Got any older memes pug?
There’s an HFY story where the guy in the slow ship became a tourist attraction for the advanced humans that beat him to his destination.
His bank account had grown to billions and they offered him billions more to keep it going.
Sounds awesome not only you skipped the hardest part you have everything setup and get to live a good life. Unless of course that was your goal to experience building the colony.
You make it to earth and you forgot the historical reason why you avoid earth. It is a prison planet
Instant celebrity
Riffing on the meme
one of the, like 3, interesting quests in Starfield was based on that!
Interesting premise, shit execution, as is the case with every quest in starfaild
guess you didnt play a lot of quests then. lot of them have good execution, namely the vanguard questline
It was decent and has its moments, but it only works because starfield is a universe where phones with cameras and the internet don’t exist, and instant communication only exists when the plot remembers it’s not Fallout, which is not often. Secret military research? Believable. Said research getting out of hand and destroying a whole colony? Believable. Nobody giving a single flying fuck to said colony outside the questline? Weird. Not a single mention of repression and censorship about the event? Even weirder. Then again, after the terrormorph attacks New Atlantis, nobody gives a fuck (because cameras and phones don’t exist, nobody is asking about relatives or friends that are missing), not even the “TV Station”. After the damage is removed from the city, instant amnesia hits everyone.
This is the plot of a short story, Far Centaurus, that I read a long time ago.
I love how Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga (2004) opens up with this. But also funny how the inventors of the tech were such douchebags that they casually used it to just be there when the first mission to Mars landed. But hey, at least they didn’t have to do the return trip.
Oh that is absolutely brilliant. I never thought of that 😆
The first crew would face the most difficult challenges. Imagine the relief after expecting to establish the fundamentals of civilization, and instead are just assigned your living quarters.
Except you’re basically a caveman. You leave and you’re one of the world’s foremost engineers, trusted to know everything necessary to build a new settlement from scratch, with no help from Earth.
You get there and your engineering knowledge is 3000 years out of date. The only people who are interested in your skills are archaeologists and anthropologists. They use an app to ask you questions like “Could you demonstrate how you used woodpaper to wipe your anus?”
What a fascinating point. I’d be fine holding antique engineering story hour as my contribution. Who knows what old gems were lost over the years. It sounds like fun, even if I was just a novelty.
If the records survived, they might not need anything from you, because they’ve already watched it all on video. But, maybe some of them would be interested to see it in person once. Even if we know how warriors fought 3000 years ago, it would still be interesting to see a true expert warrior using their weapons in a way that took a lifetime to master.
If the records didn’t survive, you might be a valuable person to study for a while, but it might quickly get tiring to basically be a sideshow performer, there to delight the people who think of you as this ultra-primitive thing that’s nearly an animal.
I would bet it would be pretty frustrating for most people after a while. You’d have this mental image of yourself as a sophisticated, modern person who was respected by his/her peers. Suddenly, you’d be living in a world where people around you might be struggling to contain their disgust. Things that are normal to you like eating meat or peeing in a toilet might be seen as animal-like behaviours.
If you’re lucky, then your sophisticated construction and engineering techniques might be seen as impressive feats of craftsmanship. In a world where robots fasten everything that needs fastening, just driving in a nail or using a screwdriver might be seen as something really fancy, like we’d now see the kinds of stonemasonry that they might have had millennia ago.
But, if your self-image is that of an advanced engineer, and the best you can hope for is to be seen as a quaint old-timey craftsman, that might not be very satisfying.
You’re absolutely correct from a “best practice” standpoint, but only the standards make it into records. That’s the source of our admiration of “old-fashioned know-how.”
Real life experience can’t be catalogued. The index doesn’t have dirt under its nails. Sure, I’d be obsolete and out of place in the day-to-day, but I’d always be ready to coyboy up in a crisis.
In the meantime, I could probably make a decent living creating one-of-a-kind newly handcrafted antiques for the neo-hipsters.
I think I’d really enjoy our movie, btw.
Real life experience can’t be catalogued
In ye olde days it couldn’t. But, what if the current database of YouTube videos survives? You’d get every non-expert trying everything in any way possible. If books and podcasts survive, you’d have every discussion on why things are done a certain way and not another way. Assuming it all survives, there’d be so much more information to future archaeologists and anthropologists than today. Right now we just dig up a shard of pottery and try to figure things out from whatever we can glean from that pottery.
It would make for a cool movie. The only problem is trying to imagine a really distant future that makes the present look barbaric.
They had fun with that in Demolition Man with the three shells. Star Trek TNG did it in The Neutral Zone where they had a bunch of people from the 20th century including a financier who couldn’t accept the lack of money in the future. But it’s really hard to make a future that’s believable and makes the present look barbaric.
That’s so true. I’ve thought about that quite a lot watching sci-fi. I really enjoy the idea of trying to create a completely new culture or civilization without first seeing it as an inevitable evolutionary progression. I think that’s the only way to really imagine a civilization that far into the future.
I love that you thought of the three shells. It’s absolutely one of my favorite sci-fi mechanics to leave unexplained phenomena up to the viewer or reader. Most stories end up as a bland socialist paradise or a dystopian nightmare. I like the idea of something different altogether, or a blend of present-day and something else entirely. Kind of like how Taco Bell won the fast food wars. Lol
The only problem is trying to imagine a really distant future that makes the present look barbaric.
But it’s really hard to make a future that’s believable and makes the present look barbaric.
This episode of Star Trek: DS9 from 1995 depicts life in 2024
The Bell Riots weren’t what they were cracked up to be. Either that, or they got the date wrong.
But, the writers in that scene went really easy on the set dressers and costumers: “Ok, it’s a street scene in 2024, but everyone is poor, and as a result they don’t have anything built after… say… 1995.”
Merry and Pippin: “we should leave only after the 13th breakfast because by then the Eagles will already be on route and we can just use them.”
Minmaxing LOTR? Nice
Call that one a win.
Take risk of signing up for a 3000 year hyper-sleep trip.
Reap the rewards of being a pioneer without having to do any of the hard work.
join intergalactic ship pilgrimage hoping to be a pioneer to a new world
Land to late stage capitalism and the same oppression you were just trying to escape.
Id shoot myself immediately.
A mission in starfield (shit game but honestly decent writing at the very least) included just this. A generation ship finally arrived at its destination long after FTL travel was invented to find that the intended colony planet was already a fancy resort planet. You have to broker some kind of agreement between the parties.
It’s a couple of Star Trek episodes too. Similar idea is how they found Khan.
That’s why you outfit your ship with mass drivers.
Any parasites roaming around on your paradise? A couple hundred rocks at 2% light speed will clear that up.
Nice nice, and in the 3000 intervening years they’ve developed alpha particle cannons that shred your entire swarm of rocks and puny physical spaceship to white hot quantum loops as they sip megachampagne on their continent sized airships as they watch your fleet unwillingly transition to light
The gun that fired the barrage was the size of a juice box floating somewhere in orbit, they have millions of them
You didn’t even get a chance to pull your finger off of the mass driver button
It’s not made on earth so it’s mega sparkling wine
As if that future civilization would treat you as anything but a zoo specimen
Damn, you make it sound better and better. Just sent me out already!
50+ years younger too.
Jerks didn’t come pick me up on way there? Wtf dudes.
Just be glad they managed to fly around your ship and not through it. Navigating at those speeds is hard, matching speed with an older ship, connecting to it and transfering all the people over is probably also difficult.
Not to mention those in the older ship are probably brought into hypersleep in a different way then more modern ships, so they might not actually be equipped to handle the people from the older ship.
Ikr? Rude.
