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 generation sleeper 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).
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 us 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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
