Remember Project Hyperion? In case you have priorities other than staying current on all the most obscure space and astronomy news from around the world, here's a quick recap. It's a theoretical study by the members of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) to explore the design of a crewed interstellar spacecraft using current and near-future technologies.
In November last year Project Hyperion launched a competition, called the Project Hyperion Design Competition, asking teams of participants to design the habitat of a generation ship including its architecture and society. Teams had to consist of at least two people and were required to be multi-disciplinary. Cash prizes were offered, but I think this was more likely about earning respect from other space nerds. Or maybe just letting the imagination run wild on a fun hypothetical and coming up with some amalgam of sci-fi spaceships from the Eagle Transporter in Space: 1999 to the Hyperion class heavy cruiser in Babylon 5.
Generations ships are a necessity, according to the known laws of physics, if we are ever going to travel to the stars. If you don't already know, things in space are really far apart, and it takes a long time to travel anywhere. The competition asked for a ship that was designed to span 250 years, which in reality is not likely to get us very far away from Earth at all. There are lots of wild estimates about how long it would take to travel to the closest planet outside our Solar System, but as an example a study published on arXiv in 2018 calculated that based on current technologies it would be at least 6,300 years. Assuming that hibernation isn't ever going to be possible (which, maybe), that's a lot of generations of humans confined to a tin can as it flies through deep space. But Project Hyperion is also looking at hypotheticals, not just the state-of-the-art today.
Anyway, the submissions have been judged, and the winners have been announced. Thankfully the teams all put a lot more effort into their presentations than Project Hyperion did in coming up with the name of the competition. And wow, were some of the results impressive. If as a civilisation we never make it to stars, it won't be our imaginations that are holding us back.
Take Team Chrysalis, the competition winners, as an example. They designed a ship capable of carrying more than 1,000 people to the Proxima Centauri system in about 400 years. The ship itself looks a bit like a cigar, and it is enormous. About 58 km in length and 6 km in diameter, and weighing more than 2 billion tonnes, there's a lot of room on this ship for all the different systems required for so many people to live captive in a self-sustaining environment for hundreds of years. There are separate sections for housing, facilities, sports and recreation, and other communal spaces. There are a variety of biomes, from tropical rainforest to dry scrub and grasslands. And, of course, propulsion, radiation protection, and artificial gravity systems.
But it's Chrysalis' vision of how this society would work that is perhaps the most though provoking part of their design. For starters, there's no traditional family unit. Adults live alone, and if they have young children, they alternate care with the other biological parent every week. You only get to reproduce between the ages of 28 and 31, and each person can have a maximum of just two children. And they must be with different partners. Why? Because with such a small population you need to be very careful about maintaining the diversity of the gene pool. The rules might sound a little dystopian, but I guess you can understand why they are necessary.
This, then, might be starting to break any illusion you might have had that a trip on a generation ship could be fun. Rather than being a grand adventure, it sounds like a lifetime of dull monotony, sailing through a seemingly endless void pockmarked with distant stars that are forever out of reach. Most people will never even leave the confines of the ship, and even the final generation of humans that lands on a new planet won't have any guarantees about what that new world will be like.
Maybe that's why WFP Extreme, the competition's second placed team, thought to include virtual reality pods for everyone. The pods allow people to hook up intravenously to food and water so they can escape for days at a time, but I've got my doubts there'd be much relief from the grim reality of life even after escaping to a virtual one. Mark Zuckerberg already did a good job of showing us why we don't need a Metaverse.
But they did include turtles. Six of them. Turtles, because they live a long time and require very few resources. And, so the humans could stay connected to nature. But even with turtles, I'm still not sold. Maybe we should just focus on keeping Earth habitable instead? Because I'd take living here over a voyage on a generation ship any day.
