Generation ship

A generation ship is a concept for an interstellar spacecraft, which is further distances for bridging takes several generations to reach the distant goal. Another name for this concept is Space Ark ( as a reference to Noah's Ark).

History of Ideas

• Bernal Sphere

• O'Neill colonies

• Stanford Torus

The idea of ​​the generation starship goes back to considerations of the physicist John Desmond Bernal in 1929 and has been since the 1940s as a recurring motif in science fiction literature, especially the space opera known. In the 1970s, NASA involved the idea in future studies. The long distances and long travel times of interstellar flight are to be handled by a space ship on which a group of people live over several generations and can propagate.

Many science fiction authors focus on the development of social relationships on board such vessels over very long periods of time, as opposed to other types of space opera, that are designed primarily as an adventure novels.

The idea of ​​generation spacecraft emerged from the problem that a spacecraft to reach even the nearest star systems with the current technical conditions only after centuries or millennia. Not just science fiction writers, scientists have speculated about the possibility of generation spaceships. It was suggested to use the 1929, designed by the U.S. physicist John Desmond Bernal Bernal sphere for interstellar spaceflight. 1952 suggested the physicist LR Shepherd, undermine an asteroid and equipped with a nuclear propulsion as to use Space Ark, while other proposals describe variants of the O'Neill Cylinder.

To populate hypothetical, colonization mature, distant planets, it requires a well-educated, mixed group of settlers. Frequently spoken by a population of over 1000 people, in order to avoid genetic erosion ( inbreeding in humans).

There are many problems when you think about the implementation of generation spaceships. So have artificial gravity, energy, fuel and food can be procured from renewable over several centuries. The entire system must also remain functional for a long time, or alternatively by the crew periodically maintained in. Other problems lie in the psychology of people.

No one can foresee how such a civilization socially developed and what it may cause a malfunction. The question of motivation for such a trip has to be questioned. Should the earth be uninhabitable, would the Mars closer than vanishing point of a select few. A journey with a generation spaceship is thus conceivable rather than volunteer project of idealists.

History of Literature

The Canadian SF writer Laurence Manning in 1934 probably taken in his story The Living Galaxy the subject first. For the first time large became famous for the design of the generation ship in the two short stories published in 1941 Universe and Common Sense by Robert A. Heinlein, which he put together in 1963 for the novel The Long Journey (English Orphans of the Sky). Heinlein portrays life on board in such a generation ship, the rudderless drives through space since a failed mutiny. The descendants of the original crew live only in a small habitable area of the ship, which they hold for the entire universe.

This concept, in which the crew of the spaceship generation has forgotten that the colonization of a planet is the goal of the journey, and keeps the space ship itself for the world is also being taken up by many other authors. An early example of the 1957 written by Wolfgang Jeschke narrative world is no horizon. In the Star Trek episode For the World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky (1968, dt The stray planet ) and the short-lived television series The Starlost (1973 ) we prepared the topic also for television.