query: series ring 
supports: A starship, starcraft or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between planetary systems, as opposed to a vehicle designed for orbital spaceflight or interplanetary travel. A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, the brightest of which gained proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. However, most of the stars in the Universe, including all stars outside our galaxy, the Milky Way, are invisible to the naked eye from Earth. Indeed, most are invisible from Earth even through the most powerful telescopes. Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of science fiction short stories written by Stephen Baxter. The collection connects the novels of the Xeelee Sequence and also shows the history of mankind in the Xeelee universe, and ultimately the universe. While each short story in the collection is self-contained, the stories are presented as being contained in the context of the first story, "Eve", about a man who is forced to witness the events in the short stories by a god-like being. "Eve" acts as a structure for the short stories, with an introduction at the beginning of "Vacuum Diagrams", short scenes occurring between each "era" (with "Eve" character explaining and introducing the next section), and an ending that wraps up the plot for the "Eve" story itself. "Vacuum Diagrams" won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1999. Ring is a 1994 science fiction novel by author Stephen Baxter . Ring tells the story of the end of the universe and the saving of mankind from its destruction . Two parallel plots are followed throughout the novel : that of Lieserl , an AI exploring the interior of the sun , and that of the Great Northern , a generation ship on a five - million - year journey . Iron is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from ) and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is by mass the most common element on Earth, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust. Its abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production by fusion in high-mass stars, where it is the last element to be produced with release of energy before the violent collapse of a supernova, which scatters the iron into space. The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets, with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly, the moons, two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury. Oxygen is a chemical element with symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group on the periodic table and is a highly reactive nonmetal and oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements as well as other compounds. By mass, oxygen is the third-most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium. At standard temperature and pressure, two atoms of the element bind to form dioxygen, a colorless and odorless diatomic gas with the formula . This is an important part of the atmosphere and diatomic oxygen gas constitutes 20.8% of the Earth's atmosphere. Additionally, as oxides the element makes up almost half of the Earth's crust. Hydrogen is a chemical element with chemical symbol H and atomic number 1. With an atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest element on the periodic table. Its monatomic form (H) is the most abundant chemical substance in the Universe, constituting roughly 75% of all baryonic mass. Non-remnant stars are mainly composed of hydrogen in the plasma state. The most common isotope of hydrogen, termed "protium" (name rarely used, symbol H), has one proton and no neutrons. Life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entities having biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased, or because they never had such functions and are classified as inanimate. Various forms of life exist, such as plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. The criteria can at times be ambiguous and may or may not define viruses, viroids, or potential artificial life as "living". Biology is the primary science concerned with the study of life, although many other sciences are involved. Carbon (from "coal") is a chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalentmaking four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. Three isotopes occur naturally, C and C being stable, while C is a radioactive isotope, decaying with a half-life of about 5,730 years. Carbon is one of the few elements known since antiquity. Earth, otherwise known as the world, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets. Science fiction (often shortened to SF, sci-fi or scifi) is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas." It usually avoids the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science fiction stories were intended to have a grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection is now limited to hard science fiction. An interstellar ark or Generation ship is a conceptual space vehicle designed for interstellar travel. Interstellar arks may be the most economically feasible method of traveling such distances. The ark has also been proposed as a potential habitat to preserve civilization and knowledge in the event of a global catastrophe. Lieserl is the title of the fifth story in Stephen Baxter's science fiction anthology "Vacuum Diagrams". It was originally published in "Interzone" in 1993 and represents a small, but integral part of the novel, Ring. Helium is a chemical element with symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas, the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is the lowest among all the elements. The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process.<ref name="doi10.1146/annurev-astro-081913-040012"></ref> It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.
  About three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron. A generation ship, or generation starship, is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels at sub-light speed.
candidates: 2 civilization earth fiction life novel orbit rocky starcraft universe xeelee sequence
answer: xeelee sequence