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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
Touch grass. Don’t hate people.
Go fuck yourself bud
Nah I got a lady friend for that.
When your daughter looks like this
Sorry too soon
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.
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?
I don’t think that, because it’s not the 1930’s any more.
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.
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.
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.
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!
ECS Constant in Starfield.
Attempts to prevent this phenomenon involve using what is called the “wait calculation” to predict how long to wait to launch an interstellar journey.
They didn’t dock and help you out? Rude.
Who launches a space ship only half full?
No room to take a second crew/passengers+their supplies (food/water) onboard, can’t exactly tow a space ship either (esp FTL)… So, help how?
