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.
kayodelycaon · 6m ago
Related to long-distance space travel: closed ecosystems. There’s been a couple cool experiments.
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.
JumpCrisscross · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
> quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years
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.
jvanderbot · 1h 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.
poisonborz · 2h 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.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> 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.
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.
hermitcrab · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
It would be cruel to their children.
simonh · 57m ago
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.
levocardia · 1h ago
You're on a voyage through space in a big spaceship right now!
jvanderbot · 1h 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.
Aaargh20318 · 1h ago
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.
yincrash · 3m ago
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.
alanbernstein · 45m ago
What "current and neat future technologies" do you suggest using for this approach?
hermitcrab · 51m ago
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 · 46m ago
You are being printed, every day, cell by cell.
eamsen · 47m ago
One distant day they’ll wonder who began them. Do you sign the work?
ofalkaed · 1h ago
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.
ttemPumpinRary · 1h ago
Menonites in space. Autistic astronauts only.
jvanderbot · 1h ago
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).
jiggawatts · 1h 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.
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?
trhway · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
I think the problems would come in the 2nd generation, who didn't choose to go on the mission.
silverquiet · 1h ago
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.
kibwen · 22m ago
"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
ryandrake · 1h ago
To be fair, no human born on our current Earthship asked to go on our current mission.
trhway · 1h ago
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)
bobabob · 51m 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 · 32m ago
Doesn't it need to slow down
Paul_S · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> 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.
0_____0 · 1h ago
58km long, 6km diameter cylinder. 60km is about the distance from central San Jose to SF, as the crow flies.
cluckindan · 2h ago
This seems like a VaultTec idea.
Edmond · 20m 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.
Doublon · 1h ago
I'll admit it: I've clicked because of the books....
desultir · 44m ago
the shrike has noted your interest
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> Habitability for 1,000 ± 500 people over centuries
Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
hermitcrab · 2h ago
The human population might have been reduced to as few as 1000 individuals at one point:
Are there two proposed bottlenecks, one at 900 kya and another at 70 kya? I'd only really heard about the latter.
frigidwalnut · 1h 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/nature213...
imzadi · 2h 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.
Tuna-Fish · 1h ago
That's a problem that's easy to fix with a fridge and a bunch of embryos. They take practically no space.
BizarroLand · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
> 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.
c048 · 2h ago
It should be, but you can't be picky.
herval · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
I vote 1000 billionaires and family. Then the rest of us can get to work repairing the damage they've done.
didgeoridoo · 1h ago
Downvoters apparently still sore about the Golgafrinchan B Ark incident.
moonlion_eth · 2h ago
bruh noah did it with 2
hermitcrab · 1h ago
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.
esafak · 27m ago
You mean God sent word to the Sumerians and Akkadians !
AtlasBarfed · 1h ago
Facts?
nobodyandproud · 1h ago
Tweens and teenagers in space: What can possibly go wrong?
kridsdale3 · 1h ago
I thought preservation of the species was the goal
jmyeet · 43m 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.
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 · 50m ago
it would be a lot more practical with a space elevator.
vFunct · 1h ago
I'm here just wondering if people get dizzy in a spinning space station...
hermitcrab · 1h ago
A large spacecraft doesn't have to spin very fast to simulate 1g. So probably not.
TuringNYC · 38m 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/)
I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
Ancalagon · 12m ago
I think they have artificial gravity in star wars iirc
BizarroLand · 1h 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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
The winning proposal coasts at 0.01c. Propulsion systems--not the speed of light--and thus engineering, not phsyics, are the relevant limitors.
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.
Whipple shields [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
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
Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
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.
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.
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.
It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex biological object, like a human.
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).
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?
Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.
(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)
Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a big space exploration fan, but beyond our solar system, it's probably best thought of as a fantasy entertainment genre.
Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
[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/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1
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
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.
Aside: The biblical story of the Ark and the flood in ripped off wholesale from Sumerian and Akkadian narratives.
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
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.
I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
I bet that their descendants would find the idea of seasickness amusing, since they would probably be nearly immune to it.