World ships are hypothetical, large, self-contained spacecraft for crewed interstellar travel, taking centuries to reach other stars. Due to their crewed nature, size, and long trip times, the feasibility of world ships faces an additional set of challenges compared to interstellar probes. Despite their emergence in the 1980s, most of these topics remain unexplored. This […]
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i4is World Ships featured in Medium OneZero
We are proud to announce that our research on world ships has now been featured in an article on OneZero, “Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity” by Corin Faife. The article generated a stream of other features such as on Futurism. From the article: There’s no principal obstacle from a physics […]
Project Lyra featured in Wired
Our new Project Lyra research was featured in Wired magazine. Project Lyra assesses the feasibility of missions to interstellar objects such as ‘Oumuamua and Borisov.
David A. Hardy – AI interstellar probe paintings
We are proud to have legendary space artist David A. Hardy among our ranks. He created two wonderful paintings of AI interstellar probes, inspired by the paper by Andreas Hein & Stephen Baxter published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The probe’s characteristic features are large solar panels at the front for generating […]
i4is World Ship journal article published
We are proud to announce that our article on world ships, huge, self-contained generation ships, has now been published in Acta Futura, the journal of the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency. The article provides a concise overview of the state of research on world ships and generation ships and touches on the […]
Newsletter: i4is Annual Report, mini-research projects and more…
The i4is Annual Report 2019 has just been published for all members to read. We also have a list of short research projects that you can work on.
Freeman Dyson passed away
With great sadness, we received the message that Freeman Dyson has passed away on the 28th of February 2020. He was 96 years old. A distinguished physicist, Freeman Dyson was a member of the i4is Advisory Council for many years. Many obituaries have already appeared. In the following, we would like to honor Freeman by […]
Principium 28
Issue 28 of Principium, the quarterly publication of the Initiative and Institute for Interstellar Studies is now published.