Proposed spacecraft could carry up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri
The engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a single trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to ours. Crafts, called Chrysalis, could make the trip of 25 billions of Milles (40 miles of kilometers) in about 400 years, say the engineers in their BriefThis means that many of its potential passengers know only life on crafts.
Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could give birth to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri B – An exoplanet of the size of the earth which is considered as potentially habitable.
The project won first place in the Hyperion Project design competitionA challenge that obliges teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.
Life on chrysalis
Before embarking on the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of inhabitants of the ship to live and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctic for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological well-being. The ship could theoretically be built in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity with constant rotation.
The ship, which measured 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be built as a Russian nesting doll, with several layers engaging around a central core. Layers include common areas, farms, gardens, Nuclear merger reactors.
The core in the center of the vehicle hosts the shuttles which could bring people to Proxima Centuri B, as well as all the communication equipment of Chrysalis.
In relation: Are we never going to reach Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring stars system?
The closest layer of the Chrysalis core is dedicated to food production, to plants to nourish, fungi, microbes, insects and livestock in controlled environments. To preserve biodiversity, different environments, including tropical and boreal forests, would be maintained.
The second level of the center provides common spaces, such as parks, schools, hospitals and libraries, for the inhabitants of the ship. The next shell would then contain housing for individual households, equipped with air circulation and heat exchangers.
The work occurs at the next level, where there are installations of industries ranging from recycling to pharmaceutical products through structural manufacturing. The fifth and most outside would serve a warehouse for various types of resources, materials, equipment and machines. Chrysalis designers suggest that robots could manage this level, reducing the need for human physical work.
Births would be planned in Chrysalis to ensure that the population remains at a sustainable level, which the research team has determined as about 1,500 people – 900 people less than the total capacity of the ship.
The governance of the ship would collaborate with artificial intelligence“Allowing the resilience of the entire social system, a better transfer of knowledge between the different generations of inhabitants and a deeper vision of the overall dynamics of the Chrysalis spaties complex,” wrote the project engineers in their arguments.
This plan is purely hypothetical, because some of the technologies required, such as nuclear merger reactors, do not yet exist. However, hypothetical projects like this can always add to our existing knowledge base and help engineers improve future conceptions.
The Jury of the Hyperion project wrote on its website that Chrysalis was impressive for its “consistency at the system level and its innovative design of the modular housing structure” and “overall detail depth”. The winning team of five researchers received 5,000 USD.
