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.
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.
Yeah generation ships and surprises are old.
A classic example, non-stop, goes back to the 1950s, for example.
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?
If you have working FTL now, though, and can get there faster why not also intercept the sleeper ships and bring them with you?
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
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.
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.
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.
Is that hitchhikers?
It is.
I don’t think that, because it’s not the 1930’s any more.
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.
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.
When your daughter looks like this
Sorry too soon
MURPH
Oof, right in the feels
Attempts to prevent this phenomenon involve using what is called the “wait calculation” to predict how long to wait to launch an interstellar journey.
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.
They made it make sense in the outer worlds
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.
Galaxy’s Edge
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.
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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!”
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
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.
At least he didn’t have boneitis.
It’s still likely the only way you could have made the trip.
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This is an argument for the sleeper ship. You get there and enjoy an already set up and running civilization in the prime of your life.
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Outriders. Absolutely underrated game
No, it’s just not very good.
It so could have been, though. A lot of wasted promise.
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?
People who know there’s another ship on the way
That’s an awful lot of cost and effort to launch a ship specifically for ‘rescuing’ another ship that’s not really in any trouble, it’s just a bit slow.
It’s already got the supplies it needs, a set course, and a plan for when they arrive at their destination. It doesn’t really need help.
Then there’s the problem of docking one ship with a second ship that likely wasn’t designed to/with a dock. That’s not a trivial task in a vacuum.
TBH unless they are in some sort of distress; it seems better to let their plan play out. They’ll arrive when they were expecting to, and will have less work to do setting up a settlement when they arrive.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
brittleness of civilization? last i checked civilization has managed to survive 12’000 years since it first came about.
I’m still waiting to see civilization start…
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.
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.
50 years is terribly short. 500 maybe.
Also, resolvable. Space beacons, stone tablets, etc.
If you can think of it, so can they.
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.”
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.
You guys think KFC is still open?
The closest thing in terms of a novel would be “Far Centaurus” by A. E. van Vogt
