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
generationsleeper 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.
Imagine if a lost Spanish armada finally arrived at Florida, centuries late, musket-wielding conquistadors raiding a coastal naval academy while a prominent political VIP was giving a speech, taking them hostage like Hernán Cortés did with Moctezuma II (Aztec Empire) or Francisco Pizarro with Atahualpa (Inca Empire).
find a nice McDonalds
Going back to the sleep pod for another 50k years.
Only the finest restaurant for me. Tonight, we dine at Taco Bell
After the franchise wars of 2050 all restaurants are taco bell.
Make sure you know how to use the three seashells before eating any Taco Bell.
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.
First, there have always been people who have thought, “I’m fine with the chance of dying to do this thing.” Free climbers, for instance. If the odds of survival are zero, and your personal effort isn’t going to change it, that number goes down by a lot.
Second, unless we find a FTL solution, surviving in space indefinitely is the first step in interstellar travel, because 3000 years is functionally equivalent to indefinitely. If you’re response to that is sleeper ships, you only survive if the ship survives, and we’re back to the same point. The reason this is important is because if the planet at the destination isn’t required for your survival, you have a lot more flexibility for how you colonize that planet, which vastly improves the odds of success.
As for the Fermi paradox, it doesn’t require that everyone wants to colonize a different star, build a Dyson shell, or whatever, it requires that everyone who doesn’t want to do that be willing to do whatever it takes to stop anyone else from doing it (and can make it count). It’s a slightly different proposition, and one that I think is less likely than other solutions.
Agreed. I always try to think of these kinds of questions in two ways.
The first way is from a hard sci-fi perspective, like how can this become a believable thing. How can we change as little as possible in the universe to make this a real and normal thing, so we can expect a reader to have enough suspend of disbelief to serve as a good backdrop to a story. This way it’s fun to think about these things and see how we can still be living in the real world, but with something cool added. Instead of going full “it’s just magic” and thus cutting out any thought proces.
The second way is from a real life standpoint. Like if we extrapolate our technology into the future, but keep in mind real life limitations, laws of physics etc. So no over unity, no FTL, nothing that would require the power of a star to work but also somehow not be an actual star etc.
So that’s how you can easily get to two kinds of answers from a singular question. And it’s all speculation anyways, just a bit of fun.
There is also the possibility of information transfer so the people on board the ship (or an automaton) could enhance the vessel and make it faster mid flight
As a rule of thumb, I’m never happy to find a McDonalds.
Why waste your hate on it? I haven’t had McDonald’s in over 25 years now and it causes me no problems to just go past one and not think about it
That’s what I was thinking - so I got the free cryro without the hard work?
Humans being humans, I bet there would end up being some huge animosity between the two groups.
I mean, we’re halfway through… not sure if a novel, but it’s surely like a young adult TV show or the setup for a looter shooter or something.
i mean, you better hope the civilization you find is a good one.
It’s a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.
But then you never send out ships. (Unless you do like embryos or something.)
The obvious solution to this is to just not send the faster shios to the new planet, or do but use it as a hub for further travel, and let the sleeper ship people fulfill their literal purpose.
Celebrate them and support them theres more planets why even bother?
The sleeper ship people would be going to a planet chosen because it was able, the faster ship people would likely be able to choose a better planet anyway.
But also could just meet up with that sleeper ship and like take them with you
The science answer would be there’s probably not that many suitable planets. And probabilities of ships not making it means sending additional ships is a good idea.
Hard disagree on that answer. We have found thousands of possible planet candidates already and we aren’t looking that hard, relatively. The second we have the technical capability to actually get to any other solar system there will be a new instrument in space with the explicit purpose of finding planets we want to travel to
Edit. This new instrument will not magically appear, i meant we will start the process of building one and putting it in place asap
Possible candidates. Because we don’t have the ability to actually know. And it has to be habitable to humans, agriculture, and animal husbandry, which is much stricter than possible (bacteria) life.
As for using new planets for further exploration, it’s possible but will take time to develop the industry (while trying to build your new planet) and watch space for new targets.
shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
Dune: Fremen Origin, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson.
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.
Such a good quick read! Thanks a bunch for that!
Basically the premise of Mass Effect Andromeda
Not really, the Angara, Kett, and Remnant were already there. You’re just showing up in the middle of their dispute. The comment was implying your own people developed FTL and fucked everything up, not that you landed in a shit show
Yeah, was gonna say. It’s more like Outriders than anything.
There’s a side quest chain in Starfield that has a generation ship arriving at a planet they claimed centuries ago only to find it’s a corporate owned resort planet.
Maybe that’s what happened to us already.
Children of
EarthTime 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!
3,000 year steam backlog
No half life 3 yet tho.
And no Elder Scrolls 6
They just released the second trailer tho!
Nice, maybe we’ll get it this decade
lol i meant in that timeline.
GTA V just got a new release
Imagine how pissed someone who wanted to get away from civilization via the generation ship would feel
Buddy that’s all I wanted to do.
What even is the alternative? Wait 50 years and be too old for space travel?
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.
ingenuity
You missed the point. Underpantsweevil made something new!
I’ve thought about this too. A few apes, after a long string of evolution, figured out how to bang the right rocks together to make a television…or even a microprocessor. And that’s just one piece of modern tech that some ape figured out, centuries after another ape wrote the complete works it Shakespeare.
They made it make sense in the outer worlds
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The Neutral Zone (the episode in question) has people that died and then were frozen to try and revive later. The space capsule was in orbit above a planet not en route to another planet. Not exactly the same situation.
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Whut
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Keep telling yourself that
At least he didn’t have boneitis.
you don’t need money anymore, everything is free and you can do whatever you want.
"Damn it! How am I going to be better than people then?
“At least I’m not one of those filthy Klingons!”
It wasn’t a ship full of people heading to a distant star, that was a bunch of dead people who were frozen at the moment for their death in hopes that sometime in the future a cure for their ailment would be found and then they were set adrift in space.
That wasn’t even the first time Trek did the “catching up to a sleeper ship” plot. TOS did it earlier, and then they made a movie out of that episode.
There is an aspect of the plot in Alastair Reynold’s novel Chasm City (part of the Revelation Space series) that also has to do with this concept.
I think it involved a planet called …
spoiler
… Sky’s Edge, if I recall correctly. Except the “new tech” was not FTL (not a thing in Revelation Space canon) but the practice of ejecting a significant fraction of hibernating colonists and their supplies to buff their deceleration ability in order to hold higher interstellar velocity for longer so as to get a few years “edge” in lead time over other generation ships. All to enable the traitorous ship of the generation ship fleet to raid planetary resources sooner to build up military forces to raid the slower latecomers.
Galaxy’s Edge
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.
There’s a huge debate on how to communicate the simple idea of “danger, don’t dig here” on top of nuclear dumps.
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.
, 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.
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.
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.”
50 years later nobody remembers this ship even exists
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…
Or you know, this is discussed in advance and the faster ships pickup the slower ships on the way (if possible).
Or in an infinite universe just go to a different planet.
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.
faster ships pickup the slower ships on the way
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.
50 years ago they thought we have flying cars but no one thought of smart phones.
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.
Stuff happens.
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.
Could only be able to send a bunch of walle’s setting up the town.
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.
Imagine trying to escape humanity only to end up being surrounded by humans again. Nightmare fuel.
That’s what humanity is best at though. It should be no surprise.
When your daughter looks like this
Sorry too soon
MURPH
Oof, right in the feels
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.
Maybe they are like people today (or Ferengis in Star Trek) and just don’t care, not seeing any profit in the endeavor.
There is absolutely no way we survive if we continue like we are right now.
Surviving isn’t profitable, SMH my head.
You’re not quiet getting the scale of the problem.
It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Except the haystack is 100km deep and covers the entire planet. But, you know that the needle should be some where in Manhattan.
It really isn’t. When you know where they started from, and what direction they were supposed to be heading in, then even without knowing how fast they’re supposed to be going, it’s literally as simple as dropping out of FTL at regular intervals behind the sleeper ship and pointing a telescope in the general direction you’re going until you hit the sleeper ship’s light cone. What other posters have suggested about potential technical limitations relating the nature of the FTL drive and/or logistical problems with actually doing a pick up make sense as blocking issues, but finding them to begin with is a solved problem. Like, this is basically “where are Voyager 1 & 2 right now”, and we actually know exactly where they are right now because we’re still picking up their radio signals, powered by a 249W generator (less power than used by a typical modern PC!), from over 136 AU out, and a sleeper ship is going to be way more visible than that.
Prob simpler than that. It likely had a beacon.
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.
Is that hitchhikers?
It is.
I don’t think that, because it’s not the 1930’s any more.
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
Pure sci-if speculation: Your FTL (or near-c) tech is reliant on a deep gravitational well or a strong radiation source (like a star) to stop. I can see a sci-go scenario where that is the case.
Or you arrive to find the civilization has had time to collapse and given way to the rise of damned dirty apes.
Elite Dangerous players flying loops around generation ships while listening to their horror downfall logs.
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?
Shouldn’t all biological processes be stopped. I’d assume you can’t even dream. You just go under and get back up instantly.
I liked how it was in raised by we wolves where everyone shared a dream so the kids where technically older than their bodies.
I know another shared dream hyper sleep where the guy in control went mad and tortured the crew until they band together to stop him. Then he arrived dead. I dk name.
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.
Back in my day the quest to reach spiritual enlightenment by ascending to divinity was a proletariat tradition. Is there nothing these bourgeois assholes won’t co-opt?
Yeah generation ships and surprises are old.
A classic example, non-stop, goes back to the 1950s, for example.
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.
They are planning to do a movie out of it
It’s an important world building device in the book Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds. Which is a fantastic book, highly recommend!
