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.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).
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.
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.
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
Elite Dangerous players flying loops around generation ships while listening to their horror downfall logs.
If FTL is impossible (as is likely the case) there is a point where a better ship can’t catch up, even if its going like 0.9c.
Or you arrive to find the civilization has had time to collapse and given way to the rise of damned dirty apes.
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.
Yeah generation ships and surprises are old.
A classic example, non-stop, goes back to the 1950s, for example.
When your daughter looks like this
Sorry too soon
The closest thing in terms of a novel would be “Far Centaurus” by A. E. van Vogt
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.
It happens in Star Trek. They find a 1980s style businessman on board, who is apopleptic to learn that humanity doesn’t care about investment portfolios anymore.
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.
Oh, I misremembered then. Still kinda fits tho.
Whut
It still fits because it’s still people from a previous era being awoken in the sci fi universe, even if I misremembered the details and they weren’t literally on a sleeper ship.
Keep telling yourself that
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 stolen from Elite: Dangerous. You can find a few of those colony ships drifting around deep space, but you’re warned with heavy penalties to not interact with them, for this exact reason.
Mm yes they definitely stole this decades old concept from 2014’s Elite Dangerous.
I’m surprised this isn’t the central plot device of some blockbuster property.
It’s a neat idea from a sci-fi perspective, but when you think about the most efficient forms of space propulsion (slingshots around large gravity wells) I’m not sure how we’ll manage to do much better.
Either you catch up to someone before they leave the solar system or you’re just going to shorten the time needed to reach their terminal velocity.
There’s a diminishing return as you approach the speed of light, and FTL travel isn’t exactly a trivial hurdle.
You could say that the amount of time it would take for an interstellar trip at non-FTL speeds is also not exactly trivial.
We can sort of try to imagine how technology could develop in tens of thousands of years, but… not really.
We can sort of try to imagine how technology could develop in tens of thousands of years, but… not really.
To some extent, I think we’ve become blinded by the progress we’ve made in the last century relative to the progress we made in the millennium before that. For the vast majority of our 10,000 years of human civilization, life was of relatively uniform technological variance. We’re in a big uptick of progress in this moment, but eventually (I’d argue very soon) we’re going to exhaust the natural limits of our surroundings and the advances of technology will run up against the limits of our material conditions.
Then we very easily could be in a world where the modern day “high tech” nature is the baseline for decades, perhaps even centuries or millennia. Also, very possible we dip into a Dark Age. We’ve done it before. And its not as though this degree of manufacturing infrastructure is cheap or easy to maintain indefinitely.
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.
I don’t think that, because it’s not the 1930’s any more.
