#digitalphotography #photomanipulation #doubleexposure #weepingwillow #StorageUnit #corridor #hillsboro #portland #surreal #sciencefiction #mutations #lostgeneration #generationship #nogenerativeai

Mutant Corridor on a Lost Generation Ship

Writer Fuel: A proposed spacecraft could carry up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

https://www.limfic.com/2025/12/31/writer-fuel-engineers-design-a-generation-ship/

#WriterFuel #StoryIdeas #GenerationShip

En el blog os cuento unas cositas sobre el concepto de nave generacional

https://pagarcia.es/nave-generacional

#navegeneracional #generationship #cienciaficcion #navesespaciales

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

What Happens if you forget what the Outside 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/

This is a #videogame #postmortem for a #space #detective #scifi game I like caledd #BetweenHorizons. It was made by the company that made #lacuna

I love the style and the themes it has because this mystery detective whodunnit is set on a #generationship
https://digitales.games/blog/devlog/between-horizons-post-mortem

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