this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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My current favorite topic is the idea of a world ark, a self-contained world adrift in space containing the remnants of life from a doomed world, and the inhabitants aren't aware of it. Intetestingly it has been featured in two different games: SOMA and Genshin Impact. I'm currently working on a TTRPG campaign within such a world.
I don’t know if this is the same or at least similar, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a generation starship that is moving toward the universe either toward another planet, in search of another planet, or simply as an indefinitely mobile home. It’s wild to imagine generations being born and living on the starship without having any real understanding of the place that humans came from. Stories of Earth would start to seem like wild folklore and mythology rather than actual human history.
Eventually, some generations may become angry that the decision to live on this starship was made by other people many generations before them, and now everyone on the starship is cursed to live under that decision. Was the starship navigation designed so that people may one day change the course? Or perhaps enormous safeguards were put into place to ensure that the ship kept going toward the initial objective because all other options were decidedly much much worse for everyone.
If you haven't read his books, Stephen Baxter has at least a couple of good explorations of long journey ships.
I've been thinking of an idea like this for a while. A bubble of stars and planets preserved from a dying universe, either doomed to drift the void for eternity or perhaps lucky enough to stumble into a new existence. Either way, I imagine people on worlds with a countable number of stars in the sky. Think of it as almost the same as a world arc, but on a local cluster scale instead of planetary.