About: Generation Ships   Sponge Permalink

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If the laws of physics don't allow Faster-Than-Light Travel, it's going to take a long time to colonize the stars. If you can't get close enough to lightspeed to take advantage of Time Dilation, don't have the medical technology for functional Immortality, and you don't want to resort to suspended animation/hibernation (or, in more recent SF, Brain Uploading), you're not going to see the destination yourself -- it may be your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their... You get the idea. Has nothing to do with fandom Shipping older and younger characters.

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  • Generation Ships
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  • If the laws of physics don't allow Faster-Than-Light Travel, it's going to take a long time to colonize the stars. If you can't get close enough to lightspeed to take advantage of Time Dilation, don't have the medical technology for functional Immortality, and you don't want to resort to suspended animation/hibernation (or, in more recent SF, Brain Uploading), you're not going to see the destination yourself -- it may be your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their... You get the idea. Has nothing to do with fandom Shipping older and younger characters.
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  • If the laws of physics don't allow Faster-Than-Light Travel, it's going to take a long time to colonize the stars. If you can't get close enough to lightspeed to take advantage of Time Dilation, don't have the medical technology for functional Immortality, and you don't want to resort to suspended animation/hibernation (or, in more recent SF, Brain Uploading), you're not going to see the destination yourself -- it may be your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their... You get the idea. This doesn't have to wind up as a City in a Bottle, but frequently does (and did in what is perhaps the first story to use popularize this trope, Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe"). Several examples of Generation Ships are listed on that page. Generation Ships are great settings for sociological comment: the author has a nice sealed pressure vessel to play out their theories or critique existing cultures. A Generation Ship is almost always a Starship Luxurious -- it's got to sustain the equivalent of an entire ecosystem, whether it does so with rivets-and-bolts machinery or with an actual terrarium-style recreation of a full-fledged habitat. Sometimes, a Generation Ship doesn't have a destination -- it's an interstellar trade ship, connecting isolated colonies or installing the Hyperspace Gateways that will allow FTL expansion and exploitation, in which case the populace are usually Space People. Occasionally, the generation ship will arrive to discover that someone developed an FTL drive while they were en route and the world they were going to colonize already has a few million people on it. Has nothing to do with fandom Shipping older and younger characters. Examples (Spoilers en masse ahead)
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