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Fusion-powered spacecraft with glowing red radiators and blue-white exhaust, light sails along a laser beam, a long generation ship and a warp lens beside an imagined ocean world

How to go interstellar?

A series on choosing a destination, crossing the distance, and building a life beyond the Solar System.

Start readingBrowse the series

Published essays

Coming next

  • A light sail with its suspended chip in the foreground against the Milky Way

    Riding light

    Laser sails and the challenge of reaching another star.

    Coming next

Planned essays

  • Copy-paste colony

    Machines that build the next machines, far from Earth.

  • How to stop a starship

    Reaching another star is only half of the journey.

  • Riding the bomb

    Nuclear pulse propulsion and the energy a starship needs.

  • Born in transit

    Life aboard ships that take generations to arrive.

  • Instant humanity: just add water

    Sending the beginnings of a settlement ahead of its inhabitants.

  • Faster than light

    The limits of physics and the ideas that try to go beyond them.

A render of the Sun rising over the Earth's limb, seen from orbit, with city lights on the night side

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