I guess Vatican could be ?
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