Editing Generation ship (section)

== Origins ==
Rocket pioneer [[Robert H. Goddard]] was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his "The Ultimate Migration" (1918).<ref name="CAROTI">{{cite book|author=Simone Caroti|title=The Generation Starship in Science Fiction: A Critical History, 1934-2001|publisher=McFarland|year=2011|isbn=978-0-7864-6067-0|page=275}}</ref> 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 in fiction|suspended animation]] and be awakened when they reached another star system. He proposed to use small moons or asteroids as ships, and speculated that the crew would endure psychological and genetic changes over the generations.<ref>Rodriguez Baquero, p. 16</ref>

[[Tsiolkovsky|Konstantin Tsiolkovsky]], considered a father of [[Astronautics|astronautic theory]], first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his essay, "The Future of Earth and Mankind" (1928), outlining a space colony equipped with engines that travels thousands of years which he called "Noah's Ark". In the story, the crew had changed so much over the generations at so many levels that they did not even acknowledge Earth as their home planet.<ref>Rodriguez Baquero, p. 18</ref> 

Another early description of a generation ship is in the 1929 essay "The World, The Flesh, & The Devil" by [[John Desmond Bernal]].<ref name="BERNAL" /> Bernal's essay was the first publication to reach the public and influence other writers. He wrote about the concept of human evolution and mankind's future in space through methods of living that we now describe as a generation starship, and which could be seen in the generic word "globes".<ref name="BERNAL">{{cite web|url=http://bactra.org/Bernal/|title=The World, the Flesh & the Devil - An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul|author=J. D. Bernal |year=1929 |access-date = 20 January 2016}}</ref>