Generation Ships: Difference between revisions

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 [[Human Popsicle|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.

 

 

[[Generation Ships]] are great settings for sociological comment: the author has [[Closed Circle|a nice sealed pressure vessel]] to play out their theories or critique existing cultures.

* ''[[Megazone 23]]'' (the first two installments).

* The official backstory for ''[[Turn a Gundam (Anime)|Turn a Gundam]]'' says that {{spoiler|there are no space colonies because they were all converted into [[Generation Ships]] and left the Earth Sphere.}}

* City 7 of ''[[Macross 7]]'' was a rare example of a faster than light generational ship.

** Macross in general has these, with humanity deliberately spreading itself out to avoid species-ending disasters like the end of the original series. ''[[Macross Plus]]'' is actually the only series set after the original without one.

== Film ==

 

* In ''[[Pandorum]]'', the Elysium becomes this after one of the crewmembers {{spoiler|kills the other awake crewmembers, awakens most of the [[Human Popsicle]] colonists and tries to play God with them. The colonists turn into ravenous monsters by a retrovirus designed to adapt them to a new environment and live aboard for nearly a millennium}}.

 

 

* ''Endless Universe'', by [[Marion Zimmer Bradley]], is an example of "Generation Ship Planting FTL Gates".

** Ironically, the people who stayed on the supposedly doomed planet die from an infection spread by unsanitized telephones, as the B Ark included all the telephone sanitizers.

* In Norman Spinrad's ''Riding The Torch'', the remains of the human race in its entirety had to leave Earth after a nuclear cataclysm, flying Bussard ramjet ships ("torchships") in search of a habitable planet. Slowly they use the resources gained from the void by Bussard engines to develop an entire civilization under the guise of an ever expanding fleet of torchships.

* ''[[Orphans Of The Sky]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]] has a massive generation ship whose inhabitants have forgotten their origins and fallen into barbarism, yet [[Ragnarok Proofing|the ship still functions after centuries of neglect]] (albeit with an assist from [[Cargo Cult]] maintenance procedures). Guess they don't make them like they will have used to.

** The ''New Frontiers'' in ''[[Methuselahs Children|Methuselah's Children]]'' was a Generation Ship which was later upgraded with a FTL Drive.

* The most extreme example -- in [[Larry Niven]]'s ''[[Ring World]]'', the Fleet of Worlds is the Puppeteers' ''entire planetary system'' converted into a generation ship to flee the galaxy.

** The Pak also did this with when they colonized Earth and the Ringworld itself.

*** In addition to that ultra-long journey (half a million years), the Pak have ships that ''would'' be generation ships for a species with less incredible lifespans - Phssthpok flies a ship for 1200 years ([[Time Dilation|ship's time]]), ''alone''.

* ''Second Genesis'' has a [[Living Ship]] called Yggdrasil that takes a journey between galaxies; it would normally be called a generation ship, except its inhabitants have discovered [[Immortality]], and so a few centuries of relativistic travel is not much of a burden.

* In [[Alastair Reynolds]]' ''Chasm City'', the planet of Sky's Edge was settled by 5 {{spoiler|(only 3 made it)}} generation ships traveling at 6% lightspeed. There are at least 4 generations on the ship. {{spoiler|Also, a cold war forms between the ships, due to scarcity of resources. Then a full blown war on the planet.}}

* Rob Grant's ''Colony'' deconstructs this somewhat. Various systems go wrong (notably the eugenics program determining who is allowed to mate with whom, and the career-allocation system), so the later generations are hopelessly inbred, illiterate and unqualified for their jobs.

** Not quite a deconstruction as things going horribly wrong is the ''normal'' state of this trope.

* The planet Martine was settled by one of these in ''[[Crest of the Stars]]'' and the Abh's original home was one as well before they cracked the FTL issue.

* Generation ships (called longliners) are used to carry messages and trade between planets in [[Frederik Pohl]] and C. M. Kornbluth's "Search the Sky". They're pretty horrid: while they don't ''quite'' forget their mission, the people on board end up suffering fairly severe mental retardation (it's not too clear why, possibly a lack of intellectual stimulation?), and they're kept from overpopulation by massive infanticide. But ''every'' place in that book is in horrible shape: it's a horribly [[Darker and Edgier]] world before it was popular. The longliners appear to use ''liquid fuel rockets'', which is what the Saturn V rockets used; in 1970, with a millionth of the distance a Longliner travels.

* In Brian Aldiss' ''Non-Stop'': A plague on a generation ship reduces the passengers to barbarism: they lose all idea of who they are or even what a spaceship ''is''. The bioengineered plants go into overdrive, turning the ship into a jungle, increasing the sense of obscuration and isolation. The reader's first clue as to what's going on is when the jungle turns out to have bulkheads.

* Non-space example: in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', the khepri residents of New Crobuzon are descended from refugees who'd fled a mysterious disaster on their native continent. As their ramshackle ships took decades to cross the ocean, and thousands of the refugees died en route, some khepri vessels technically invoke this trope by having only ship-born crew members left on board when they reached land.

* [[Harry Harrison]]'s ''Captive Universe'': A Generation Ship with a seamless environment is launched: by design the highly repressive, extremely stable [[Mayincatec|Aztec]] cities onboard believe themselves to be in an inaccessible river valley. The ship tenders are if anything more rigid and religious: an extraordinary asceticism rules their lives and repairs are sacred rituals.

* The title species in [[Alan Dean Foster]]'s ''Quozl'' seek out new habitable worlds in these.

* Simon Hawke's ''The Whims of Creation'' is set on one, generations after humanity has left the [[Earth-That-Was]].

* Common FTL travel powerful enough to at least get around one's own galaxy makes these relatively uncommon in the ''[[Perry Rhodan]]'' universe, but they're not unknown. Ships (and space stations) intended for ''really'' extended missions, such as some undertaken by mortal helpers of the setting's [[Powers That Be]], may be designed to fit the trope, and suitable vessels have turned into this purely by accident, as happened to the SOL when its cosmic odyssey dragged out longer than expected and the shipborn generation started to have their own ideas about what uses their 'home' should be put to. Stretching the definition of "ship" to the limit, a ''major'' significant example would be the cosmic swarms, literally mobile star clusters whose multi-species 'crews' quite naturally were born, lived, and died on the worlds orbiting said stars while going about their assigned task of aiding the spread of intelligence throughout the universe.

* [[Andrey Livadny]]'s novel ''Ark'' is set aboard the title ship, a Moon-sized (literally, as it is the hollowed-out Moon with engines attached) ship built by humans to fly around the galaxy and collect samples of intelligent life to eventually bring back home. These "samples" were put into special habitats modified to the conditions on their homeworlds, even including artificial suns. There was also a human habitat for the families of the crew. Then an onboard cataclysm killed most of the senior officers and damaged many cybernetic systems, isolating the habitats from the command module and each other. Millennia later, the ship is falling apart with disrepair, as the human descendants have regressed into a near-Medieval state and forgot their origins. The only hope is a boy who has been a [[Human Popsicle]] since the cataclysm and is the only one who can regain access to the command module and direct the ship to a habitable planet. The ending reveals a possible {{spoiler|[[Stable Time Loop]], as the planet they find is eerily similar to Earth}}.

** Also, cats have [[Evolutionary Levels|evolved]] into intelligent humanoids.

** Interestingly, this is one of the few novels by Livadny that don't include some form of [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]].

* In François Bordes's novel ''Fleeing Earth'' (''Terre en fuite'', written under the pen name Francis Carsac), the [[Nested Story]] reveals that the people of the Second Civilization of humans (after most of us die out in another Ice Age) discover that the Sun is about to go nova. Since they can't build enough ships to fit everyone from Earth and Venus (terraformed and settled), they instead decide to move ''both planets'' by building giant "space magnets" at the poles. The original plan is to move them to the Outer Solar System, hide behind Jupiter, and return once the Sun settles down. However, they discover that the Sun will not return to its yellow dwarf state after the explosion and have to move to a new system. Thus both planets become giant generation ships, although the interstellar journeys only take several decades thanks to the "space magnets" accelerating the planets to 80% of the speed of light.

* The backstory of Kevin J. Anderson's ''[[The Saga of Seven Suns]]'' involves 11 generational ships sent out into space. None of them reach their destinations, however. Nine are found by an alien race who use their FTL technology to take them to habitable planets. Another ends up colonizing whatever asteroids and other non-terrestrial environments they can find becoming Space Gypsies. The other one is assumed to be lost until it is discovered that {{spoiler|the supposedly friendly Ildirians that rescued the others kept the last one to do breeding experiments with and have been raping generations of human women to experiment on their hybrids}}

* In "Thirteen for Centaurus" by J. G. Ballard, the action takes place on a generation ship {{spoiler|but not really. The main character figures out it's all a scam when he sees supplies being trucked in.}}

* Molly Glass' "The Dazzle of Day" a generation ship populated by Quakers nears a system where they could possibly settle. Much of the action of the novel deals with the decision of whether to stop here or go on. Since all decisions are made by the Quaker practice of Consensus, this is a complex task.

* In [[Empire From the Ashes]], the planetoid-class ships have perfectly good FTL that can get them around to most places in less than a year, but they're still set up as generation ships because they oftentimes go on ''long'' tours of duty and it's considered necessary for the health of the community to have children born and growing up as they would be on a planet. Of course, being what they are, these ships have crews in the hundreds of thousands and provision for natural increase up to doubling.

* In ''[[Liaden Universe|The Tomorrow Log]]'' by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, {{spoiler|a [[Generation Ship]] has actually forgotten that it was supposed to colonize a planet and has become a flying [[Cult Colony]]}}.

* The short story "[http://www.wagar.org.uk/?page_id=553 Schism]," set in the ''[[Elite]]'' universe, examines what happens when a homegrown [[Cult Colony]] inside a Generation Ship that has been out of contact with human civilization for centuries encounters another derelict vessel in the void of space.

** Which got lucky and reached an inhabitable planet complete with primitive [[Human Aliens]] inhabitants within a year or so.

*** It was the same planet that the team had been warped to in the pilot to receive their powers and was the home of the team's resident [[Human Alien]]. So, not so much luck as destiny.

** And "By Any Other Name" had a faster-than-light generation ship that the Kelvans used for the immense journey between galaxies.

*** [[Fridge Logic|Silly of them not to have gone ''just slower than light'' and have made the trip in a (subjective) day.]]

*** [[Fridge Brilliance|If they had gone slower than light, it would have taken them over 2 million years to get to an Andromeda Galaxy that had been uninhabitable since the 123rd century due to increasing radiation levels.]]

** Janeway often wonders whether "Voyager" will become such a ship itself: the original return estimate is 70 years, after all. {{spoiler|they make it in seven}}

* The Magog Worldship on ''[[Andromeda]]''.

* The Australian series ''Silversun'' used this. As the journey to the new planet would take many years, most of the crew were adolescents and teenagers, so that there would be at least some crew still around when they got to the planet. A lot more people are in cryogenic stasis.

** The Novus civilization, founded by the crew of the Destiny over 2000 years before the crew actually encounters Novus ([[Timey-Wimey Ball|long story]]), dedicated its resources to building a fleet of ships for its millions of citizens so that they could evacuate their dying world. They will reach their destination in a few hundred years (in stark contrast to the 10 days Destiny needs to cover the same distance with its FTL).

* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S31 E02 The Beast Below|The Beast Below]]" has ''the entire United Kingdom'' (minus Scotland) on a single spaceship, searching for a new home after the Earth becomes uninhabitable. The discovery of just how this massive ship is travelling through space with the engines apparently off forms the main mystery of the episode.

** Much earlier, First Doctor serial ''The Ark'', had the title spacecraft serving as both a generational ship for its crew (of both humans and subservient aliens), and as a [[Human Popsicle]]-stand for the remaining billions of humans and subservient aliens, since a ship that could carry both species in their entirety would've been far too massive to build (or move).

* The ''[[Space: 1999]]'' episode 'Mission of the Darians'. The crew of Moonbase Alpha respond to a distress call from a 20 mile long ship on a 900-year voyage. {{spoiler|They discover that an accident a century earlier has wrecked most of the ship and its passengers have reverted to barbarism, except for an elite who are keeping themselves alive by using the others for transplant surgery.}}

 

 

== Music ==

 

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* The entire world of ''[[Phantasy Star]] 3'' takes place on one of these. Later, in ''Phantasy Star 4'', the heroes find the wreckage of one such ship that had fallen from the sky.

** To elaborate a little bit, these things were basically planetary escape pods, sent out when Parma exploded. Didn't go too well, though - some got lost, some were caught in the explosion and destroyed.. the one mentioned above was crippled in the escape and suffered the nasty fate of getting stuck in a decaying orbit around Motavia.

* According to the manual, you can occasionally run across these in the original ''[[Elite]]''; however, that's the ''only'' place they exist in that game. In the expandable remake ''[[Oolite]]'' on the other hand, you can ''really'' run across them with the right [[Game Mod|OXP]].

* In ''[[Mass Effect]]'' the entire quarian species dwells in a massive flotilla consisting of thousands of this trope due to being driven off their original planet. The fleet isn't going anywhere in particular, but the trope still fits.

** In fact, the Migrant Fleet is actually the largest fleet in known space. They just don't have any planets where they could off-load their civilians.

* Arguably, the planet in ''[[Might and Magic]]'' 7 has turned into one of these: They {{spoiler|lost contact with the [[Progenitor Race|Ancients]] (in an event known as the Silence) and }}have regressed to roughly medieval levels of technology, {{spoiler|although some ancient tech still exists. And is really dangerous}}.

* Building one of these and sending it to Alpha Centauri is one of the ways to win in ''[[Civilization]]''.

== Western Animation ==

 

** Subverted in that it wasn't ''meant'' to be. The humans were supposed to be aboard for just a few years, while the Wall-E units cleaned up the earth. The Buy-n-Large president, however, deemed the Earth permanently doomed and ordered the Autopilot to keep them in space forever. He turned out to be wrong, but it's 700 years before the first plant life reappears on the planet.

 

{{reflist}}