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.
I guess. I’m more of a space socialist, myself. Silly me always assumed that equality and collaboration would be a precursor to colonization of other worlds. Musk is trying so hard to prove me wrong. Lol
If people stopped starving, beating,.and raping children for 2 generations it would be possible. Humans have no need to compete with each other for survival already. If we could just get a generation or two with minimal human inflicted trauma it would be obvious.
If people stopped starving, beating,.and raping children for 2 generations it would be possible.
How do you propose we achieve this? We'd have to isolate a group of people who've never experienced abuse and set them up somewhere the rest of us could never come in contact with them again.
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You get there and your engineering knowledge is 3000 years out of date.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.
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 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."
I consulted my Ivy League homeslice Chad G.P.T. III about the surname Barnard and he promptly provided the following response:
“… the surname Barnard, it’s not super common, but it’s not rare either. Here’s a quick breakdown:
• In the U.S., it ranks around #2,500 to #3,000 in terms of frequency. That puts it in the mid-range — you’ll definitely run into it now and then, but it’s not like Smith or Johnson (if you’re looking for Johnson, so is Chad)
• It’s more common in South Africa, partly because of Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the guy who did the first human heart transplant. The name has some Dutch/Afrikaans roots.
• Also seen in the UK, Australia, and Canada with moderate frequency.
Origin-wise, it comes from the Germanic personal name Bernhard (“bear” + “brave/strong”) — which morphed into Barnard in English-speaking countries.
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.
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
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.
1000 years alone is a wildly long time for language. Granted, written language and education are more accessible than ever, so I imagine language evolution will be significantly slower than it once was, but still I found this short of English over the past 1000 years to be really interesting
True! Fad based language spreads like wildfire with modern tech! At the same time, I feel like trends like that fall out of favour just as fast. It's definitely a wild time for language evolution.
3000 years is insanely long for language. Consider that the mother fucking alphabet was invented around 1000 BC*, and basically no languages that anyone still speaks existed in their modern forms. Homer hadn't written the Illiad and the Odyssey yet, and the standard Greek that came to be defined by these works had also yet to develop. If you went back to 1000 BC you'd have no idea what was going on.
*Although previous alphabets existed, the Phoenician alphabet that became the basis for pretty much all modern writing systems in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia was invented around 1100 BC
I know I was just saying 3000 years and basically nobody alive today understands the language. Even people who devote their whole lives to the languages around at that time are basically just making informed guesses on pronunciation and would probably struggle considerably to understand an actual speaker.
Could be even worse than that. You could arrive to find a planet dominated by talking apes with humans living as primitive animals, only to later find that your ship whipped back around and you were on Earth all along.
You know, this is the live-action remake Disney needs to actually make. They own the rights to The Simpsons and Planet of the Apes. They could absolutely make a feature-length Planet of the Apes musical. And I don't want them to use the CGI apes like they use in the modern films. Bring back the 1960s makeup. If you're going to do it, do it right.
I remember one where a sect of humanity was being persecuted, and left to try to find a better life in the stars. They failed to find a life, gave up and returned home, but their interstellar trip consumed so many Earth years that by the time they returned, Earth had moved on from persecution and eagerly welcomed their historical memories.
Sadly, I forget the name; it may have been a short story.
Something similar happens in the sequel to The Forever War. The main character and his wife are fed up living on a colony controlled by the shared conciousness names Man. So they decide to take a ship into near light speed for the equivalent of 300000 years, only to be stopped by god, told god was bored and that he was going to leave them all behind, then changing physics to prevent them from going so far into the future.
3 Body Problem has an interesting take on this. Faster than light travel is not possible but communication is, meaning we’re anxiously preparing for an alien war that won’t happen for 400 years but they can see everything we do in real time thanks to quantum entanglement.
FTL coms are a concession to the story, it would have been terrible without it
IRL quantum entanglement can't ever provide causality breaking info. In very simple terms, you need correlation to know when the data stream began as just observing the resulting spins still seem just as random before and after the event.
In even more simple terms: Whatever message they can send even if pre-agreed on seems like random heat results until you know the exact moment the transmission began, as confirmed by a light lagged message.
In less simple terms, the misunderstanding comes from treating the metaphor of 'flipping the spin north switch' as a literal thing instead of a less-than ideal 'lies to children' of what is actually happening to particles that experience spin transition, and the meaning of 'entangled' is both less and more strange than people understand.
But again, 3 body problem would have been a terrible story without it,t hat's why it's science fiction
From what I've heard the Chinese version is rather literal to the books to a fault.
Having read the books I enjoyed the Netflix series, but understand they made some changes to both adapt it to a series (fine) and made a lot of characters westen (a bit unnecessary maybe).
macguffins are always just to drive the plot forward, their satisfaction as a solution is usually secondary.
In simpler terms, they paint the cover of the comic book first and sometimes overbid for the purpose of sensationalism, so sometimes Superman has to pretend to punch Lois Lane
It's not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin isn't important to the story, it's just there to serve as motivation for the characters. In the Three Body Problem, the mystery of what happened to science is central to the plot of the entire book.
This isn't "pretending to punch Lois Lane". This is "why the hell did Superman just kill Lois Lane!?" The whole plot of the story is that science stops working. Scientists are killing themselves because of it. One of the characters is seeing a countdown when he closes his eyes. Aside from the Three-Body-Problem game parts, the whole rest of the book is structured as a mystery that they're trying to solve. This mystery is the primary motivation for the characters in the book, and it's presented as a mystery for the reader to speculate about.
Basically, the book is structured as if it were a murder on a train, and the whole structure of the story suggests that someone on the train is the murderer. But, it turns out that the murderer is Zeus, who descended from the heavens, killed the murder victim for his own reasons, and left. Ta-da, mystery solved! (And there's the additional bullshit that scientists are committing suicide because their experiments are failing. That's just so ridiculous. Actual scientists would be so excited by unexpected results. The way to upset a scientist wouldn't be to have something appear to break the laws of physics. What would upset real scientists would be a replication crisis: either they can't match someone else's work, or people call into question their work because nobody can match the results they're getting.)
And those are just the problems with the "A" plot. The "B" plot is the ultra-stupid simulation of life on a planet in a 3-body system. You know what life would be like in that kind of system: nonexistent. But no, you're supposed to believe in people being flattened and rehydrated. I mean, come ON. And you're also supposed to believe that people are playing this "game" and loving it. Has the author ever actually played a game? Has the author ever met any people?
The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the science is bad. It's just a bad book. It's a book that dumb people read and they think the author is smart, and if the author is smart the book must be good, it just went above their heads. But, the author isn't smart, the book isn't smart, the book isn't good.
I haven't read the books, but I did watch the show... I enjoyed the first half, but the second half had so much implausible bullshit that I couldn't really recommend it. I mean, the first half also had crazy impossible tech - but I feel that's ok because its part of the setup premise. The stuff I didn't like in the second half was more implausible decision making and strategising (and also implausible uses for impossible tech).
In any case, I really feel like they wasted a strong setup. I was disappointed at the end, and I'm not intending to watch the next session.
Good show, fantastic books. Recommend to anyone reading this comment and are remotely interested in sci-fi. A lot of facinatong ideas explored throughout the series.
That's another solution to the Fermi paradox. FTL travel is impossible, but can't actually be proven to be impossible, so no one wants to be the sucker.
I think that's exactly what one would be hoping for. One does this to escape the reality of human civilization and seek the adventure of building it over again.
It's like a start up. Show up early and buy in on low stocks, work your ass off, retire at 40. I'd assume it's something like that. Pick the best place to build your house, claim all the resources.
The Orville too. And apparently this show called "Ark" too (going by other comments). And in books and video games too. Seems to be a common sci-fi trope.
Yeah, what's the new civilization's tech like? Bound to be more advancements than just travel speed. Do they have sufficiently fast FTL communication with Earth to keep up with the tech advancements?
That's the plot of a nice obscure theatre piece I know, but they don't travel that far, are awake, and see the other ships pass. It's awsome and fun for the audience and super frustrating for the characters.
It's never been officially published and it's not in English - it trully is obscure. It was played several times though with enough success and I do have the whole thing on my computer somewhere, probably (or at least I know who to ask for it). I'm not sure it's worth reading in automatic translation, but if you're interested, I could send it to you.
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.
The real solution to this is simple. You're a ship full of colonists dreaming of settling a new world, right? So go settle a new world! Ask the citizens of your target world for an FTL-capable spaceship, climb aboard, pick a new target further afield, and head off into the wild blue yonder. It seems that's the least they could do in such a situation.
Except the new FTL-capable ships are the result of 3000 years of advancement. You wouldn't even be able to figure out how to use the bathroom, let alone do the navigation and piloting to reach a new planet.
Imagine we had some Egyptians from -1000 BC who suddenly arrived unexpectedly in the modern world. They think Ra, Anubis and Horus control their fates. Iron is the most advanced technology they know of, but you're proposing we make them astronauts?
Yep, and the biggest letdown. I expected the main quest to be meh, but side quests to he pretty fun.
They had the opportunity to create a really cool mission out of this, but instead created one of the most interesting stories and least fun questlines.
It wasn't the only memorable thing for me, but it was memorable. Honestly I still think Starfield is a great basic framework for a video game, I just wish they put an actual finished video game onto that framework
I caught a few early episodes on Syfy channel and they didn't impress me much. After a few days I saw a few more random episodes and started to care and get attached to the story and characters.
I've watched what I think is everything that is out now, 2 seasons I guess. I'm liking it a lot more than I would expect. High potential for it to keep being good. But yeah, the starting episodes are a little slow.
Thanks for the warning but I actually already enjoyed the first episode very much. I like the setting, the characters and their dynamics and I think it has a lot of potential while already being fun to watch. I'm looking forward to the rest of it and thanks again for the recommendation! And by the way: It's renewed for a third season.
Yep, then I'm sure you're gonna like it. I was really surprised in some situations in the plot and like where it's going. At the end of s2 I was craving for more really hard. Very happy for the s3 being approved.
Or worse, you meet the super intelligent giant spider your human ancestor left behind, and you accidentally start a war with them because no one realizes the computer on the ancient satellite is made to behave like the project founder is trying to make first contact.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
The project founder accidentally died, the computer AI fails to keep them alive and the spiders start to think the satellite is a god. Then they enslave the native ants.
The big problem is no one remembered to tell the humans on Earth about the experiment. Or the humans on the generation ship that knew died centuries ago.
:::
EDIT: If you haven’t figured it out, I’m describing the novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Better than the sort of intelligent final evolution of the cat you released when the captain attempted to confiscate it that has a selection of fine outfits and hair gel.
No, and that is based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar which people thought was a rip off of Project Haily Mary by Andy Weir (which I read and loved). When the trailer for Spaceman was released, Weir had to go on social media and tell fans Spaceman of Bohemia was published before his novel.
3000 years of dreaming would radically warp your sense of reality I think. Laying down all those repeating neuron paths century over century I doubt anything would be left of your recollection of the waking world
Waking up would be like being born, nothing would make sense
Surely if you’re sending someone on a 3000 year journey, you’ve prepared for the possibility of making a faster ship in the time between them leaving and arriving at their destination!?
It was was an AE van Vogt story, Far Centaurus. Took me a while to track this down, as all I remembered was the general plot and an orange cover showing a flying astronaut filming a giant sea monster, which I don't think even happens in the book. Van Vogt originally wrote the short story, about a spaceship on a 500-year voyage to Alpha Centauri with a sleeping crew. They arrive to find Earth people who routinely make the trip in hours using FTL, who decided to let the sleeper ship finish its journey. Van Vogt later combined this story with two others into a novel called Quest for the Future - one of the first Science Fiction Book Club books I bought in high school.
I think Terry Pratchett touched on it as well - I think the book was Strata (been a while since I read it). There were arguments about whether to bring the people out of cryosleep due to the effects of culture shock or depression.
“Hard” Sci-Fi stories making a big deal about faster than light not being possible but then treating pods that magically freeze and revive a human body for years as such a triviality that we invented them by 2004 or something in the timeline.
that sounds like a plot hole so let's put some plot into it
a lot of technological advancements happen in times of war, that's when scientists get the funding to make weapons, but that research doesn't go to waste afterwards, the knowledge stays and can help in times of peace
what if the ship was sent, and a great war broke out soon after, all records and those who remembered it were destroyed, all whilst technology advanced becuase of the race to invent new weapons, and now the knowledge is being utilised for a more cheerful cause - space exploration, and FTL travel
the forgotten ship would peacefully sail across the great dark blissfully unaware of what happened, of how their mission has been erased from history, regardless if it was on purpose or accidentally. Their eventual arrival would make news across all human colonies, their language so ancient, their biology similar but in a strange way imperfect, living relics of the old world ripped right out of already faded pages in history, what a shock it would be for both sides of the encounter
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.
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.
Once upon a time that was pretty much the novel I was going to write. Had a bunch of notes and shit. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Now I just hope that happens to Elon and his sperm ark. Wakes from cryo or some shit to find we survived his global winter idea and set his car on a pike in front of Fort Neveragain.
FTL isn't possible, ERBs would pastafy any matter passing through them and there is no way to control the other end, and take Kardashev scale 3 civ at least (and that's even pretending the Kardashev scale isn't the purest daydream fantasy)
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.
I would definitely prefer to be a leader of new world than just be sent to my room.
I guess. I’m more of a space socialist, myself. Silly me always assumed that equality and collaboration would be a precursor to colonization of other worlds. Musk is trying so hard to prove me wrong. Lol
What if you set out with the idea of starting socialist utopia on a new planet and get there to find booming corporate dystopia?
Put me back to sleep and wake me for the revolution.
Let's burn this bitch down and start over with the common man in mind, and the needs of everyone met.
Or let's go find a new planet. With blackjack, and hookers.
I don't know how you can look around at the world and think that will ever be a thing.
If people stopped starving, beating,.and raping children for 2 generations it would be possible. Humans have no need to compete with each other for survival already. If we could just get a generation or two with minimal human inflicted trauma it would be obvious.
Seems possible to me.
How do you propose we achieve this? We'd have to isolate a group of people who've never experienced abuse and set them up somewhere the rest of us could never come in contact with them again.
Step one: School breakfast and lunch for all. Food benefits for struggling families on top of that.
Let's get it done.
Space is big. You can always go out and find a different place.
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.
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
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."
Curious that the star is called Barnard because that’s the name of the doctor that first performed a successful heart transplant.
I think its just a common surname
I consulted my Ivy League homeslice Chad G.P.T. III about the surname Barnard and he promptly provided the following response:
“… the surname Barnard, it’s not super common, but it’s not rare either. Here’s a quick breakdown: • In the U.S., it ranks around #2,500 to #3,000 in terms of frequency. That puts it in the mid-range — you’ll definitely run into it now and then, but it’s not like Smith or Johnson (if you’re looking for Johnson, so is Chad) • It’s more common in South Africa, partly because of Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the guy who did the first human heart transplant. The name has some Dutch/Afrikaans roots. • Also seen in the UK, Australia, and Canada with moderate frequency.
Origin-wise, it comes from the Germanic personal name Bernhard (“bear” + “brave/strong”) — which morphed into Barnard in English-speaking countries.
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.
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.
That’s on you bruh. You shouldn’t have placed that bumper sticker that said, “if this spacecrafts a rockin, don’t come a knockin”.
That was the generational spaceship lagging behind you on their 30rd generation, now mutants
Omfg ugh why did i do that!
Ikr? Rude.
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.
Not only that, but 3000 years into the future, language has changed so much that the plural of SHEEP is now SHOOP
That's right, androids do dream of electric SHOOP
Shit's wild yo
1000 years alone is a wildly long time for language. Granted, written language and education are more accessible than ever, so I imagine language evolution will be significantly slower than it once was, but still I found this short of English over the past 1000 years to be really interesting
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WLSBCs5vcgQ
Have you seen how fast slang is evolving currently? I can't even imagine translating something like "chat, am I cooked?" to my grandma.
Also on a side note; have you noticed the rise in lisps?
"Hey folks, am I in trouble?"
Riddle me this, Lads: do I find myself in a pickle?
True! Fad based language spreads like wildfire with modern tech! At the same time, I feel like trends like that fall out of favour just as fast. It's definitely a wild time for language evolution.
3000 years is insanely long for language. Consider that the mother fucking alphabet was invented around 1000 BC*, and basically no languages that anyone still speaks existed in their modern forms. Homer hadn't written the Illiad and the Odyssey yet, and the standard Greek that came to be defined by these works had also yet to develop. If you went back to 1000 BC you'd have no idea what was going on.
*Although previous alphabets existed, the Phoenician alphabet that became the basis for pretty much all modern writing systems in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia was invented around 1100 BC
Dude, listen to 1000 CE English. It's 90% jibberish even at that point.
so are tiktok comment sections, your point?
I know I was just saying 3000 years and basically nobody alive today understands the language. Even people who devote their whole lives to the languages around at that time are basically just making informed guesses on pronunciation and would probably struggle considerably to understand an actual speaker.
It's also possible that audio recording being a thing that exists will slow changes in language as well.
fr
Shoop da whoop?
Well at least you didn’t have to spend the rest of your life building civilisation from scratch.
Yeah but it's all strip malls and Arby's.
Could be even worse than that. You could arrive to find a planet dominated by talking apes with humans living as primitive animals, only to later find that your ship whipped back around and you were on Earth all along.
I love you, Dr. Zaius!
You know, this is the live-action remake Disney needs to actually make. They own the rights to The Simpsons and Planet of the Apes. They could absolutely make a feature-length Planet of the Apes musical. And I don't want them to use the CGI apes like they use in the modern films. Bring back the 1960s makeup. If you're going to do it, do it right.
That'd be why I'd sign up
Couldn't be bothered to pick him up on the way.
I read an interesting book based on this premise called The Forever War, it’s been awhile but it was pretty good!
Similar premise but with soldiers sent to fight a war and eventually finding it already over.
I remember one where a sect of humanity was being persecuted, and left to try to find a better life in the stars. They failed to find a life, gave up and returned home, but their interstellar trip consumed so many Earth years that by the time they returned, Earth had moved on from persecution and eagerly welcomed their historical memories.
Sadly, I forget the name; it may have been a short story.
This sounds like Methuselah's Children
Something similar happens in the sequel to The Forever War. The main character and his wife are fed up living on a colony controlled by the shared conciousness names Man. So they decide to take a ship into near light speed for the equivalent of 300000 years, only to be stopped by god, told god was bored and that he was going to leave them all behind, then changing physics to prevent them from going so far into the future.
I do this with bill collectors.
You might also enjoy The Shoulders of Giants.
Thanks for reminding me of this one. It was a really good read.
That was good, thank you!
"fuck you, Sir!"
3 Body Problem has an interesting take on this. Faster than light travel is not possible but communication is, meaning we’re anxiously preparing for an alien war that won’t happen for 400 years but they can see everything we do in real time thanks to quantum entanglement.
FTL coms are a concession to the story, it would have been terrible without it
IRL quantum entanglement can't ever provide causality breaking info. In very simple terms, you need correlation to know when the data stream began as just observing the resulting spins still seem just as random before and after the event.
In even more simple terms: Whatever message they can send even if pre-agreed on seems like random heat results until you know the exact moment the transmission began, as confirmed by a light lagged message.
In less simple terms, the misunderstanding comes from treating the metaphor of 'flipping the spin north switch' as a literal thing instead of a less-than ideal 'lies to children' of what is actually happening to particles that experience spin transition, and the meaning of 'entangled' is both less and more strange than people understand.
But again, 3 body problem would have been a terrible story without it,t hat's why it's science fiction
Which version of the series is better to watch? The American version or the Chinese version?
From what I've heard the Chinese version is rather literal to the books to a fault.
Having read the books I enjoyed the Netflix series, but understand they made some changes to both adapt it to a series (fine) and made a lot of characters westen (a bit unnecessary maybe).
I am excited for season 2
Aren't they the same but just dubbed in english? I picked the english one as I didn't want to read subtitles
Two different shows
Well the Chinese version on Prime doesn't have any English subtitles so I guess it depends on if you can speak Mandarin
It does have English subtitles though...?
Weird, mine didn't.
Good series, I always recommend the books but haven’t seen the show yet
I managed to finish the first book, but it was so terrible that I wasn't willing to read any more or watch the show.
The whole book sets up a big mystery, then solves that mystery with the biggest deux ex machina bullshit ever committed to paper.
macguffins are always just to drive the plot forward, their satisfaction as a solution is usually secondary.
In simpler terms, they paint the cover of the comic book first and sometimes overbid for the purpose of sensationalism, so sometimes Superman has to pretend to punch Lois Lane
It's not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin isn't important to the story, it's just there to serve as motivation for the characters. In the Three Body Problem, the mystery of what happened to science is central to the plot of the entire book.
This isn't "pretending to punch Lois Lane". This is "why the hell did Superman just kill Lois Lane!?" The whole plot of the story is that science stops working. Scientists are killing themselves because of it. One of the characters is seeing a countdown when he closes his eyes. Aside from the Three-Body-Problem game parts, the whole rest of the book is structured as a mystery that they're trying to solve. This mystery is the primary motivation for the characters in the book, and it's presented as a mystery for the reader to speculate about.
Basically, the book is structured as if it were a murder on a train, and the whole structure of the story suggests that someone on the train is the murderer. But, it turns out that the murderer is Zeus, who descended from the heavens, killed the murder victim for his own reasons, and left. Ta-da, mystery solved! (And there's the additional bullshit that scientists are committing suicide because their experiments are failing. That's just so ridiculous. Actual scientists would be so excited by unexpected results. The way to upset a scientist wouldn't be to have something appear to break the laws of physics. What would upset real scientists would be a replication crisis: either they can't match someone else's work, or people call into question their work because nobody can match the results they're getting.)
And those are just the problems with the "A" plot. The "B" plot is the ultra-stupid simulation of life on a planet in a 3-body system. You know what life would be like in that kind of system: nonexistent. But no, you're supposed to believe in people being flattened and rehydrated. I mean, come ON. And you're also supposed to believe that people are playing this "game" and loving it. Has the author ever actually played a game? Has the author ever met any people?
The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the science is bad. It's just a bad book. It's a book that dumb people read and they think the author is smart, and if the author is smart the book must be good, it just went above their heads. But, the author isn't smart, the book isn't smart, the book isn't good.
I haven't read the books, but I did watch the show... I enjoyed the first half, but the second half had so much implausible bullshit that I couldn't really recommend it. I mean, the first half also had crazy impossible tech - but I feel that's ok because its part of the setup premise. The stuff I didn't like in the second half was more implausible decision making and strategising (and also implausible uses for impossible tech).
In any case, I really feel like they wasted a strong setup. I was disappointed at the end, and I'm not intending to watch the next session.
You would hate the books. The author just pulls tech out of his ass constantly.
Good show, fantastic books. Recommend to anyone reading this comment and are remotely interested in sci-fi. A lot of facinatong ideas explored throughout the series.
Technically you just slept through the whole thing
The Fry Maneuver
That's another solution to the Fermi paradox. FTL travel is impossible, but can't actually be proven to be impossible, so no one wants to be the sucker.
Don’t have to fll. Just have to be a third faster to give them 1000 years head start
How is that not great for me? Setting up a colony must be hard work and all around pretty horrible.
I think that's exactly what one would be hoping for. One does this to escape the reality of human civilization and seek the adventure of building it over again.
It's like a start up. Show up early and buy in on low stocks, work your ass off, retire at 40. I'd assume it's something like that. Pick the best place to build your house, claim all the resources.
Or maybe he just wanted solitude.
Cryosleep in earth would be pretty baller. Imagine all the people who'd sign up to just skip ahead 50 years.
What’s the name of the movie?
Ty !
Watch it, and suddenly dozens of memes will make sense.
Fast and Furious 27
Relevant XKCD
lmao havent seen that one. "Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed."
This little detour...
I mean if they get there ang there are like ruins and remnants, that's going to be a good sci-fi horror-detective-thriller story
At least you aren’t a soldier ready to restart a war that’s been settled
Babylon 5 had an episode on this. A sleeper ship was launched and a few years later we got jump gate tech from an alien race.
The Orville too. And apparently this show called "Ark" too (going by other comments). And in books and video games too. Seems to be a common sci-fi trope.
That's how they found Khan in Star Trek.
It was also the plot of a sci fi story Far Centaurus by AE Van Vogt.
it'd still be cool as fuck, i wouldn't even be mad
Yeah, what's the new civilization's tech like? Bound to be more advancements than just travel speed. Do they have sufficiently fast FTL communication with Earth to keep up with the tech advancements?
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.
With some variations, used already a few times in games and series.
That's the plot of a nice obscure theatre piece I know, but they don't travel that far, are awake, and see the other ships pass. It's awsome and fun for the audience and super frustrating for the characters.
This is a take I never saw before on this matter. Is there a source?
It's never been officially published and it's not in English - it trully is obscure. It was played several times though with enough success and I do have the whole thing on my computer somewhere, probably (or at least I know who to ask for it). I'm not sure it's worth reading in automatic translation, but if you're interested, I could send it to you.
Oh, then it could be difficult. Thanks anyway.
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.
The real solution to this is simple. You're a ship full of colonists dreaming of settling a new world, right? So go settle a new world! Ask the citizens of your target world for an FTL-capable spaceship, climb aboard, pick a new target further afield, and head off into the wild blue yonder. It seems that's the least they could do in such a situation.
Except the new FTL-capable ships are the result of 3000 years of advancement. You wouldn't even be able to figure out how to use the bathroom, let alone do the navigation and piloting to reach a new planet.
Imagine we had some Egyptians from -1000 BC who suddenly arrived unexpectedly in the modern world. They think Ra, Anubis and Horus control their fates. Iron is the most advanced technology they know of, but you're proposing we make them astronauts?
Honestly, that would be fucking hilarious to watch.
That was the only memorable part of Starfield for me.
Yep, and the biggest letdown. I expected the main quest to be meh, but side quests to he pretty fun.
They had the opportunity to create a really cool mission out of this, but instead created one of the most interesting stories and least fun questlines.
It wasn't the only memorable thing for me, but it was memorable. Honestly I still think Starfield is a great basic framework for a video game, I just wish they put an actual finished video game onto that framework
So you're telling me, someone else did all the work already, I don't have to lift a finger? Awesome.
The Ark, tv series.
This was also an episode of The Orville.
Also an episode of Babylon 5.
Is it good? I'm looking for a new series to watch
Very very very good
I caught a few early episodes on Syfy channel and they didn't impress me much. After a few days I saw a few more random episodes and started to care and get attached to the story and characters.
I've watched what I think is everything that is out now, 2 seasons I guess. I'm liking it a lot more than I would expect. High potential for it to keep being good. But yeah, the starting episodes are a little slow.
Thanks for the warning but I actually already enjoyed the first episode very much. I like the setting, the characters and their dynamics and I think it has a lot of potential while already being fun to watch. I'm looking forward to the rest of it and thanks again for the recommendation! And by the way: It's renewed for a third season.
Yep, then I'm sure you're gonna like it. I was really surprised in some situations in the plot and like where it's going. At the end of s2 I was craving for more really hard. Very happy for the s3 being approved.
I did like the gag where the robot didn't understand the boundaries of practical jokes and amputated someone's leg as a prank.
I finished watching it a few weeks ago and I don't remember that 😅. But I likely skipped a few episodes here and there, so no surprises there.
Here you go!
Oh you were talking about that series. I've never watched it. But that fun.
Ah. Different comment chain.
Or worse, you meet the super intelligent giant spider your human ancestor left behind, and you accidentally start a war with them because no one realizes the computer on the ancient satellite is made to behave like the project founder is trying to make first contact.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler The project founder accidentally died, the computer AI fails to keep them alive and the spiders start to think the satellite is a god. Then they enslave the native ants.
The big problem is no one remembered to tell the humans on Earth about the experiment. Or the humans on the generation ship that knew died centuries ago. :::
EDIT: If you haven’t figured it out, I’m describing the novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Or in a similar vein, the ship's cat has evolved into a suave humanoid with impeccable taste in fashion.
The ant powered consciousness was pretty cool 😁
Paul likes this and attempts to kill you whilst flirting heavily
Better than the sort of intelligent final evolution of the cat you released when the captain attempted to confiscate it that has a selection of fine outfits and hair gel.
I thought you were talking about the Adam Sander movie Spaceman
No, and that is based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar which people thought was a rip off of Project Haily Mary by Andy Weir (which I read and loved). When the trailer for Spaceman was released, Weir had to go on social media and tell fans Spaceman of Bohemia was published before his novel.
EDIT: I did not read Spaceman of Bohemia.
Do I dream on the trip? Do I remember any of the dreams? Thatd be pretty cool.
Yes, but all your dreams are about the Teletubbies for some inexplicable reason.
Rule34 Teletubbies for 3000 years. And you're in the cuck chair for that entire ride.
3000 years of dreaming would radically warp your sense of reality I think. Laying down all those repeating neuron paths century over century I doubt anything would be left of your recollection of the waking world
Waking up would be like being born, nothing would make sense
Aaaand now I have a new story idea
Surely if you’re sending someone on a 3000 year journey, you’ve prepared for the possibility of making a faster ship in the time between them leaving and arriving at their destination!?
People intrinsically know their some of their loved ones are going to die before them, that doesn't mean they won't cry when it happens.
I'm psyched. Less work for me!
But at least your great great great granddaughter is pretty fine 👉😏👉
"what are you doing multigenerational step bro?"
Also can someone check if I turned off the stove? Thx
I think either Asimov or A.E. van Vogt wrote a short story with this premise already back in the late 1940s.
It was was an AE van Vogt story, Far Centaurus. Took me a while to track this down, as all I remembered was the general plot and an orange cover showing a flying astronaut filming a giant sea monster, which I don't think even happens in the book. Van Vogt originally wrote the short story, about a spaceship on a 500-year voyage to Alpha Centauri with a sleeping crew. They arrive to find Earth people who routinely make the trip in hours using FTL, who decided to let the sleeper ship finish its journey. Van Vogt later combined this story with two others into a novel called Quest for the Future - one of the first Science Fiction Book Club books I bought in high school.
I think Terry Pratchett touched on it as well - I think the book was Strata (been a while since I read it). There were arguments about whether to bring the people out of cryosleep due to the effects of culture shock or depression.
Is HFY a community over here yet?
.world has one
Hyper force yesterday?
Hot Female Yetis.
Thats better tbh
Humanity Fuck Yeah! It is a science fiction writing community.
You make it to earth and you forgot the historical reason why you avoid earth. It is a prison planet
Or you wake up and there's nothing there because that star died a thousand years ago and the light from the supernova hasn't reached earth yet.
Fortunately that really couldn't happen. Supergiant stars are unlikely to be promising colonization targets.
Back to the future that is less distant than the future you wanted to go. A Hollywood classic.
“Hard” Sci-Fi stories making a big deal about faster than light not being possible but then treating pods that magically freeze and revive a human body for years as such a triviality that we invented them by 2004 or something in the timeline.
This is the plot of a short story, Far Centaurus, that I read a long time ago.
If they had faster ship technology, surely they’d be able to locate the older ships in transit and relieve the astronauts of their duty.
that sounds like a plot hole so let's put some plot into it
a lot of technological advancements happen in times of war, that's when scientists get the funding to make weapons, but that research doesn't go to waste afterwards, the knowledge stays and can help in times of peace
what if the ship was sent, and a great war broke out soon after, all records and those who remembered it were destroyed, all whilst technology advanced becuase of the race to invent new weapons, and now the knowledge is being utilised for a more cheerful cause - space exploration, and FTL travel
the forgotten ship would peacefully sail across the great dark blissfully unaware of what happened, of how their mission has been erased from history, regardless if it was on purpose or accidentally. Their eventual arrival would make news across all human colonies, their language so ancient, their biology similar but in a strange way imperfect, living relics of the old world ripped right out of already faded pages in history, what a shock it would be for both sides of the encounter
Instant celebrity
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.
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.
But at least you arrive well rested.
Its like taking Amtrak instead of a flight!
Got any older memes pug?
You gotta have a wake up protocol.
Oh that is absolutely brilliant. I never thought of that 😆
Vance Astrovik
Once upon a time that was pretty much the novel I was going to write. Had a bunch of notes and shit. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Now I just hope that happens to Elon and his sperm ark. Wakes from cryo or some shit to find we survived his global winter idea and set his car on a pike in front of Fort Neveragain.
I'd hope he he's woken by an alien species far in the future, who are about to dissect him, for science....
Go read The Freeze Frame Revolution!
I always feel like Peter Watts is severely under appreciated
FTL isn't possible, ERBs would pastafy any matter passing through them and there is no way to control the other end, and take Kardashev scale 3 civ at least (and that's even pretending the Kardashev scale isn't the purest daydream fantasy)
Christopher Mason understands the Relativity of that situation. https://relativitypodcast.com/
Where does it say the first ship is traveling near the speed of light?
What the hell is this crap
It got deleted so of course I NEED to know!
Some bot account claiming to be a struggling single mum and wanting donations 😭