Image credit: ChatGPT

In 1979, aged 11, I received a copy of Stewart Cowley’s Spacecraft 2000 – 2100 AD as a Christmas gift. Suffice it to say that book blew me away.

Extravagantly produced and coffee-table sized, it combined detailed “realistic” scenes of science-fiction starships with text that matched each lurid illustration to dry technical specifications and a gripping overarching narrative involving an interstellar space war that pitted Alpha Centauri and the Solar System against Proxima Centauri! It was a vision of the future in which the Fermi Paradox had proved to be merely a naive non-sequitur.

There was something about the precise detail and the aggressively near-future sweep that stood in stark contrast to Star Wars and Star Trek. I could tangibly place my future self into the book’s discrete-yet-analog time line. And now, from the standpoint of 2025, nearly a half-century on, rather than facing the imminently scary prospect humanity-replacing AGI, we’d instead be on the cusp of Henri deVass’ breakthrough perfection of the Warp Generator, the development that finally permitted Mankind to slip the surly bonds of the Solar System:

Possession of the physical volume to pore over at leisure was invaluable at a time when the starships of the movie theaters’ big screens were both fleeting and overwhelming. I spend vast stretches of time trying to come up with my own illustrations in the style of the book. I wrote treatments and incomplete drafts of whole new volumes that introduced the planets and civilizations orbiting Tau Ceti and Eta Cassiopeiae into the fray. The results always fell short, but somehow the time spent in failed effort was deeply satisfying.

I heard yesterday that OpenAI’s image generator has made a sudden leap forward, and I wondered how the model would perform on that task I’d spent so much time on decades ago…

SURVEY VESSEL
EX-33 Criterion
Commissioned by the United Nations Deep Survey Initiative in 2091, the EX-33 Criterion was purpose-built for the long-term observation of Class-D planetary systems. The ship’s unique hull geometry—a flattened, asymmetrical crescent with deeply recessed engine pods—allowed it to remain stable while hovering at the fringe of a gas giant’s magnetosphere for months at a time, shielded from both gravitational shear and plasma wash.

The vessel is shown here conducting a station-keeping operation above Erechtheus, a failed proto-planet in the Epsilon Indi system. Note the minimal thermal signature and open cooling vanes: Criterion is running in low-emission survey mode, relying solely on passive sensor sweeps to monitor the electromagnetic activity of Erechtheus’s inner moons.

The ship’s mission profile was typically geological and atmospheric: recon for isotope-rich atmospheres, early-stage terraforming viability, and monitoring of erratic exomoon orbits. In one instance—Survey Loop 5—the Criterion narrowly avoided a collision with the shepherd moon Osta Minor when its decaying orbit accelerated unexpectedly due to a previously uncharted gravitational eddy in the Erechthean belt.

The ship carried no weapons, relying on its deep-range field scramblers to vanish from any threat profile. Its most famous sighting was in 2104, when it accidentally intercepted a Proxima Hegemony skimmer convoy during a covert insertion into the Delta Pavonis neutral zone. The Criterion escaped undetected.