It's a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.
In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
As a guy who sometimes gets told "Hey, don't worry about that work you had to do, you can skip it", hard agree. No better feeling in the world. And after thinking you'd have to build a whole civilisation from scratch? Yeah, nah, sign me up for the ~~generation~~ sleeper ship please.
A generation ship and a sleeper ship are two different things (that we can't yet do). In one, you live on a ship so your kids can go to a new place. In the other, you don't really live on a ship so you can go to a new place.
find a nice McDonalds
Going back to the sleep pod for another 50k years.
I'd argue the type of people who sign up to be first on an extra-solar planet to settle are exactly the kind of people who would rather shuttle down with a printer and a prayer than find a small town.
I mean, if I were to sign on, I would want to know what the settlement plan is (Like who's doing what jobs, how will we produce food assuming there is 0 viable land to grow on, what's the worst case scenario that has been planned for, etc) as well as having a say in said plan... And I know plenty of people who would happily sign on knowing it's gonna be just them, a tarp, and a Gransfors Bruks axe vs everything the planet can throw at them and they might die inside a week if they aren't careful.
And yeah, I imagine if I showed up and all the super hard work was done but everything was still getting started, I'd probably be a little more upbeat. But in no way would I want to see a planet filled with people who got there first. Worse yet, got there by being the 8th generation to be born there.
I guess it depends what stage of the colonization effort you're on. People signing on for the tail end would be ecstatic, probably.
But is it a good argument? What are the chances a new technologies will be invented that allow for ships that are actually substantially faster? And what are the chances of some conflict or disaster or combination preventing any ships from being built regardless of how fast those ships are?
My view is: As soon as technology is ready there's an actual 1% chance of a successful mission, launch right away. And keep on launching till you can't launch anymore. Sure maybe something better will come along, but maybe it won't. If the window of opportunity is open, don't wait for it to close.
But in reality I don't actually think interstellar travel for living humans is possible. There are so many issues, it's hard to see us overcoming them all. But maybe the state of the world has left me jaded and the future will be bright somehow, who knows. I'd love to be proven wrong, but for now I lean of the side of impossible.
You kind of answer your own question there, honestly. If you're at the point where you can somehow convince hundreds to thousands of people to get a one way ticket to turning into a space popsicle for the chance of eventually turning into xenomorph chowder, then you can probably also do better than that eventually.
So from that perspective we both hard agree that interstellar travel is probably not practical to any degree of technology below full-on Star Trek. But also, we both hard disagree that "shoot people into space to die as soon as you have the ability" is something that any society is ever going to do. If some modicum of a survival instinct is needed to evolve intelligence, then the answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens looked at the practicalities of actual interstellar travel and went "Hell, no".
If anybody out there is willing to do interstellar colonization you better believe that it's because their star is about to pop and they'll try that exactly once.
Worse: your sleeper ship arrives at what should be a pristine planet. But FTL capable ships beat you there. And they ruined the planet over a few thousand years. And now they’re sending out refugee ships of their own.
Damn now that's an interesting story
Admission: I stole it.
qntm’s cool science fiction stories are my favorite.
Children of ~~Earth~~ Time is sort of like that. Amazing book.
Children of Time, not Earth! Also gets my highest recommendation.
I really don't see the problem here. They did all the hard work for you and they probably all pity you.
Yup, civilization is already set up and you don't need to scrape by in the wild for the rest of your life. Plus you get 3000 years of memes to catch up on!
There was a sci-novel about that, I don't remember who wrote it. Essentially, after FTL got invented they caught up with generation ships and retro-fitted them with FTL drives; overall message of the story was that humans are a valuable resource and they should not be discarded lightly, especially in a mission to seed the galaxy.
message of the story was that humans are a valuable resource
HA! Fiction indeed.
Sometimes I'll be in an office building, or on a job site, or in a hospital room, or even just taking a big shit.
And I'll look around and think to myself "Everything here is man made. It all comes from people." And then I'll just kinda marvel at the productive and transformative nature of human beings.
In deep space, that only gets more true. The water you drink, the air you breath, the lights you see by - all the product of human enginuity.
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.
Wow. This is actually the plot for one of the side quests in Starfield. Neat idea; i'd like to see it done in a better game.
It's actually a pretty common sci fi scenario, I remember reading about it in a pop science book in school
It's a widely talked about issue with deep space travel.
Imagine trying to escape humanity only to end up being surrounded by humans again. Nightmare fuel.
Or you arrive to find the civilization has had time to collapse and given way to the rise of damned dirty apes.
If you have working FTL now, though, and can get there faster why not also intercept the sleeper ships and bring them with you?
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
A sleeper ship isn't going to be doing any maneuvers other than constantly accelerating before the halfway point and then constantly decelerating after the halfway point. Predicting the position of the ship at any given moment based on that is a textbook physics 101 problem that students are expected to be able to solve by hand. If you've got FTL cracked then you've got the computational power to account for any real world variables that would throw off such a prediction.
3000 years is a lot. You can't imagine how profoundly, unbelievably long that is. In just 65 years we went from the Wright brothers' first flight to landing on the moon. And technological progress is exponential. Assuming people don't all kill each other, in a couple hundred years, maybe a thousand, it will likely cost the humanity next to nothing to go pick them up, if they so desire.
Maybe if you had FTL, but chances are you'd still be limited on fuel and supplies
You have to slow down to the sleeper ship to intercept it, and then speed up again with that extra mass, it probably wouldn't be practical unless the ship was designed for it
Elite Dangerous players flying loops around generation ships while listening to their horror downfall logs.
Such a plot device has been used in every sci-fi universe I've been interested in. It's not even funny.
Galaxy's Edge did a pretty cool take on this with the billionaires who fled a dying earth and became the Savages who lost their minds in the deep black. The remaining humans on earth built FTL like 20 years after they left and had like 3000 years to establish a galaxy wide Republic before they encountered the insane Savages who spent all that time experimenting on their own and trying to become actual gods.
And for the only time in your life, you're SO well rested!
Oof, what if it turned out you get 3000 years of nightmares and wake up insane?
Attempts to prevent this phenomenon involve using what is called the "wait calculation" to predict how long to wait to launch an interstellar journey.
ECS Constant in Starfield.
I'm surprised this isn't the central plot device of some blockbuster property.
They didn't make a movie, but The Forever War is one of my all time favorite novels and deals with this situation exactly.
Post memes here.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
