"Columbus Was a Dope" is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein.

Two bar patrons and a bartender debate building a generation ship to Proxima Centauri.

"Columbus Was a Dope" was first published in the May 1947 issue of Startling Stories.

It was subsequently released in the anthology collection Travelers of Space in 1951, through Gnome Press.

[2] William H. Patterson Jr. claimed that "Columbus Was a Dope," along with other stories collected in The Menace from Earth, occurs within Heinlein's World as Myth framework, stating that they "are happening somewhere else in the Multiverse, somewhere quite close by the Future History.