My 7-year old son Ethan is continually amazing me with his insights, thoughts, and questions. He’s not the most verbal or social of kids, but he is a (young) man of ideas.

Today, entirely unprompted, he came up with the idea of intergenerational starships.

After all, he figured, you can’t get to the nearest stars (he started with Pluto, but that’s almost correct as well) in one lifetime. So you’d have to have multiple families on a starship - and the people who started the voyage would never live to see the destination.

He also wondered how they would be able to take enough food along, and I explained that they couldn’t: in fact, they’d have to take entire farms along instead.

Wow. I’m impressed.

Tags: ethan, starship, inter-generational, john koetsier