Have you ever read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama? Or, maybe more recently, have you seen that gigantic generation ship from the end of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar? If you’ve said yes to either, then you’re already familiar with the unfathomably giant spaceship.
It’s the kind of ship humanity might need to carry us like a massive life raft to a new home should we thoroughly destroy this one.
Ships like that have long been sci-fi fodder, and still are, but, as Live Science reports, a design for one such interstellar ship that can house thousands just won a major competition for the best and brightest engineers the world has to offer.
Meet the Absolutely Massive Starship That Could Take Us to a Whole New Star
The Chrysalis is a 36-mile-long, nuclear-powered generation ship designed to ferry 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Proxima Centauri b. It’s not leaving anytime soon, because it’s not real, and you’re not going if it were. However, if it were real and could launch, the trip would take approximately 400 years. Load up your iPad with TV episodes.
Chrysalis won top honors in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a contest where engineers get to relinquish the reins of reality to out-design each other by dreaming up hypothetical multigenerational starships.
The vessel is powered by theoretical fusion reactors and is wrapped in five concentric layers: farms on the inside, robot-run warehouses on the outside. In between are parks, schools, hospitals, homes, industries, and all the endearing and embarrassing human foibles we all contain, just on a gargantuan tube floating through space.
Before even thinking about boarding, prospective passengers would spend up to 80 years in Antarctic isolation training, only to board a ship that’s partially governed by an artificial intelligence.
The core of Chrysalis contains shuttles and comms systems, ready to deploy settlers once the ship arrives at Proxima Centauri b, the only halfway decent real estate we’ve spotted outside our solar system. Biodiversity would be preserved via onboard biomes, from tropical forests to microbe farms.
The population would be carefully managed to make sure there were enough resources to go around. While the theoretical ship could have a maximum capacity of the aforementioned 2,400, there would likely only be around 1,500 passengers in total.
The team—made up of scientists Giacomo Infelise, Veronica Magli, Guido Sbrogio, Nevenka Martinello, and Federica Chiara Serpe—won $5,000 for its design.
Again, this is all speculative. Taking a look at the current state of things here on Earth, we seem better suited for causing problems than banding together to solve them, or at least getting our ship together well enough to run away from them.
Still, it’s not that someone out there is trying to apply genuine effort into figuring out how to (somewhat) realistically pack all of our stuff and get out of dodge should all this come crumbling down.
The post This 36-Mile-Long Spaceship Could Take Humanity to Another Solar System appeared first on VICE.
