COSMIC 1001: Engaging Future Speculation on Space Exploration with Generative AI
This work provides a novel interactive art experience for general audiences to speculate about space exploration, but it is an incremental application of existing generative AI methods.
The paper presents Cosmic 1001, an interactive installation that uses generative AI to create speculative news stories about future space exploration based on user input, and displays them in a shared visualization. It aims to engage participants in reflecting on possible futures rather than predicting them.
Cosmic 1001 is an interactive installation that transforms space exploration history into a speculative news experience. Participants first browse a news-based archive of major space events, then pose future-oriented questions or specify conditions such as year, celestial body, or mission name. In response, AI generates a future news item including a headline, article, narration, and visual media. These outputs are accumulated in the Future Tunnel, a shared visualization where individual stories form a collective landscape of possible futures. By combining historical space events with science fiction references, the installation explores a space between documentation and imagination, treating the future not as a fixed prediction but as a visible and discussable speculation.