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 perspective,” Andreas Hein, executive director of the nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies — an education and research institute focused on expediting travel to other stars — tells me in a call from Paris. “We know that people can live in isolated areas, like islands, for hundreds or thousands of years; we know that in principle people can live in an artificial ecosystem like Biosphere2. It’s a question of scaling things up. There are a lot of challenges, but no fundamental principle of physics is violated.
In his research, Andreas Hein of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies estimates that the world economy, if it continues to grow at current rates, would be able to cover the cost of building a generation ship sometime between the year 2500 and 3000. And it’s not only a matter of time: We most likely couldn’t develop a big enough economy with the resources of Earth alone, so would need to expand in some way beyond our home planet. Colonizing space would be necessary for both the funds — say from mining asteroids — and to test the idea that it’s possible to live in a spaceship for hundreds of years.
Quote from the article.