“Project Hyperion works on a preliminary study that defines integrated concepts for a crewed interstellar starship or generation ship. The study aims to provide an assessment of the feasibility of crewed interstellar flight using current and near-future technologies. It also aims to guide future research and technology development plans as well as to inform the public about crewed interstellar travel,” says the “About” page at Project Hyperion, sponsored by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies.

Concept art, ProjectHyperion.org

Hyperion is offering a $10,000 prize to the team that comes up with the best design for “the habitat of the generation ship, including its architecture and society,” that can survive a mission of “250 years from launch to arrival at the target star system,” with requirements for the habitat such as that it “provides Earth gravity via artificial gravity via rotation but parts of the habitat can have reduced gravity,” “provides atmospheric conditions similar to Earth,” and large enough to accommodate and provide “and decent living conditions for 1000 +/- 500 people over the entire trip duration.”

Here’s the design scope. The propulsion and tech stuff someone else will figure out:

The adventure/RPG video game Starfield launched last year to mixed reviews, seen as a bit of a misfire by the studio that cranked out classics like Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Without getting into the clunky backstory of the game, we can tell you that it takes place across the galaxy in the 24th century and the player’s human character can pilot a starship and explore hundreds of different worlds, some of them with preexisting human colonies, others untamed. The ship is equipped with a faster-than-light drive, meaning that the trips between star systems are measured in however long it takes your Xbox to load up the region and place the player’s spaceship in the destination.

In one side mission the player gets a distress call from a ship that doesn’t appear on any registry. He or she docks with them and the leader of the crew says they wanted to settle on this one nearby already-colonized planet but the governor refuses to give her clearance to land – because the colony wasn’t there when the captain’s ancestors launched 200 years earlier, before faster-than-light drives had been invented. Generations had wasted their entire lives sealed up in a fucking metal tube drifting through the interstellar void. That little side mission in Starfield may’ve been ripped from a plot envisioned by some obscure sci-fi writer however long ago or it may not have been because it’s not all that deep of a thought experiment on what could await the 1,000 humans who would lock themselves up in this still very hypothetical “Project Hyperion” scenario.

NASA engineer Dr Harold “Sonny” White has been claiming he’s making headway on building a warp drive for more than a decade now, the video above is from his Limitless Space Institute. Apparently White is at the “using Casimir plates to generate the negative energy densities required” phase of his research and development on what’s been termed the Alcubierre Drive, named after the Mexican physicist who once proposed it, according to an article last year in Popular Mechanics.

If you dive into this stuff you’re going to read a lot about why an Alcubierre drive is impossible because of the non-existent form of matter required but no this paper proposes a solution to that problem where it could destroy the entire universe if they tried to do it and then a paper by a different physicist theoretically solved that problem and so on. Just the research and actual experiments being done by White and his team alone have more practical value than planning on how to build a goddamned “generation ship” to colonize some distant extrasolar planet that might be colonized by other humans by the time the travelers’ descendants get there (or worse, it’s already occupied by unfriendly natives whose presence no one was able to detect prior to launch).

These Project Hyperion eggheads should instead think about self-sustaining enclosed habitat colonies at Earths’ Lagrangian Points – gravitational overlaps where a man-made object can sit and collect solar energy to sustain them. The spaces would be perfect to situate the kind of societies they want to envision as living on the generation ships without the fuss of them being permanently isolated while traveling across the interstellar void on a gamble. They’ll be good rest stops for when, God-willing, our descendants have their own Millennium Falcon-like private ships they can use to escape from the bounty hunters sent by obese gangsters pursuing a drug debt.