Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought preservation of the species was the goal
Teen angst with no personal space or privacy. Seems like torture for everyone.
The winning design had large, personal habitats.
Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
91–100 of 330 posts
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years Whipple shields [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
> up to 18km/s
Vs
> 0.1c
Off by quite a bit
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#93An 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…
The winning design assumes redundant toroidal fusion reactors.
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#94What's the cost for getting all that to space? Is it still about $4,000/kg? What's a rough idea about how much Chrysalis would weigh? 2.4M tons it says. ~2.2B kg = $8.8 trillion dollars just for the launch costs alone? I also thought this was interesting from the 2nd place booklet. Did not know this. >The chance of a successful pregnancy in deep space without a geomagnetic field is essentially zero. >During mitosis a…
>During mitosis and meiosis, microtubules depend on a stable magnetic field to orient the mitotic spindle and ensure accurate chromosome segregation — processes critical for embryonic growth. A spacecraft lacking any magnetic field would halt human reproduction, dooming both the mission and the survival of the colony.
That seems wrong to me. The last time I calculated it out, the Earth's magnetic field isn't that strong, and for someone on earth's surface is dwarfed even by high voltage power lines. This is due to the Earth magnetic field radiating out from the iron core which is much farther away at the surface compared to the power lines, and declining by the square root law.
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#95Link to Canva presentation for the winning entry https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
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…
The drive in this design is not yet invented Helium 3 - Deuterium Direct Fusion Drive.
In your design how is it going to catch up to pellets if it's decelerating? I.e. pellets need to be pre-decelerated for this. Which raises the question, would it be cheaper just to bring all deceleration fuel onboard.
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 alre…
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.
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#97Earlier 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.
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 return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return.
If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun.
Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder.
Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence.
An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#98Why does it say the Chrysalis spends 400 years in inertial age at 0.01c if it accelerates for 1 year at 0.1g? That should bring it to actually ~0.1c and the whole trip would take less than 15 years.
Wow, great find. It's funny that for such massive presentation with so many calculations there is such a simple error. Maybe they wanted to accelerate at 0.01g?
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#99> Habitability for 1,000 ± 500 people over centuries Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
That's a problem that's easy to fix with a fridge and a bunch of embryos. They take practically no space.
So far the only known technology to bring embryos to life is through alive female host, so you still need healthy, and on top of that, willing population to use embryos.
Re: Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
#100Earlier 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.
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 tools to enable us to get along and work together effectively.