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Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition

• codeulike 1y ago
  Link to Canva presentation for the winning entry https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-PXA/view https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
  • virgildotcodes 1y ago
    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.
    • kylecordes 1y ago
      c appears to be the speed limit of the propagation of information in the universe - never say never, but so far it appears quite unlikely any new physics will overturn this.
      • VagabundoP 1y ago
        If we manage to get anywhere near 0.1c and slow biological ageing we can get nearly anywhere with the right engineering.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > 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.
      • jvanderbot 1y ago
        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 400 years.
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years Whipple shields [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
          • privatelypublic 1y ago
            Whipple shields are consumed by impacts.
            • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
              > Whipple shields are consumed by impacts Everything is consumed on such a voyage. If we can send a generation ship at 0.01c, we can send replacement parts quicker and probes ahead to verify our estimates even faster.
              • jvanderbot 1y ago
                Are you just casually handwaving away sending a dockable resupply ship at 0.01c to somewhere in interstellar space, then doing some kind of rendesvous with it at 0.01c with a spaceship measured kilometers in length? There's no free lunch. Every gram of mass that you want to get to interstellar space requires exactly as much fuel to get there as you'd have to add to the original spacecraft to just carry it. (thought experiment - have them fly side by side, then connect them by string, then shorten the string until they touch, then weld them together - the fuel required doesn't change at any point). And a shield + a resupply ship has a lot more grams than just adding the shield to the original thing.
          • jvanderbot 1y ago
            > up to 18km/s Vs > 0.1c Off by quite a bit
            • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
              Where are you getting either of these figures?
      • os2warpman 1y ago
        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.
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media. > thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.) Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion. > If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.
          • os2warpman 1y ago
            > 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…
      • munificent 1y ago
        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.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > 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.
          • kryogen1c 1y ago
            >> 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
            • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
              Oh, nobody managed Covid well. The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good. New York is a bad example to call out since it was one of the first places to get hit, locked down hard after a delay, and yet came out with lower per-capita deaths and a stronger economy than most red states. (Speaking as someone who lives in one of the reddest states in the union.) > jailed journalists and destroyed evidence Not sure we can call anyone out on this anymore.
      • scythe 1y ago
        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 across the ocean. There are a lot of intermediate stages.
        • pmontra 1y ago
          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 https://daniel-suarez.com/Delta-v_synopsis.html
        • Someone 1y ago
          > 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, ballpark, to mars. A lightyear is ~50,000 times the distance to mars or 50,000,000 times as far as humans have travelled. And yet, in interstellar travel, a lightyear gets you nowhere.
          • m4rtink 1y ago
            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.
      • andrewflnr 1y ago
        I read their comment as saying that current physics doesn't allow the kind of propulsion systems we need, even with optimal engineering and well below the lightspeed limit.
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > current physics doesn't allow the kind of propulsion systems we need Which is wrong. Direct-drive fusion fits the bill. It’s also easier than terrestrial power-generating fusion since you don’t need to convert to electricity.
      • Ekaros 1y ago
        Energy is the limit. 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... Then double that to slow down. And remember efficiency and that well you need to spend some to keep people alive... Seems like energy in general is one of the true problems.
        • WithinReason 1y ago
          You wouldn't be burning coal for propulsion, you would fuse atoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
          • Ekaros 1y ago
            I didn't coal would be used. Just that involved amount of energy would be truly massive. Even with fusion.
          • m4rtink 1y ago
            Or even better - ride a continuous fission detonation powered by the worlds biggest super-soaker! :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > 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.
    • qingcharles 1y ago
      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-Singularity holodeck and won't give a hoot about some empty rock 600 light years away. Send the bots. I'll watch the highlight reel from my pod.
      • philistine 1y ago
        Said like a true citizen of the Culture. And I mean that as a compliment!
      • arethuza 1y ago
        My own view is that the most likely form of interstellar travel will be something like that used in Greg Egan's Diaspora - with upload communities sending themselves in relatively small ships and choosing whether to experience the journey or not.
      • lanfeust6 1y ago
        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.
    • WithinReason 1y ago
      We had the technology to do it in 44 years 60 years ago: An atomic (fission) Orion can achieve perhaps 9–11% of the speed of light. [...] At 0.1 c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1 g or 9.8 m/s2). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
      • notahacker 1y ago
        Tbf we had nuclear [fission] pulsed propulsion technology in the 1960s in roughly the same way we had nuclear fusion in the 1960s: we had an understanding of some basic principles of physics and some calculations that looked broadly plausible The problem with using thermonuclear explosions to produce that level of thrust are more "but can we actually do it safely" than "but can we do it in a way that generates more that it takes to produce", but that's a not inconsiderable problem even without all the international agreements about where we shouldn't be exploding nuclear bombs...
      • slightwinder 1y ago
        > We had the technology to do it in 44 years 60 years ago: No, we had not. That was only theoretical work, no real technology, not even a prototype.
        • m4rtink 1y ago
          IIRC there were sub-scale test done with chemical explosives. Also Feynman said it should work. :)
    • konart 1y ago
      Speed is one thing. Surviving space is another.
    • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      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.
      • zdragnar 1y ago
        > 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.
        • m4rtink 1y ago
          Yep, it is always a good idea to have a flight crew[0] when most of the passengers are in hibernation. It might take them some time but they will always sort thing out in the end! :) [0] https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_North_(short_story) https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_North_(shor...
        • random_is_rando 1y ago
          Some sort of AI algorithm? Don't think anyone pilots the SpaceX Dragon.
          • m4rtink 1y ago
            Looks like it is x86 + Linux and C++: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/10/the-usage-of-embedded-linux-in-spacecraft/ https://hackaday.com/2024/02/10/the-usage-of-embedded-linux-...
  • jvanderbot 1y ago
    Pretty awesome. I feel like Paul Chadeisson should do a reward render of the assembly/flight. Nobody does space "big stuff" like he does.
  • AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    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 to slow down with, AND gains fuel to decelerate. If the catch can be done like an ion drive in efficiency, then you get ion drive efficiencies while gaining fuel for the pulse nuclear accelerations/decelerations. The real problem would be timing the deceleration "catches", and a HELL of a railgun. We aren't really doing this in current physics without a massive and functional orbital/planetary economy that gives cheap nuclear fuel and materials. We'll probably need solar wind antimatter harvesters as well, if those are actually a thing.
    • vl 1y ago
      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.
      • amenhotep 1y ago
        You'd spend years firing pellets in advance of the voyage, on the same trajectory but moving a little slower than the ship you plan to launch. Time it all so you catch up with the first of them just as you want to start decelerating.
        • WithinReason 1y ago
          But then the whole project takes thousands instead of hundreds of years
          • vl 1y ago
            And also it requires extraordinary navigation precision. These launches are going to be spread in time, which means that they don't happen from the same place (all celestial bodies move relative to each other). Which in turn means that when you approach the pellet there is going to be perpendicular velocity component. Even without taking this into account all systems are going to need active guidance - there is no way you do single burn and end up in the same place in the same time few light years away. The best schema is probably launching all fuels containers that should be picked up for retro burn at the same time with much higher acceleration (orbital rail gun and then a burner), and with very slightly smaller final speed. Then on the main craft you do short retro burn to match speed to fuels containers, attach them and do full retro burn for orbital insertion. Benefit of this schema is that you don't need to accelerate everything slowly using main engine, so your original booster can be way smaller. (Energy-wise it only works if you have stationary means to accelerate high-g-capable payloads, i.e. orbital railgun, in this case you don't have to accelerate extra fuel required for initial burn)
  • fuckinpuppers 1y ago
    Reminds me of the probe from Star Trek IV
  • vl 1y ago
    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 to rotate entire structure. Once it's going it keeps rotating inertially! Another comment points to error in speed calculation - at declared acceleration they should go at 0.1c, not 0.01c! And what is missing of course is the calculation of how many years of current world's GDP is required to complete such project event if all yet-to-be invented technologies exist.
    • nn3 1y ago
      If you would spin the whole structure you couldn't have multiple shells all with 1G on their surface. The required spin speed for 1G depends on the diameter. But their whole concept is built around multiple shells, which is clear from the name. Regarding the GDP needed once you have a working "mine from the moon and send to orbit" economy it doesn't seem to be too bad. The assumption would be that a lot of technology is already developed for other projects. Launching it all from earth obviously wouldn't be possible even with vastly cheaper launch. That's why they put the build into the moon-earth L1 lagrange point to be easily reachable from the moon. For propulsion and reactors, but there are multiple projects today working on all of this. Building a life support system for 400 years is still an unsolved problem however.
      • vl 1y ago
        Re: orbital assembly. L1 point is bad in every respect. If most materials come from Moon, then the best assembly point is low Moon orbit (as benefit you get a boot to your launch speed to escape Earth gravity), if most material comes from Earth, then best assembly point is low Earth orbit. Hauling all material to L1 is going to be more expensive in either case (unless the ratio of materials is very exact, which is unlikely). Re: spin. I still claim that the best design is to rotate entire living module as one. Most of the activity is going to be on the outer shell. Warehouses, etc will be in the lower gravity inside. No moving parts. The only question is what to do with fuel and retro engines. Rotate them as well? Fuel tanks need to be stronger. Do not rotate? Then maybe living module can undock for the flight and rotate separately.
  • forgingahead 1y ago
    Perhaps I'm being mean (haven't read the full presentation) - but the winning team is made up of 2 actresses/artists, 1 social innovator, 1 designer, and 1 astrophysicist?
    • riffraff 1y ago
      One of the artist is also an environmental engineer, the other is also a psychologist, the designer is an architect. But yes, it's a work of design more than a blueprint.
  • dirkc 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing the presentation. I wish I could download it to look at it in a few years from now. I hope durable file formats regain popularity before humanity starts embarking on interstellar voyages :)
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Habitability for 1,000 ± 500 people over centuries Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
  • c048 1y ago
    It should be, but you can't be picky.
  • imzadi 1y ago
    I searched for "minimum space colony size," and the numbers are all over the place. Some says as low as 50 and others are over 40k.
  • hermitcrab 1y ago
    The human population might have been reduced to as few as 1000 individuals at one point: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
    • frigidwalnut 1y ago
      Follow up work has shown that result is a statistical artifact/does not replicate [1,2,3]. [1]https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article-abstract/229/1/iyae192/7925576 https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article-abstract/229/1/iya... [2]https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733 https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733 [3]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        Are there two proposed bottlenecks, one at 900 kya and another at 70 kya? I'd only really heard about the latter.
        • frigidwalnut 1y ago
          The paper linked in that post proposes a bottleneck at 900Kya in the ancestors of all modern humans. There is a bottleneck associated with the migration out of Africa and the peopling of the world that many populations have, but not all. Based on genetic data the timing is between 100-50Kya, with a lot of the uncertainty coming from converting generation times to years (i.e. how many years on average between parents and offspring). This is a nice reference: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21347 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature213...
• cluckindan 1y ago
  This seems like a VaultTec idea.
• airstrike 1y ago
  When can we start?
  • burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Send Elon Musk, all the billionaires, and 99.9% of lawyers and politicians first. Feed them like Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
• poisonborz 1y ago
  I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A 400 year travel to an unknown, possibly empty, lifeless target, however historic, is not something that can keep a society running long term.
  • levocardia 1y ago
    You're on a voyage through space in a big spaceship right now!
    • jvanderbot 1y ago
      Right! And it's got crops, jobs, and a very small social circle and living quarter allocated for you. And you dream of more but are secretly happy with less.
    • M95D 1y ago
      And I wish we could change course a little bit, away from the sun.
      • cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
  • jiggawatts 1y ago
    I suspect it’ll be easier to adapt the human species to be compatible with long-duration travel than to design spaceships to accommodate humans as-is.
    • Qem 1y ago
      Reminds me of this: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/rivers-end https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/rivers-end
• Paul_S 1y ago
  I love that most of those designs give bigger houses to people in a spaceship than modern houses in the UK on planet earth. Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > 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 antiquity just fine. The colonists be in a life-or-death system in a community small enough that everyone knows of everyone else personally. To the extent humans are almost uniquely exceptional at one thing as a hominid, it's exploration and colonization--I woudn't be surprised if this group winds up more functional due to scratching an underlying human need to explore and push boundaries.
    • hermitcrab 1y ago
      >Would such a project be particularly volume constrained? It would be mass constrained because of the sheer cost of getting it all into orbit, even with advanced tech such as space elevator. And more volumne = more mass. There is a saying in aerospace design along the lines of 'weight breeds weight'. Heavier components necessitate stronger, and therefore heavier, supporting structures.
    • Paul_S 1y ago
      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 slaves and adult male citizen population having a vote. In which case sure, I can get behind that but that's not what those spaceship designs propose. They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law. In actual fact history proves the opposite and all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations and the idea that you can fly a spaceship across light years without a captain who can condemn people to death is laughable.
• cvoss 1y ago
  This feels like the grown-up ideological successor to the International Space Settlement Design Competition for high school students. That was (is? anyone still in the know?) a competition that ran for years out of NASA Houston as a pet project of some engineers and contractors who wanted to engage and cultivate the next generation of aerospace minds. Teams would submit proposals for the design of a permanent space settlement (sometimes on the surface of a body, sometimes orbiting). Winners from across the world were invited to compete together live in 4 huge multi-national teams to design and pitch another settlement over a long sleepless weekend. As a two-time finalist, I can say it was an incredible experience for so many reasons. This new competition seems like its goal is to actually take the design/ideation of working professionals as a serious output, as opposed to the educational value of simulating this sort of thing for students, which is what drove the ISSDC.
  • namanyayg 1y ago
    It was indeed incredible. Battled out in a pan Asia round, won it, and got invited to the ISSDC at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Felt so fortunate learning from engineers at Boeing and NASA. Incredible experience for a 15yo kid from India. Coincidentally, it has been exactly 10 years since and my photos app resurfaced some of the memories. Good times.
    • carpdiem 1y ago
      Another ISSDC alum here, but from a little more than a decade earlier. It really was a unique experience. I remember the finals at Kennedy Space Center fully exercised the extent of your mental and physical stamina both. It also delivered lots of surprisingly applicable lessons for startup life around coordinating technical teams in high-stress, high-stakes environments.
  • ifckncantakeit 1y ago
    > This new competition seems like its goal is to actually take the design/ideation of working professionals as a serious output While it’s interesting, the only things that sell trips to space are cheap ways to get additional resources (information or materials), steady flows of income (from recurring tourism, travel, services), or war/defense. Long, expensive one-way trips that require incredible amounts of money to pull off will never, ever make business sense. The only reason explorers were funded hundreds of years ago was the promise of vast amounts of gold, magical life-extending water, mysterious new jewels and materials, wild native art, new sources of food, beautiful mostly naked natives that would look to you as gods and be your slaves willingly, and a shitton of fertile land to farm and colonize; and it must benefit the homeland within a reasonable time period, preferably not more than a year or two.
• nobodyandproud 1y ago
  Tweens and teenagers in space: What can possibly go wrong?
  • kridsdale3 1y ago
    I thought preservation of the species was the goal
    • nobodyandproud 1y ago
      Teen angst with no personal space or privacy. Seems like torture for everyone.
      • protocolture 1y ago
        The winning design had large, personal habitats.
• vFunct 1y ago
  I'm here just wondering if people get dizzy in a spinning space station...
  • hermitcrab 1y ago
    A large spacecraft doesn't have to spin very fast to simulate 1g. So probably not.
    • BizarroLand 1y ago
      2-3 rpm seems to be the speeds from the winning submission, varying depending on which level you're on. (Closer to the center = faster rotation to equal 1g). I bet that their descendants would find the idea of seasickness amusing, since they would probably be nearly immune to it.
    • TuringNYC 1y ago
      I was always curious about this. In some of the star wars movies, you dont see any spin, yet they are not floating around (e.g., notice how Orson Krennic has a backdrop of a planet, isnt floating, yet the planet isnt spinning https://allfortheboys.com/ben-mendelsohn/ https://allfortheboys.com/ben-mendelsohn/) I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
      • Ancalagon 1y ago
        I think they have artificial gravity in star wars iirc
        • svachalek 1y ago
          And anti-gravity, as seen in the many machines and craft that easily hover around.
          • Apocryphon 1y ago
            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.
• Doublon 1y ago
  I'll admit it: I've clicked because of the books....
  • desultir 1y ago
    the shrike has noted your interest
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • specproc 1y ago
    Follows a classic sci-fi series arc, IMO. Brilliant, enthralling and at times terrifying first book, followed by several tomes of 'meh'. See also Night's Dawn.
    • agos 1y ago
      the second is also really good. the second couple is... different. Good but not in the same league
      • specproc 1y ago
        Maybe it was just the last two I was thinking about. Been a while. These things start falling down when they start getting explained.
• 0_____0 1y ago
  58km long, 6km diameter cylinder. 60km is about the distance from central San Jose to SF, as the crow flies.
  • jwilliams 1y ago
    Yes + Appears it's a rigid structure w/ the engine pushing from the back? At 0.1g I suspect even with advanced composites only a few km would be possible.
• Mistletoe 1y ago
  What'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 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.
  • hermitcrab 1y ago
    it would be a lot more practical with a space elevator.
  • ctchocula 1y ago
    >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.
    • Mistletoe 1y ago
      You know I think you are right and it really doesn't speak well for these submissions that they are getting stuff like that wrong. I was stupidly taking them at their word that they had researched this. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5h9is2/why_does_a_cell_undergoing_anaphase_during/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5h9is2/why_does... It makes sense because if any of what they said was true we would have to constantly be worrying about magnetic fields around us, which are much stronger than the earth's, affecting our mitosis and meiosis. Your sperm would be completely screwed up if you had a magnet in your pocket when they were created.
• bobabob 1y ago
  Why 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.
  • 383toast 1y ago
    Doesn't it need to slow down
    • bobabob 1y ago
      Yes, and that should also take 1 year.
      • m4rtink 1y ago
        If its loosing mass for propulsion, it might need to slow down a lighter ship, taking less time ? Remember, a lighter ship can start slowing down later so it will arrive to its destination faster. This might be important if you are traveling with a flotilla of ships & decide for a little race at the end. Also helps if you have some heavy hibernation pods on board[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasm_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasm_City
  • vl 1y ago
    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?
• jmyeet 1y ago
  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 board such a ship vs the offspring you have who definitely did not consent, some of whom may not even make it to the destination. So a generational colony ship looks a lot like an O'Neil Cylinder [1]. It can spin to create 1g gravity and support enough people to make it to the destination. The issue is energy. An orbital can support itself with solar power when around a star and doesn't need a form of propulsion. An interstellar ship will need an alternative energy source and also have a propulsion system that can sufficiently accelerate and decelerate. The energy budget for the propulsion is so large that the life support energy budget is a rounding error. The only realistic policy I see is solar sails. This avoids the reaction mass issue. You need to decelerate at the other end. Part of that you get from drag in the interstellar medium. You either carry reaction mass for the rest or you go ahead and use automated systems to build the solar sail equivalent on the other end to decelerate you. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
  • protocolture 1y ago
    The winning design assumes redundant toroidal fusion reactors.
    • jmyeet 1y ago
      Having a fusion engine or fusion reactor is basically hand-waving away the energy problem. Controlled fusion has a fundamental problem: neutrons. Even if you solve the problem of container destruction (ie neutron embrittlement), which is significant, you still face the problem of significant energy loss to the system through high-energy free neutrons. Stars solve this problem by simply being really large so a free neutron can't really go that far without hitting another nucleus, particularly because fusion happens at the core. The hope with commercial fusion research is that we can somehow avoid the container destruction issue and have sufficient energy generation (given the energy inputs) despite the free neutron energy loss but it's unclear if that'll ever happen.
• Edmond 1y ago
  Anyone enamoured with this type of stuff should watch the movie Aniara. It's a great movie that illustrates what a delusional fantasy interstellar space travel of this form is. I am a big space exploration fan, but beyond our solar system, it's probably best thought of as a fantasy entertainment genre.
  • m4rtink 1y ago
    Aniara is not a good example - the ship was supposed to do a regular interplanetary flight orogonally before ending up on unplanned interstellar trip to oblivion due to drive failure before they could break to their destination planet (+ some apparent strife in the Solar System at the time, so no one could mount a rescue mission in time). That is totally something that can happen if you have a high performance interplanetary craft that does trips between planets in weeks - any trajectory is likely hyperbolic and if your drive fails before you brake again & no one can catch up with you in time you are kinda screwed.
• kayodelycaon 1y ago
  Related to long-distance space travel: closed ecosystems. There’s been a couple cool experiments. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
• optimalsolver 1y ago
  A Robert Heinlein story about how this will likely go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13VS_klDrio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13VS_klDrio
• arjie 1y ago
  One thing that I think is fun now that we have embryo freezing is that we can transport absolute masses of genetic diversity into the future, so even a small crew of a generation starship need not worry about interbreeding risk. Social risks abound, of course, but we could easily supply hundreds of thousands of embryos into the far future so that concerns of a minimum viable population are no longer valid. That eliminates biology as a constraint. What a life for our descendants so consigned, generations to live and die on a ship so that their descendants in turn could one day revolve around a foreign sun. I'm sure at some nth generation they will resent us for sending them away from the happiness of Spaceship Earth. It would be an amusing result if the only ones with the fortitude necessary to endure this are those religious enough in belief and purpose.
• WalterBright 1y ago
  My design would be to send a nanobot builder. Then you could beam it instructions on what to build, based on what it finds at its destination. Sort of like sending a cell capable of life and creating more life. Aliens are always sending such probes here in scifi, so why don't we do it, too?
  • sien 1y ago
    How would you power it? Solar sail or nuclear? How big would the payload be?
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      > How would you power it? Given that the payload would be tiny compared to a generation ship, I expect the powerplant would be able to get it there much faster. > Solar sail or nuclear? Solar sail won't work outside the solar system. > How big would the payload be? We cannot build it yet. But I expect the technology to do it seems possible.
      • m4rtink 1y ago
        Solar sail might help slow it down at destination + possibly a close solar Oberth maneuver to capture in an orbit in the target system. Being a probe sized craft, deceleration as well as a very close flyby close to a star should be much more doable than with a big honking interstellar ark. As for power - even a small nuclear reactor would be fine initially if it can last long enough for it to land somewhere suitable and start spamming solar panels. Then you are finally ready to get going on you first extra-solar Benchy. ;-) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect [1] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/10/06/assessing-the-oberth-maneuver-for-interstellar-probe/ https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/10/06/assessing-the-obe...
• lerp-io 1y ago
  space is for boomers, just fix earth.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    To the extent this philosophy has merit, it’s in the societies that embrace it being virtually guaranteed to become poorer and thus, possibly, lower in population and energy and material intensity compared with their peers who keep technologically advancing.
    • cellular 1y ago
      "Tragedy of the commons" effect.
  • NoGravitas 1y ago
    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.
  • m4rtink 1y ago
    Why not both ?
    • lerp-io 1y ago
      because priorities
• jimmcslim 1y ago
  Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora [1] is a great novel about the hubris of generation starships. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)
• DoctorOetker 1y ago
  I was hoping the challenge would be about launch or propulsion mechanisms, both with and without human occupants (the design space relaxes a lot if interstellar scientific probes are acceptable, say for parallax imaging of the universe, etc.).
• pomian 1y ago
  This project has invoked a lot of very interesting dialogue and discussion - Very fun fit for HN. Someone mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson's book: Aurora. (There is an audiobook version.) I recommend it also... It is a bit long winded but presents a lot of detail and thinking on many of the ideas discussed in this comment section. A very fun read. A grand adventure similar to old school science fiction books. One of the brilliant concluding quotes, went something like; The earth is an interstellar spaceship too.
• Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
  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.
• tgbugs 1y ago
  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.
  • jandrese 1y ago
    The fundamental problem with Ark ships. They're just much harder to build versions of fully self-sufficient orbital colonies. Not only do you need to install the enormous thrusters, but you have to be able to operate without any inputs at all. No solar power. No imports of mass from asteroids or elsewhere. No increasing genetic diversity via swapping people between other colonies. What advantage is there in moving your orbital colony to a different solar system?
    • Ekaros 1y ago
      Slightly less chance of dying in very tiny solar system destroying effect. Traded to much higher risk of dying for some other risk or system failure. Anything affecting solar system likely affects also any ark on the way... And well inside solar system you might be able to get some support. Where as outside none... Just what sort of population would enter that risk profile? Especially when there is little to gain for themselves.
      • jandrese 1y ago
        Even if the sun explodes you're probably better off staying in the solar system and picking through the remnants than trying to make the trip out to another solar system.
• palisade 1y ago
  Meanwhile biodome couldn't keep an artificial ocean from acidifying.
  • worldsayshi 1y ago
    Do you mean Biosphere? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
    • palisade 1y ago
      OH yea, I confused it with the movie name. Surprisingly, the wikipage fails to mention it was a failed experiment and doesn't mention the ocean issue at all.
      • m4rtink 1y ago
        Well wasn't that like the first real attempt on this & to a degree a non-optimal one at that ? Its not like sustainable extraterrestrial habitats will not be needed elsewhere anyway, so it should be hopefully long established technology (by the lava tube settlers of the Moon or the Oneil Cylinder bunch from L3) when you do the first interstellar ship.
• davedx 1y ago
  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!
• lutusp 1y ago
  > The idea behind a generation ship is that the initial crew would live, reproduce, and die on the ship, with their descendants continuing the journey until reaching the destination. What a shame -- their basic premise is grievously mistaken. When we have the means to launch interstellar pioneering craft, people will have figured out the most logical, sustainable approach -- launch a set of frozen embryos, not a set of arguing adults. The craft would gain speed toward a suitable target, then drift for centuries, no need to waste resources on living, arguing human beings. When the destination is reached, the craft will land and spawn a human crew at the destination -- using artificial wombs and robots to guide the children into adulthood. Someone might object to the idea of letting robots teach humans, but hey -- look around. It's already true.
• abrenuntio 1y ago
  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".
  • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
    For a deep dive into the psychological aspects of a forming colony I recommend KSR's Mars trilogy.
  • Ntrails 1y ago
    > taking a group of volunteers to Antarctica to format them to a supposed sociocultural blank slate I'd love to see an actual blueprint for making this work. I don't believe in it at all. > They are not just governed with "mere" discipline Unclear to me what discipline exists. There's no mention of crime and punishment or enforcement. It seems assumed that you'll have indoctrinated everyone sufficiently to not need it? My working model of indoctrination and control is based on power imbalance. Once they're on the ship, I don't think "the AI's will control everything" is gonna fly forever.
• jimmySixDOF 1y ago
  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.
  • fermuch 1y ago
    Drowning in my own shower is a new kind of fear you've just unlocked on me
  • m4rtink 1y ago
    You are on the right track - this is pretty much how the showers on Skylab & Mir worked: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1j1ijsw/how_astronauts_showered_on_nasas_skylab_space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1j1ijsw/... https://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00284/56484/Microcosmic-Getaways-Aboard-Space-Habitats?redirectedFrom=PDF https://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/thl... It worked well enough, but ISS opted for wet towels & I am not sure what the Chinese are using currently. Will be interesting what some of the upcoming commercial space stations opt for. :)
• KineticLensman 1y ago
  Looking at view #28 in the winning presentation, the system carries 200 shuttles that can each do a one-way trip to the target planet carrying 10 people and delivering 5 tons of cargo. So the overall system can deliver up to 2000 people and 1000 tons -in comparatively small pieces - to the planetary surface. It would be good to see some discussion of how you can bootstrap a colony (let alone a civilisation) under these very tight constraints. For example, whether flight systems would be cannibalised to support the colonists, and how the colonists would establish a viable, self-sustaining tech tree (including critical life support) after landing, where there may be essentially no immediately accessible raw materials.
  • m4rtink 1y ago
    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 all the benefits of starting with a space based civilization in the new star system rather than stranding 2000 at potentially hostile planet with no means of support and space based assistance, battling for survival. Well, unless you really like all those lost colony novels with low tech human societies existing on exotic planets that were not able to keep their tech level. ;-)
    • KineticLensman 1y ago
      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.
      • m4rtink 1y ago
        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.
• sgarrity 1y ago
  The biggest "TBD" I've ever seen (in the slide deck for the winning entry): "(TBD ethics of voluntary euthanasia)"
  • 9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
    For as many times as they mention it, it would seem that it is not really TBD.
• andrewla 1y ago
  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.
  • NoGravitas 1y ago
    The generation ship in KSR's "Aurora" failed due to unknown unknowns. I'd very much hate to have lived on it as it did, and I would be unwilling to condemn tens or hundreds of thousands of people to the same fate as an experiment.
    • andrewla 1y ago
      There were numerous ships that attempted to traverse the Atlantic to form colonies in the Americas. Many were lost, or died out, or failed to thrive for unknown unknowns. And many survived and flourished for reasons not even the settlers understood, and which frankly we will probably never understand because the moment has passed. In Aurora society took a one-shot approach. This strikes me as unrealistic; why weren't there dozens of competing attempts? I thought the book was one of the best treatments of generation ships that I've ever seen in scifi except for this. And I don't love the "also we discovered new physics and made a sentient AI on our ship somehow" plots (the latter is also a reason I never liked "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"). I get that it feels unjust or unfair or morally wrong to subject new generations to an experiment that they never signed up for, but that's just the way that humanity works -- all of our children are part of an experiment that they never signed up for, because none of us know (or can even conceivably know) the "right" way or environment in which to raise children.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Zigurd 1y ago
  The words "woman" or "women" appear zero times on this thread up to my composing this post. The word "female" appears once in the context of how to breed a next generation without any women. That's why none of this is going to work. Is that blunt enough for you? Have any of you asked a woman about the utter insanity of generation ships? Do you think maybe the tech industry still needs to do some work about gender equality, and the resulting quality of decision-making in tech management and investment?
  • aplummer 1y ago
    > Have any of you asked a woman about the utter insanity of generation ships? Isn’t submitting the proposal to a jury that is 40% women explicitly asking women?
  • ljlolel 1y ago
    ? The page doesn’t mention man either. It says people. Looks like nearly half the judges are women, and the top 2 winning entries look like majority women.
    • Zigurd 1y ago
      Point taken, but I was referring to the sausage fest here
  • antisthenes 1y ago
    It's not going to work because the energy requirements of reaching another habitable planet through interstellar space are mind-bogglingly high. You need to be able to run a fusion reaction in space, for 100+ years and have absolutely nothing in the system break or require maintenance. Until you do this, these spaceship competitions are just fancy CGI renders.
    • m4rtink 1y ago
      I think with highly enriched uranium you could definitely power a (set of spare) fishion reactors for that long during transit with reasonable mass budget.