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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In that timeframe it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts.
We'd have to completely re-think industrial processes. I'm in favor of realized nanotechnology and 3d printers at an atomic level. Evolution stumbled across carbon based lifeforms as it's answer on Earth.
> 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.
Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?
Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Would it be any more cruel than having children as a serf on a farm, where your family has worked for countless generations, knowing that they're likely to have the same fate?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the most likely way we'd do it, provided we get over our cultural/political/religious limitations, which might pose a real obstacle.
The most likely way to move in the Universe is through something along the lines of von Neumann probes, which can be small machines sent at relativistic speeds across the whole galaxy, setting up these "spawn" points. Even at 10% speed of light it would take 1 million years to get such probes in strategic points to cover most of our galaxy.
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.
To the extent what they’re suggesting isn’t bunk, it’s in being able to transmit genetic information and then print it to a womb. Then have a generation of psychopaths raised by a robot.
But the process have been bootstrapped billions of years ago. They would have to print a feconded egg cell and make it grow. I think that the best we can do now is to freeze that cell and ship it to the next star. Then build the womb, which we can't do yet. And a zillion of other problems to solve.
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).
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?
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.
Provided the first generation volunteered, I expect the second generation would still be indoctrinate enough to the idea and mission to be fine, but the third generation would definitely be stirring some shit up.
What's our current mission? "Keep society running" and "don't fuck up the planet" don't seem to be going super well, but that's just my cynicism talking. I need a nap.
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)
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> didn't notice any prisons included in the design, so that assumption seems fair
Does it?
You don’t need dedicated prison space as you won’t have a permanent prison population. (Depending on labour requirements and resource availability this may not be a choice.) Nothing about not having a prison implies no hierarchy. And you don’t need prisons to “condemn people to death.”
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.
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?
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.).
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.
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.
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...
I mean you could make sure to limit couplings to 3rd cousins and beyond which eliminates like 99.5% of genetic problems for many generations,having an even more diverse starting group also will help, and if you really wanted to make sure you could also send along some eggs and sperm to throw in the gene pool at times.
So far the only known technology to bring embryos to life is through alive female host, so you still need healthy, and on top of that, willing population to use embryos.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
It's interesting how frequently the issue of unborn children's consent is brought up. This consent is impossible, it's never existed and never will exist, and the only alternative seems to be nihilism.
Yeah, its not like kids today are consenting towards living on this earth now in this age. As long as the ship isn't just some piece of trash death trap and has decent living standards I don't see the problem.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
This got me thinking. There are fairly hard takes on most fictional technology but I don't know that I've ever come across one for artificial gravity. At least no examples immediately come to mind.
I guess that's just too far out in the fictional physics system weeds for even the more dedicated of authors.
Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions (albeit the weakest one), perhaps trying to create it artificially is a bit beyond even hypothetical physics. Sounds like the latest suggestion for it is from 2016:
> Now, Füzfa has shown, mathematically speaking, that by stacking large superconducting electromagnets we would be able to produce a very weak gravitational field, and that we'd be able to detect it using highly sensitive interferometers. These interferometers would work by basically superimposing gravitational fields on top of each other so that physicists could obtain information about them.
Right, but in a fictional universe we aren't constrained by real world physics. Yet no "hard" takes on artificial gravity come to mind. I assume this is partly because any explanation would be difficult to work into an interesting narrative (unless you consider physics journal articles and mathematical equations interesting) and also because "simulating" the downstream impacts of changes at such a low level of physics just sounds incredibly daunting and probably near impossible to get right.
The linked article is interesting. I'm amused by the mental image of the Millennium Falcon crumpling like a tin can into a singularity when magnets of ludicrous strength under the deck plating are suddenly switched on.
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.
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.
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.
reply