The Long Lonely Void
Generation ships fascinate me. The distance between Earth and the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is about four lightyears. This Space News article reports that with our current generation of spacecraft it would take over 148,000 years for humans to travel there. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft might get there in 80,000 years; it took them 40 years to cross the boundary of our solar system.
Until we crack the Warp Drive or wormholes, generation ships are one of the theoretical ways to travel beyond our solar system that wouldn’t break the laws of physics. Of course were talking travel on the time scale of the history of our species, homo sapiens, which have been around for about 200,000 years. Imagine spending essentially the time it took humans to leave Africa, migrate around the world, live in the Stone Age for a long time, and in the home stretch of the journey, invent civilization. That’s a long ass time to be out in space.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." Credit: NASA
That time is what’s radical about generation ships. So much could change in the intervening years. Red Dwarf wasn’t wrong that it’s enough time for a cat to evolve into a walking, talking being of equal intelligence to humans! (Okay, maybe a bit of a stretch 😻… or is it?) The point is that a lot of the storytelling in science fiction focuses on the civilization at the end point, not the civilization evolving during the journey. You’ve got humanity in a relatively tiny box, knocking up against each other, hoping they’ve got enough genetic diversity not to turn into cats, and trying not to kill each other on a car ride without any gas stations for fresh snacks.
How does a society survive that crucible? How do humans live without ever seeing the sun?
You look at our own history and how much people and culture change over the course of fifty years, much less a hundred, much less the two thousand we’ve had since we mark the Common Era. Then multiply that kind of change times to get to 80,000 years? We really will be cats!
In The Dementia I waved my magic sci-fi wand and made the journey only 1000 years, and even that seems like a bogglingly long time to me. Plenty of time for cannibals to rise and fall, for a small pocket of scientists to turn into badass militants, for a priesthood of memory to rewrite history in service to the new godhood that has arisen (cats of course). There’s all sorts of possibilities.
