[HN Gopher] Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
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Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition
Author : codeulike
Score : 80 points
Date : 2025-08-06 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.projecthyperion.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.projecthyperion.org)
| codeulike wrote:
| Link to Canva presentation for the winning entry
|
| https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust
| impacts for 400 years_
|
| Whipple shields [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Pretty awesome. I feel like Paul Chadeisson should do a reward
| render of the assembly/flight. Nobody does space "big stuff"
| like he does.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Habitability for 1,000 +- 500 people over centuries_
|
| Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
| c048 wrote:
| It should be, but you can't be picky.
| imzadi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| frigidwalnut wrote:
| 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/iya...
|
| [2]https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733
|
| [3]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v
| 1
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Are there two proposed bottlenecks, one at 900 kya and
| another at 70 kya? I'd only really heard about the latter.
| frigidwalnut wrote:
| 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/nature213...
| herval wrote:
| most importantly, will we carry 1000 of the best minds of our
| generation, 1000 hairdressers/insurance salesmen/management
| consultants or 1000 billionaires and their direct families?
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| I vote 1000 billionaires and family. Then the rest of us can
| get to work repairing the damage they've done.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Downvoters apparently still sore about the Golgafrinchan B
| Ark incident.
| moonlion_eth wrote:
| bruh noah did it with 2
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Facts?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| There were 8: Noah, his wife, their three sons (Shem, Ham,
| and Japheth), and their three wives. If so, there must have
| been a whole of inbreeding in later generations.
|
| Aside: The biblical story of the Ark and the flood in ripped
| off wholesale from Sumerian and Akkadian narratives.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| That's a problem that's easy to fix with a fridge and a bunch
| of embryos. They take practically no space.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| The question is how well will they hold up for 400 years?
|
| Well, that, and how do you ensure that the people 400 years
| from now would know what they are for or how to implant them?
|
| Lots of unknowns. Would make for an interesting story though
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how do you ensure that the people 400 years from now
| would know what they are for or how to implant them?_
|
| A ship travelling at 0.01c for 400 years could get 4 ly
| away. They'd still be able to be coached. More likely:
| their computers would still be able to be updated.
| cluckindan wrote:
| This seems like a VaultTec idea.
| airstrike wrote:
| When can we start?
| poisonborz wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Reminds me of this:
| https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/rivers-end
| hermitcrab wrote:
| That was cheery!
| XorNot wrote:
| The whole equation changes pretty drastically if we had a
| practical hibernation or biological stasis technology (I hate
| saying cryosleep, though in practice we know freezing things
| pauses them - see the 31 year old embryo baby recently).
|
| Like do you really care how long it takes to get somewhere if
| it subjectively happens in the blink of an eye? Would you
| even necessarily be likely to lose your own peer group if you
| all spent significant time in hibernation travel between
| meetings?
| ttemPumpinRary wrote:
| Menonites in space. Autistic astronauts only.
| trhway wrote:
| Give the people some Minecraft on steroids and they wouldn't
| notice how half-century flew by.
|
| Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave
| their village/county doing the same thing generation after
| generation.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I think the problems would come in the 2nd generation, who
| didn't choose to go on the mission.
| ryandrake wrote:
| To be fair, no human born on our current Earthship asked to
| go on our current mission.
| trhway wrote:
| 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 numerous hungry homeless filling to
| the brim the dirty decaying cities of the West which they
| were showing us on the Soviet TV while we were supposedly
| on a mission to build better/higher/ideal society
| consisting of a new better entity "Soviet man" - "The
| Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy, muscular,
| and enthusiastic in spreading the communist Revolution."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man - note how the
| first 4 qualities work for interstellar, and they are
| pretty common among various other ideologies and religions,
| and the specific target for the 5th - for the enthusiasm -
| is just adjusted according the specific ideology or
| religion, and "spreading human civilization" wouldn't be
| even half-bad like some others out there)
| silverquiet wrote:
| Heidegger would say that all humans are thrown into
| existence and into circumstances that they did not choose.
| In some sense, we are currently on a large spaceship, and I
| assume some mission chosen for us by our predecessors.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while
| being awake the whole time_
|
| The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under
| one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost
| certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to
| migrate for generations.
|
| > _life will get boring and pointless fast_
|
| Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war
| footing against entropy and the unknown.
|
| [1]
| https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
|
| [-1] _Possible counterfactual_ :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818098
| estearum wrote:
| The people who had to migrate had a front row seat (and
| supporting role) to the greatest show in the known universe:
| life on earth.
|
| Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty,
| especially if you're moving through it.
| levocardia wrote:
| You're on a voyage through space in a big spaceship right now!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Polynesians took enormous risks to populate the pacific.
|
| Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be
| finished in their lifetime.
|
| Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of
| success is not for most people. But there are billions of us.
| I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a
| mission.
| trvz wrote:
| It would be cruel to their children.
| simonh wrote:
| As adults we make our decisions as best we can. We can't
| not make decisions, and the ones we do affect future
| generations whether they like it or not. That's just life.
|
| Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these
| projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on
| arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with
| no hope of survival. I've no problem with a carefully
| judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has
| to at least be a reasonable chance.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| People are not the monolithic group you seem to think them to
| be and in my experience most people adapt fairly quickly to
| their situation once they realize there is nothing they can do
| to change it.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| 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 already know how to transmit information at the
| speed of light; no new physics required. This then reduces the
| problem to transporting the 'printer'. No generation ship
| required. You need something that harvests particles locally
| and can receive a stream of data with what to print. You can
| bootstrap this, send a tiny particle harvester/printer that can
| print a slightly larger printer, etc.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| it is not clear to me that getting an autonomous 'printer' to
| function from 4 years away is any easier than creating an
| interstellar colony ship.
|
| It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex
| biological object, like a human.
| eamsen wrote:
| You are being printed, every day, cell by cell.
| eamsen wrote:
| One distant day they'll wonder who began them. Do you sign
| the work?
| alanbernstein wrote:
| What "current and neat future technologies" do you suggest
| using for this approach?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Most people don't leave a pretty small radius around work/home
| for most their life. All you need is a religion/lifestyle built
| around it and the people factor is pretty easy.
|
| I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little
| rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our
| friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing
| 99.9999% of the spaceship we're _already_ riding (Earth).
| Paul_S wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a country is more constrained by space than a
| spaceship?_
|
| At the point that we're building 60 km spaceships, yes, I
| think that's a possibility.
|
| > _you 're reaching into antiquity then not even normal
| democracies_
|
| The further back we go the more consensus-driven small
| societies get. I'm also reaching back due to familiarity.
| There are plenty of small island communities that did fine
| for generations on their own.
|
| > _They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no
| one will ever break the law_
|
| Sorry, I missed this in the winning design. Where does it
| say that?
|
| > _all exploration and conquest is driven by strict
| hierarchical organisations_
|
| If you need to bring an army, yes. I don't think we know
| how hierarchical Polynesian settlers were.
| cvoss wrote:
| 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.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Tweens and teenagers in space: What can possibly go wrong?
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I thought preservation of the species was the goal
| vFunct wrote:
| I'm here just wondering if people get dizzy in a spinning space
| station...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| A large spacecraft doesn't have to spin very fast to simulate
| 1g. So probably not.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/)
|
| I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies
| like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
| Doublon wrote:
| I'll admit it: I've clicked because of the books....
| desultir wrote:
| the shrike has noted your interest
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 58km long, 6km diameter cylinder. 60km is about the distance from
| central San Jose to SF, as the crow flies.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| it would be a lot more practical with a space elevator.
| bobabob wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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
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