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The problem with sleeper ships
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Or you know, this is discussed in advance and the faster ships pickup the slower ships on the way (if possible).
I get the world is a shit show, but it is less so when we discuss.
Fun meme though.
Given the brittleness of civilization, chances are the backup tapes with the exact flight planes get lost during a thunderstorm and 50 years later nobody remembers this ship even exists.
50 years is terribly short. 500 maybe.
Also, resolvable. Space beacons, stone tablets, etc.
If you can think of it, so can they.
And I can think of just as many ways how it can get lost.
Stone tablets break, and how can you even communicate abstract concepts like spacetime coordinates on a slab of stone? There's a huge debate on how to communicate the simple idea of "danger, don't dig here" on top of nuclear dumps.
Beacons require enormous amounts of power. We can barely communicate with voyager, and that thing is just outside of our solar system and we know exactly what and where to look for.
Think about hieroglyphs. Those were out in the open for centuries and only through a lucky accident we stumbled upon the Rosetta stone. Otherwise we would have no idea what these weird symbols might mean.
actually it turns out the answer is quite simple, do nothing, you don't want anybody digging there, and why would anybody dig there if nothing is there.
And if they are capable of digging down to where the waste lies, chances are they're advanced enough to know about radiation and other relevant risks, so we don't really have to think about it all that hard.
also voyager 1 was launched in 77, we're coming up on 50 years, so we could use voyager as a stand in for that specific ship, it'd be weird if we just, sent someone out into space, and didn't ask any questions, or try to get any follow up information or anything.
The human race is much too nosy for that.
I think you kind of missed my point here.
Think about the infrastructure needed to communicate with Voyager. How many people would be capable of rebuilding it, if it would break? Given something like a major war, or a pandemic, might those people die or simply be shifted to more pressing issues? Since a sleeper ship doesn't have an active crew, stuff might simply break on their side too. Maybe an asteroid hits the dish.
I'm not arguing that it's impossible to build technology to keep in touch, I'm arguing that those who do the touching vanish. That's a different angle.
The space beacon doesn't have to be far out. Just far enough no one nukes it in WW3.
The FTL civilization will likely notice a radio signal from within our solar system.
You're looking the wrong way, literally.
It's not about us being found by another civilization, it's about a sleeper ship being forgotten by us.
I want a future FTL capable Earth civilization to find the sleeper ship. The Earthlings are likely to notice a radio signal within our solar system as they build up for FTL.
We can forget all about it. The beacon will be attractive to them.
What are you talking about?
A ship travelling to another star system will not fly as slow as Voyager and will be well outside of the solar system within decades. What kind of beacon do you think would be strong enough to ping continuously, for 3000 years, at increasingly high energy levels? We're talking megawatts of power.
A beacon you leave behind. A small satellite left in Sol that contains notes.
Fuck. Did you think the sleeper ship was radioing Earth? It could have a local broadcast, but not at all my point.
Edit: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beacon Beacons don't have to move.
often they don't, that's where the term beacon comes from. Saying that they don't have to is a little wrong, since it's probably more accurate to state that "they don't have to stay stationary" instead.
voyager still works today, so no problems there. It's had a few issues, but those were able to be fixed remotely, interestingly enough.
It's unlikely that the entirety of humanity would ship itself off in one go, it would take hundreds, probably thousands of ships to remove humanity from the planet, and even then not everyone would want to leave.
So as far as managing infra, it would be fine, those would be the last people to leave, simple as that, and even beyond that some remote communication and admin would be possible.
You could easily keep like 5% of the sleeper ship population up and working on it, i would expect that to be the case frankly. You could likely manage it pretty effectively from that point on, if certain services fail you could automatically wake up a maintenance team i suppose.
I think you're thinking way too 21st century, when this post is thinking 77th century.
How would a space beacon be detected by an FTL ship? Unless there's some sort of weird quantum entanglement communication with some paired exotic material, whatever data (probably a waveform of some type) would be so fractional it is unlikely to be useful or even detectable.
But on top of that, if we still contend with inertia, a ship has to slow down precisely to the velocity of the slower ship or do it multiple times to detect it somewhere and then speed back up again.
But then, we'd also have to figure out why the resources are even worth it to spend and weigh the chances of success and the risks of failure.
Unless the problem is arbitrary for everything involved it is doubtful that regardless of what the future holds for technology that we just wouldn't pick up the other ship/passengers.
Space beacon can be in our solar system. It only needs to give start date, end point and route.
We can make-up FTL rules. They can use future magic tech to send probes out ever X distance to look for sleeper ship. Or not.
Well if you want to hand wave stuff for a story, sure. The issue with the beacon is a few fold though. So, let's say they use something close to the speed of light to communicate like a laser and there happens to be no obstructions and the beam is so narrow and powerful it just works. Being even a few light years away just isn't accurate enough to know exactly where something is going to be in space. Sure, if it travels in an exact straight line (so it's not near any massive bodies) there's likely to be some sort of drift, even slightly angular. That's going to translate into likely at least kilometers in the 10k range between the time it takes the data to be known vs. how many years have already passed from that last bit of data.
Sure though, take away any need for inertia or fuel and yeah, they can just stop somewhere, figure it out and go again and grab it or better yet there's just some technobabble thing that can instantaneously keep Sol updated in near real-time but also the ship coming to get it. That's just plot devices for a story though and an author can hand wave away anything they want, so there's no need to say that if we just talked about a problem in advance, we would just figure it out and make it happen because that only needs to be done in some made-up fantasy if that's what the author wants to do.
Yes. I agree. Lots of hand waving.
I have lost track of the full conversation, but I was meaning beacon as a lighthouse, not as in lowjack. Both are good though.
I think better stories come from "adults did planning and communication, but shit went wrong" than "fuckers didn't read any SciFi and assumed shit would just work."
Famously, nobody knows about the Apollo Moon mission today, because we lost all the records from 60 years ago.
brittleness of civilization? last i checked civilization has managed to survive 12'000 years since it first came about.
Is that so? Then how is Akadia doing currently? And what's up with the Hittites? Are the geometry nerds in Egypt still in power?
Civilization as a whole might survive, but civilizations are constantly going under. Just think about how much knowledge was lost during WW2 or after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There's exactly two locations in this world still having samples of small pox. Do we know that the location in Russia is still operational? They might as well lost power in 1991 and had their Diesel stolen.
We've actually had multiple civilizational collapses. Just because humans survived doesn't mean the knowledge or civilization did.
I'm still waiting to see civilization start...
If we assume that the ship, while traveling, always moves towards its destination, but it might be off by up to 1 degree. Then the margin of error for its position would grow until about the midway point in the journey. I have no idea how to calculate this, unfortunately, but I'd image there'd be a lot of space you need to cover if you want to find the ship.
Yes. That is a problem. Not least of all for the sleeper ship.
I am going to assume any higher technology follow-up ship will only do best effort.
So, then there is a good window for memes about "lost" sleeper ships.
Or in an infinite universe just go to a different planet.
That's not how space travel works, at all, unfortunately.
With 2 jumps it is. Jump to calculated position of old ship. Load cryo beds onto new ship. Jump to destination.
I think the problem is more matching velocities so you can make the pickup. Also, a certain compatibility between vessels for any kind of docking/passenger exchange.
Even then, there's a huge energy cost to slowing down mid-flight. It might actually be faster to drop off improvements as you fly by and let the slower vessel upgrade itself using the improvements.
This also opens up a big question of extra-solar transportation economics. If you're planning to develop Vehicle Y that can outpace Vehicle X, why would anyone get on X to begin with?
I kind of picturing it like how planes refuel in the air.
Cause it's 50 years later. 50 years ago they thought we have flying cars but no one thought of smart phones. Stuff happens. Plus this way you can less people through the ftl because the rest are on their way. something like raised by wolves with androids and human incubators prepping for the rest. Also no gaurentee humans can survive that kind of trip. Could only be able to send a bunch of walle's setting up the town.
Star Trek was doing digital communicators and tricorders back in the 1960s. Dick Tracy and the Adam West Batman of the 1970s had wristwatch communicators with embedded TVs. And 2001: A Space Odessy had video smart pads, which looked almost identical to the modern Samsung model.
Also, we do have flying cars. They're called helicopters. This isn't a difficult technology to create, its a difficult technology to operate and to regulate the use of. If you've ever flown in a helicopter before, you'll know why these things aren't conducive to heavy traffic.
But the physics around them stays the same. There are soft limits to what we can do today that will be surpassed with improved technology and engineering. But there are also hard limits. Steel has a certain mass and density and a melting point. Every fuel have a maximum efficient yield. Humans have a wide array of conditions they can't exit without being killed. Building a flying car means fiddling with these variables to make a device that can transport an individual at a high speed safely given a limited amount of energy. Building space ships is an extension of this exercise.
Hawking hypothesized that any First Contact with an alien civilization would almost certain mean running into their exterior network of distant probes and sensors long before we actually meet any biological. It's possible the best we can do at extended distances is to send Wall-Es. It's possible the best we can do is send information, targeted in such a way that the destination assembles its own Wall-Es.
That's before you get into the more philosophical attitudes toward space travel. If you put someone on a spaceship for a thousand years, and then you catch back up with them, are you still talking to Humans anymore? Or are they Spacemans? And are they even your friends or are they rivals in your war over scarce resources? The "Three Body Problem" hypothesis of two space ships passing each other in the night is that one will inevitably attempt to cannibalize the other.