#generation-ship — Public Fediverse posts

artificial habitat, generation ship

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on stuff back at home: https://aieris.art/featured/artificial-habitat-generation-ship-eris-and-ai.html

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Mutant Corridor on a Lost Generation Ship

Generations: A Science Fiction Mystery Thriller "Generations proves as brisk and engaging as it is ambitious." - BookLife Sale: $11.90 to $0.99 by Noam Josephides Rating: 4.3/5 (712 Reviews) #Science #SciFi #Fiction #Mystery #Thriller #Dystopian #GenerationShip #BookSky

Generations: A Science Fiction...

SHORTS 170: What Happens if you forget what the Outisde of Your Spaceship Looks LIke?

What Happens if you forget what the Outisde of Your Spaceship Looks LIke? - From Into Your Head #podcast - IntoYourHead.ie #Podcasts #comedy #humour #PodcastClips #podcasters #podcasting #IntoYourHeadshorts #humor #funny #spaceships #generationship #StarTrek #scifi #startrekhumor #spacetravel #humour #SpaceshipPerspective #InsideOut #CosmicView #StarTrekHumour #SpaceTravel…

https://intoyourhead.ie/2025/10/29/shorts-170-what-happens-if-you-forget-what-the-outisde-of-your-spaceship-looks-like/

Optimism for interstellar exploration

There’s been some attention lately to a contest on designing an interstellar generation ship, a large scale ship that humans live in for generations while it crosses interstellar space to another solar system. As Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams notes, generation ships are a long time staple in science fiction, albeit with the common trope of the crew forgetting that they’re on a ship, or other things going horribly wrong.

But even before science fiction got into them, the generation ship was explored by early space exploration thinkers like Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Whenever I’m tempted to dismiss current thinking about how interstellar exploration might work, I think about people like Goddard, Tsiolkovsky, Walter Hohmann, and Hermann Oberth, guys working in the early 1900s who were able to predict a lot of the space age, just by carefully thinking through known physics.

Although I find it hard to be too enthusiastic for generation ships. It’s worth thinking about what might have to be true for us to consign a group of people, who would have to be highly skilled, to spending the rest of their lives and that of their descendants in a profoundly isolated environment. It seems like we wouldn’t want to do it unless a number of factors were true.

We would likely want to know that there was a desirable destination worth pursuing. So we probably would have already sent robotic probes to the destination and would have thorough information on the environment. Otherwise the chances of ship’s descendants finding worlds no better than the other planets in our solar system would be too high.

There would also need to be some kind of ideology or religion, some type of manifest destiny involved, something that convinces a society to spend the kind of resources that would be needed for building something like a mobile space colony and accelerating it away at a velocity that allows it to reach its destination in any kind of reasonable time frame. (The contest posits one percent lightspeed, which gets it to Proxima Centauri in four centuries, but would take over a millenia to get to somewhere like Tau Ceti.)

To me, the whole endeavor is easier to imagine, and much less ethically dire, if it isn’t actually a generation ship, but a long duration mission for humans who have achieved immortality, or at least much longer lifespans.

It’s worth noting that the energy to get that large a habitat to even one percent of light (3000 kilometers per second) would be staggering. Although we might imagine it being doable with several gigantic fusion rocket stages. In calculating things like this, we always run up against the tyranny of the rocket equation, which is pitiless in revealing that fuel requirements increase exponentially the heavier our payload and the faster we want to go. (And are even yet more exponentially worse if we need to use the same method to slow down at the destination.)

Earlier this year I did a post asking where the aliens are. At the end, I noted that one possibility to explain why they’re not here, is that maybe interstellar travel is impossible, even for robots. Putting that at the end of the post led a number of people to conclude that was my argument. But I’m actually pretty bullish on the idea of robotic interstellar exploration. (Although I do fear generation, long duration, or sleeper ships might be as good as it gets for sending biological humans.)

Years ago, Paul Gilster made a comment that stuck with me. He noted that the main obstacle to interstellar exploration is energy, but we have all the energy we need in the sun. The trick is to find a way to channel it.

One of the currently most promising options is to use a laser propelled light sail, where a ground based laser, or array of lasers, propel a light sail craft to some substantial percentage of lightspeed. The beauty of approaches like this is they get around the tyranny of the rocket equation by having the energy used for acceleration remain outside of the spacecraft. This is the method envisaged by Breakthrough Starshot.

There are also hybrid approaches involving beaming power to a spacecraft which uses it to accelerate propellant, but the added weight and acceleration times increase the amount of coordination needed and opportunities for things to go wrong.

Breakthrough Starshot is currently aiming for a flyby mission, but to get enough information to support a future human mission, the craft would have to slow down and be able to explore at its destination. Slowing down, which in space takes just as much energy as accelerating, is a non-trivial problem.

A possible solution comes from an old idea. The Bussard ramjet was originally conceived of as a way for a spacecraft to gather its fuel in flight from the interstellar medium using an electromagnetic ram scoop. The problem is that the scoop has been demonstrated to likely produce as much drag as thrust. However, it leads to the idea of using a magnetic sail to break against the interstellar medium, and maybe even switching to an electric sail in the final stages to get down to interplanetary speeds.

Of course, this means a multi-sail design, which adds considerable weight, requiring larger initial light sails and laser arrays. But if we put the lasers on Mercury (as Robert Forward suggested in one of his designs), where solar power would be much more plentiful, such laser arrays start to seem more plausible.

Looking further down the road, the rocket situation could be improved if we can find a way to harness antimatter, aside from black holes, the most dense energy storage mechanism currently known. Manufacturing antimatter is often thought to be the bottleneck here, but again, if the antimatter factories were in close orbit of the sun, utilizing the solar power available there, it might be easier to imagine it happening.

All of which is to say, I don’t think interstellar exploration is impossible. I do doubt it will be practical for humans for a long time. But we seem to have multiple potential approaches for doing it robotically. While some may fizzle along the way, it’s hard to imagine all of them failing.

At least that’s how it looks to me today. But maybe I’m missing something? Are there problems with these approaches I’m overlooking? Or solid reasons to be more optimistic for sending humans?

#Future #GenerationShip #Interstellar #interstellarExploration #Space #spaceExploration

Tiedemiehet julkaisivat suunnitelmat avaruusaluksesta, joka kuljettaisi 2400 ihmistä Alfa Centauriin

Matka kestäisi 400 vuotta, joten avaruusalus olisi ns. sukupolvialus, jossa vasta ensimmäisten matkustajien myöhäiset jälkeläiset olisivat he, jotka saavuttaisivat aluksen lopullisen kohteen.

https://dawn.fi/uutiset/2025/08/09/chrysalis-avaruusalus-alfa-centauri

#chrysalis #generationship #space #avaruus #tiede #uutiset #teknologia #tekniikka

As a Space person, I will digest this all at my leisure later. But I must address the reason why this competition has been brought to my attention, and that is once again you have not given Women pockets!
There are Women on that design team too, so I can only imagine the guys just shouted over them, or its some internalised Misogyny?
1/2

https://www.projecthyperion.org

#ProjectHyperion #Space #Patriarchy #Pockets #Starflight #GenerationShip

Short Story Review: Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953)

This is the 20th post in my series of vintage generation ship short fiction reviews. You are welcome to read and discuss along with me as I explore humanity’s visions of generational voyage. And thanks go out to all who have joined already. I also have compiled an extensive index of generation ship SF if you wish to track down my earlier reviews on the topic and any that you might want to read on your own.

Previously: Fred Saberhagen’s “Birthdays” (1976)

Next Up: TBD

• Uncredited cover for Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, ed. L. B. Cole (September 1953)

3.25/5 (Above Average)

Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953) first appeared in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, ed. L. B. Cole (September 1953). You can read it online here.

Anderson’s tale is a fascinating collision of two of my recurring interests in post-WWII science fiction: generation ships and organized labor. Due to my love of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost” (2002) and Brian W. Aldiss’ Non-Stop (variant title: Starship) (1959), I started a review series on generation ship short fiction in 2019. The series has languished recently as I am running out of pre-1985 depictions of the theme available in English to read. I read Anderson’s vision last year but could not muster a review. However, my recent focus on organized labor caused me to reread Anderson’s account of generational conflict, the working class experience, and the contours of power and government.

“The Troublemakers” ruminates on the type of society that should exist in the intermediary generations between departure and arrival. Some authors speculate that stasis (often achieved via religion or indoctrinating ritual) or decadence (the loss of knowledge about the voyage) would set in the generations after departure from Earth. Anderson, on the other hand, examines the role of deliberate instability to combat stasis and decadence in the grand colonizing scheme. Recommended for diehard fans of the history of generation ship stories (me!) or Poul Anderson completists.

The Nature of the Voyage

The Pioneer, a vast generation ship six miles long and two miles wide, replete with massive parks, hydroponics bays, and entertainment facilities sets off from Earth to Centauri. Only partially constructed in order to give the crew something to do for the first generation, the original crew of 200 hundred men and women is planned to rise to 10k by the time of arrival.1

The story follows the youthful Ensign Evan Friday, a rising officer in the Astrogation caste (“the aristocracy of the aristocracy”), who starts to wonder about the corrupt nature of his world: “Eighty years later, what do we have? An unending succession of tyrannies, revolutions, tensions, hatreds, corruptions—all the social evils which Earth so painfully overcome, reborn between the stars” (3). He’s accused by the Captain and his Council, a representative from each of the major factions, on the “flimsiest tissue of fabrications” (3) of gross misconduct and is stripped of “all title, honor, and privilege” (4). Instead of execution, he’s assigned a common crewman position with the Engineering section (4). He must put aside his snooty elitism and learn to excel in the world of the common laborer. Friday, who yearns for a ship refocused on the grandeur of its mission and cured of its corruption, slowly rises up from the bottom. He befriends fellow workers. He attends union meetings. He watches the demagoguery of the union representative Wilson. He sees how power functions from another perspective.

Eventually, as tensions threaten to explode between different groups, Evan falls in with the rising correlate of the American middle class–small-scale artisans and business owners–who begin to organize their own Guilds. With Evan’s leadership, the Guilds start to flex their muscles and angle for their voice to be heard. And eventually Evan must learn the true shape of things.

Final Thoughts

Due to rise of fascism abroad in the intra-war period, there was a resurgence of interest among psychologists in the validity of crowd psychology.2 In this formulation, the public manifests an opinion that is a “latent disease state, subject to turbulent infection at unpredictable moments.”3 Far from a uniquely foreign occurrence, psychologists on the Homefront identified similarly troubling tendencies.4 Fearful of similar unrest at home, psychologists in the post-WWII moment positioned themselves as the experts needed design “democratic personalities and predict emotional surges in national and international tension.”5 In short, psychologists defended social engineering.

I bring this historical context up as the final conclusion of “The Troublemakers” (1953) directly echoes this sense that psychologists are the guarantees of a more socially progressive and stable future–socially engineering must occur. Anderson’s suspicion of traditional societal organizing institutions and concepts–unions, guilds, class, etc.6–echoes 50s views on the growing centrality of the expert in informing policy. Anderson deliberately ignores mentioning institutional religion. Instead, the idealism of the frontier liminal space that must be conquered takes on an almost religious imperative and forms the ideological thrust of the story. After World War II, psychologists saw themselves as guiding America towards a more democratic future. In parallel, psychologists in Anderson’s story socially engineer a system to contain and encourage particular types of behaviors that will culminate in a generation suitable to colonize.

In addition, Anderson’s take on unions echoes some strands of contemporary 50s criticism. As I’ve discussed at length previously and reproduce here in broad strokes, during the Great Depression there was broad consensus among leftist thinkers that the labor movement would lead to radical change. The Second World War and the economic recovery shattered that consensus.7 They struggled to grapple with an economic system they had expected to collapse and the lack of interest in socialism within American unions. Within unions, the political and social transformation of capitalism became secondary to preserving their organizations and maintaining a harmonious relationship with industry.8 On the right, American corporate powers and their conservative congressional allies unleashed a “propaganda campaign” against the labor movement.9

Where does Poul Anderson fit into this political scenario? Unlike H. Beam Piper’s “Day of the Moron” (1951), Anderson’s story isn’t reactionary or alarmist in a visceral sense despite his critical take on unions. He describes unions (in the story they organize lower class workers) and guilds (described as more middle-class) as an important means to protect against monopolistic oppression. However, unions leaders like Wilson–characterized with crass physical cliches like obesity to indicate his corruption–utilize demagoguery to control the masses. Evan Friday’s coming-of-age sojourn amongst the lower classes does cause him to see Wilson’s manipulation and dismiss the Communist views of many union members. The radical potential of unions will simply lead to more cycles of oppression under a Stalinist dictatorship. Unions might have immediate value in their desire to protect the worker from oppression or advocate for a previously ignored voice but the expert psychologist must channel policy to heal the larger population. Friday leaves with a deep appreciation of the working-class struggle. Anderson positions him as an empathetic leader who will defer to the intellectual elite.

As a literary experience, I’m not convinced of the merit of “The Troublemakers” (1951). As a means to extrapolate from contemporary 50s politics within the distilled world of a generation ship, Anderson provides a fascinating range of political ruminations that ultimately demonstrate his deep distrust of “large, encompassing systems,”10 belief in the dangerous potential of crowd psychology, and skepticism that there is a true political system.11 Anderson conjures a version of a sociological view popularized in 1956 by C. Wright Mills that a “power elite”–a web of industrial, military, and corporate interests–dictates from behind the scenes. Unlike Mills, as long as the power elite are guided by experts who will make sure humans can conquer the new frontier (and minimize human casualties), he’s okay with it.

Notes

1. I found this detail–partial construction–fascinating. While not discussed in detail, the implication is that the crew could complete large sections of the interior to suit their interests and needs over the generations. This gives the opportunity for a laboring class to be firmly entrenched in the ship. ↩︎
2. See Ch. 3, “The Dilemmas of Democratic Morale” of Ellen Herman’s brilliant The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (1995), 48-81. ↩︎
3. Herman, 55. ↩︎
4. Herman examines numerous psychological studies of the US military. ↩︎
5. Herman, 81. ↩︎
6. There’s substantial scholarship on the image of the American West transposed into the future. For example, Carl Abbott’s Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006), which does not mention Anderson’s story. Anderson’s story is a bog standard, but illuminative, example. If you’re interested in revisionist takes on the West in SF that would enrich Abbott’s take substantially, check out Craig Strete’s corpus of works typified by “When They Find You” (1977) and William Tenn’s “Eastward Ho!” (1958). ↩︎
7. Jeffrey W. Coker’s Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma (2002), 51. ↩︎
8. See Ch. 19, “Retrenchment, Cold War, and Consolidation, 1946-1955,” of Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin’s Labor in America: A History, 9th edition (2017), 303-320. ↩︎
9. See Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994). She describes both a local and a national campaign. ↩︎
10. See Anderson’s obituary for a brief discussion of his politics. ↩︎
11. For more on his politics, check out this interesting article. ↩︎

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #bookReview #bookReviews #bookReviews #books #fiction #generationShip #poulAnderson #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceships

As if the idea of a generation ship is not scary enough, add some horror. Really cool world and story telling. The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown. https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/44a64f90-a19f-4443-a123-d1c2f93c1c93 #horror #generationship #bookreview #books

[ Generation Ship by Michael Mammay is a riveting interstellar epic ]
https://winteriscoming.net/2023/11/01/book-review-generation-ship-by-michael-mammay/ #GenerationShip #SciFi #Book

I have thought a bit about the old concept of a generation ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship): Who would want to live on such a ship? Which people would consent to be its first crew?

You live in a small community, and after the ship has started and the contact to Earth breaks down, nothing at all happens at the outside of the ship. If you belong to the first generation(s), you will not even be able to see the target of your journey. So everything you can do is to live in this restricted place, keep the systems running and educate your children who might live to see the target. (Or their children will reach it.) Who would like to live this way?

One possibility I could think of are members of fundamentalist religious communities, who would like to have a chance to organise their life in their own way. But they would need to be affine to technology and science in order to run their ship efficiently.

Or maybe people from developing countries that have a good education but no chance to an appropriate job: They might see a life on a generation ship as an improvement to their current situation. (Or maybe not, as long as they still expect a chance to improve their life on Earth?)

#GenerationShip #ScienceFiction #SpaceFlight

Looks like word of our book is getting out! Here are details if you missed it: https://popculthq.com/comics-take-a-trip-on-the-dodona-w-bechko-luckerts-the-space-between/ #comics #SciFi #generationship

#GenerationShip: A Thousand Waves

Today, we have made history. We have arrived in the Rahl star system. Our teachers said that this would complete the 5000th wave. ...

#SciFi, #HardSciFi, #Spacetravel, #GenerationShip

@scifi

Full Post: https://octahedron.world/storylines/fourth-wave/09-thousand-waves?c=mst

#GenerationShip: New Home

The crews of the two ships formed a committee to plan the settlements when they approached their new star system. Some of the young people became experts in fields they would need. The committee was dominated by them.

The first task was to send out fast probes and search for the perfect habitat and the joy was huge when they actually found a suitable planet. The next mission was to send neuros and modellers to build homes and terraforming stations.

Also, they directly started developing plant types that could enrich the atmosphere quickly with enough oxygen to breathe. With a bit of luck, already the next generation, the children who had been born onboard the generation ships, could breathe outside the sealed habitats.

When they arrived, only the committee and a small group of pioneers moved onto the planet's surface. The rest stayed comfortably on board. Some of them waited several years until they decided to move to their new home.

@scifi

#GenerationShip: The Trip

Ten thousand teenagers went on a journey from the Procyon system into their new life in the system of Luyten's Star.

As the journey was supposed to take 12 years, the ship actually was their home. It contained everything you need to live but also to prepare for the important task to build a fresh civilisation on another planet. There were bars and restaurants, entertainment stations as well as science and educational facilities.

The journey was split into three phases. A six months acceleration phase at 1g where they profited from their light sails and laser pulses, a long drifting phase in which gravity was generated by rotating habitats and an about 1 year long decelerating phase toward the end of the journey.

Many families had already been founded onboard the ship. This was explicitly encouraged. While the journey started with 12.880 passengers, there were 15.791 who arrived in Luyten's system.

Now it was time to find their new home.

@scifi

#GenerationShip: To Luyten's Star

There was a giant party in the Procyon colony when the ships were inaugurated. Both cities, Loton and Racoon, have built redundant generation ships to perfectly safeguard their passage to Luyten's star, a tiny but promising star system that is only one lightyear away. A 12 years journey.

Now the detailed plans for the selection process started, just a year ahead of the departure. 10.000 adolescents between 16 and 20 were selected as passengers along with 2.000 experts responsible for ship, supplies, education and coordination.

The special training program for the chosen youngsters began the day after the inauguration. Those were the people that were supposed to form a new society from scratch. So they had to be prepared. Everyone got an individual trainer assigned. They went through terraforming strategies, behavioural training, exercises to adapt to different gravity and flight tests.

After a year, they were ready to embark.

#scifi @scifi

#Generationship: The Third Wave

The chain continued and most of the projects that planted seeds in our universe have thrived. Especially the missions that found habitable planets grew rapidly and are on the brink of finishing a successful terraforming process.

The third wave has anchored in the Procyon system and built their habitats in shelter caves deep inside two suitable rocky planets. But also they could create a balanced and well off society.

Caused by the circumstances, they became masters of the crafts they needed. They build the most stable caves even in the oddest rock, they developed a beautiful architecture style especially for their transparent structures outside those caves and they are experts in geothermic power plants.

And now they are almost finished with their generation ships. As there are two colonies, they've constructed two sister ships to balance the odds.

#scifi @scifi

#Generationship Alpha Centauri

Our neighbour solar system was quite a hostile place. Neither planet nor any moon was suitable for terraforming. The expeditions of the generation ship took ten years to find an appropriate place for a settlement.

They have chosen a rocky moon circling a calm planet around Alpha Centauri A. The moon had many connected cave systems and perfect exposition to the light of its star. They called it Bianor and from then on they were the Bianorians.

It took five more years until the first larger group moved into their habitats in the caves and a whole generation until everything was settled and not provisional anymore.

Then the new colony started its Sagittarius program again, set up a local interplanetary fleet and later started to dis- and re-assemble the huge generation starship for the next iteration.

500 years later the colony was thriving with 50 million people. They colonized a second planet, Cheiron.

#scifi @scifi

The Generation Ship

The Sagittarius Foundation was successful. Much earlier than expected, in the year 2730, a huge starship was ready to set lightsail towards Alpha Centauri.

The vessel was gigantic. There was space for an initial population of 50.000 young people and 10.000 specialists of all ages and knowledge. A small, fully working society.

The ship could reach 8% of the speed of light. The journey included an acceleration, a drift and a deceleration phase and was supposed to take 50 years in total. The boarding generation would already reach their retirement age when they arrived at their destination. And another or even a third generation was supposed to be born on the ship along the way.

Except for some minor technical issues, the mission was a success and reached our neighbour star system in the year 2784. But Earth, the home planet would hear news about it not before 2788 and celebrated with a huge worldwide event.

#scifi #generationship @scifi