The First Generation Starship

Since faster-than-light travel is impossible, and the stars are so very, very far away, any craft making interstellar journeys will take many centuries to get where it is going. If they are crewed, then generations of people will be born aboard these ships, live and die and be in turn superseded by younger generations. This standard trope of SF is predicated upon the unbending realities of physics.

But who was the first to hypothesise a ‘generation starship’? Wikipedia says this:

Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his The Ultimate Migration (1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an ‘interstellar ark’. The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered a father of astronautic theory, first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his essay, ‘The Future of Earth and Mankind’ (1928), a space colony equipped with engines that travels thousands of years which he called ‘Noah’s Ark’.

Clute, Nicholls and Langford go further back:

Tsiolkovsky’s ideas … were anticipated as a passing fancy, though with a more realistic timescale, in John Munro’s A Trip to Venus (1897): “… with a vessel large enough to contain the necessaries of life, a select party of ladies and gentlemen might start for the Milky Way, and if all went right, their descendants would arrive there in the course of a few million years.”

But 1897 doesn’t take us far enough back into the early history of this idea, I think. Here’s James E Lake’s Bishop Foster’s Heresy (1889), imagining a future-fleet voyaging out into the interstellar spaces for ‘millions of years’:

Look out from our flying ship as we sail out upon the universal sea of space. We turn our faces toward the sun, whose bright beams shed such a wonderful sea of material glory over us, that all nature is hid save this effulgence and our own ship … we begin to look out through the evening twilight upon the vast ocean of trackless ether, upon which we are sailing, and now thousands, yea, millions of ships like our own heave in sight … Come with me as this fleet of ships sails on its great voyage for a million years, and ask what mighty fleets are these that accompany us over this infinite sea! Hail, thou voyagers over this unsounded sea! Hail Arcturus! Hail Polaris! [154–55]

The scale of the cosmos had been understood for a while by this point, and it is a natural extrapolation from that knowledge to speculate how long it would take for a craft to traverse such distances, and what that would imply for the crew. H F Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy (1879) included this intriguing Space 1999-avant la lettre conception:

If our earth were suddenly to dissolve its allegiance to the king of day, and attempt a flight to the North Star (the centre of the Circumpolar Constellation), and should maintain its flight of one thousand miles a minute, it would fly away toward Polaris for thousands of thousands of years, till a million years had passed away before it reached that northern dome of the distant sky and gave its new allegiance to another sun. The sun it had left behind it would gradually diminish till it was small as Arcturus, thus small as could be discerned by the naked eye, until at last it would finally fade out in utter darkness long before the new sun was reached. [72]

There are many late 19th-c speculation about the distances of such voyages, actually.