kahea na hoku i ka poe koa i ka aina hou

[iquetzal]

Hawaii must establish an Institute of Interstellar Navigation based upon Polynesian Wayfinding.
There is no other solution to this problem. I have spent years on this. It is NP-Hard computationally insolvable.
Hawaii owns this. I mean real Hawaiians. They totally own it on every level.
The only navigation methodology capable of interstellar travel is several thousand years old.

This is a genuine question. Proper motion is needed in order to understand where a star is at any given moment and is therefore needed for interstellar navigation. How did the Hawaiians measure proper motion thousands of years ago without precision optical instruments?

It is impossible in principle to know the physical position of an interstellar object. Proper motion is a relative observation with no absolute physical basis. Star's position in the sky indicates physical positions randomly sampled across centuries or millennia in the past. Since every star warps the path of light along its line of sight from earth, the myriad convolutions of  'space' that dictate perceived locations of stars in the sky is uniquely defined by earth's current position at any point in time. From light years away, a database of stellar positions in earths sky will project false stellar positions based upon the differential foam of spacetime viewed from the new location. Polynesian wayfinding is the only conceptual discipline capable of collating many divergent sources of imprecise information into a wayfinding methodology. There is no such thing as a coordinate in interstellar space. There is no such thing as a course between waypoints. Polynesian wayfinding does not depend upon coordinates and waypoints. It is a continuous analytical process of acquiring, collating and discarding information from diverse sources, from departure to arrival. People seem to think this is an easy problem. It isn't. Is is profoundly difficult. We risk sending starships to interstellar destinations that will be nothing but lightyears of empty space when they arrive.