News from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies

In a new article, Adam Hibberd and Andreas M. Hein analyse how the interstellar object ‘Oumaumua could be reached via laser sails. They provide a trajectory analysis and the operations of the beaming infrastructure.

Thermodynamic limits to economic growth on Earth – Can space save us? This new paper argues that continued economic growth on Earth will hit a thermodynamic limit within the third millenium, if economic activities and energy consumption cannot be decoupled. The maximum size would be up to 7000 times the current one. An in-space economy […]

i4is concept for a near-term self-replicating probe – The potential to drastically increase the efficiency of space exploration!https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2005/2005.12303.pdf. Beautifully illustrated by Adrian Mann!

The ISU – i4is Interstellar Module ended today with four awesome presentations on world ship topics, each one venturing into areas no human has visited before! A big thank you to Prof. Chris Welch and the amazing MSS20 students who worked very hard on this for the last two weeks! Also, thank you to the […]

Thanks to Prof. Chris Welch, International Space University, for the opportunity to co-deliver the Interstellar Module to ISU students this year again! We deliver two-weeks of lectures and hands-on projects on world ships! Members of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies have access to video recordings of the lectures that the i4is crew presented. The videos […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]