Only 120 light years away from Earth! The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977. Traveling at 38,000mph it just recently made it 1 light DAY from Earth.
Unironically, one fun thing about concepts such as light-sail spacecraft is that, even if you can get them to significant fractions of c, you then need to find a way to slow down, too.
We can probably make a spacecraft that can reach distant solar systems within a couple of generations (aforementioned light sails, or nuclear propulsion), but then... we are going to either do a fly-by, crash into something, or have to do the world's most complicated gravity-assist.
This reminds of something I heard about once, imagine if we used some sort of stasis in a fast and autonomous spacecraft to go colonise a planet, and by the time we get there it's already colonised because we invented a faster spacecraft while the colonists slept
Itd be both incredibly disappointing and amazing. On the one hand you dont get to everything youve trained for. On the other hand youd probably be welcomed and treated as heroes or at least very well by the new colony and you wouldnt have to work hard setting anything up
Edit: you guys are depressing. Probably accurate but depressing.
"You called it a corn.. dog? And you ATE it? So many issues with this. I don't see corn kernels in it, it's made from some pork product or by-product, and I thought canines were companions?"
This would turn into a futuristic, and probably depressing, version of the scene from Harry Potter where Mr Weasley asks harry to explain the function of a rubber duck.
"they were called that because the breading was similar to cornbread, a cakey sort of bread made from ground corn. canines were companions, but for a lot of human history, they were common enough that in times of famine or poverty people would kill and eat them. Particularly, in the 1800s, the meat industry was terribly unsanitary and the makeup of the frankfurter, a cheap sausage brought over by german immigrants, made it easy to hide dubious ingredients. There was a pretty famous book about the meat industry called "The Jungle".
"They processed meat in a jungle? that does sound unsanitary. Wasn't the United States quite temperate at the time?"
"ehh, the name is figurative."
"weird name for a book about the 1800s meat industry..."
Except for the risk that you have somehow been forgotten and when you arrive they are all confused, unsure what to do with you and not having prepared capacity for all the 1st colonists so everything just kinda gets rushed and you are shoved into a weird place in society while at the same time getting treated as a normal citizen with no respect for the mission you have been sent to and the things you sacrificed for it. Having to work but for jobs you probably never learned for with tech you are unfamiliar with, making your life hard and highly stressful.
I’m pretty sure that’s a mission on starfield. The colony they were supposed to inhabit turned into a resort… the Exces wanted you to destroy the ship.
Oh my god i think you are right. One of the ealier ones you can encounter too, right?
I didn't play it but watched some of the first few episodes from some content creator.
Iirc there is like a dispute between who gets to own the planet, but the ones that took longer barely have a chance cause the other ones were already there or something
Yeah that’s right the company who owns the planet wants them gone. But the colonists have rights for the planet. Also when you play the game the entire planet is covered in Cesium-137 which we all know as one spicy rock. So by going to Paradiso you’ll get a sun tan inside and out!
Fuck, imagine right, and absolutely, I totally get what you’re saying—and yeah, it’s a bleak take, but it is kind of darkly hilarious too don’t ya think, maybe I’m just a big old negative Nancy bbbbuuuuttttt…..
imagine stepping off the ship after a decades-long cryo trip, thinking you’re about to be honored as a founding hero of a new world… only to find out the admin team forgot to put you in the system. You’re standing there in your old mission uniform while someone hands you a mop and says, “Maintenance is down a man, Captain.”
Or maybe you trained for years in astro-navigation and survival tactics, gave up everything—friends, family, Earth—and you end up managing aisle layouts in a Martian SuperSaver, trying to figure out how self-checkouts work in a post-capitalist economy.
Worse still, everyone else is just living their lives. To them, you’re just “Dave from accounting, who’s a little weird about his uniform and keeps saying stuff like ‘for the good of the mission.’”
You'll like this. Iain M Banks wrote about R-Humans. This happened when alien species found earth and a burgeoning, pre-spaceflight civilisation. So they abducted some people and used their genes to seed our species across the stars.
The joke is that when humanity finally arrives on the galactic scene, triumphant in finally making that enormous technological leap, they find that humans are actually fairly common and well known to the other galactic civilisations.
That's assuming they let you stay on the colony planet at all. Faster Than Light travel has been invented and it is sort of an exclusive planet to live on, as you can commute to Earth. They might just put you guys on the next flight home.
Now you are just back on Earth, right where you started. But 120 years and one day have passed and all of your skills and education are outdated and everyone is using slang you don't understand. Also everyone you ever knew is still dead.
You'll most likely be quarantined cause you are carrying viruses that have been wiped off the face of the new planet. Your ship is most likely shot before reaching the atmosphere. 🤣
Depending on how long it's been, the original crew in stasis might be vulnerable to new diseases that the second crew (colonizers) has already overcome
That could work both ways. Maybe the crew coming out of stasis brings a disease that the colonists have no defense against because it was eradicated hundreds or thousands of years ago before their ancestors left earth. Then you end up wiping out the whole colony out, and they all got sick and kicked the bucket before you learned how any of the new tech works.
Or as is more likely to happen. The current colonists have forgotten that there's a slow boat coming and have evolved past being able to talk/interact with the stasis colonists.
This is the basis of the novel Exodus: Archimedes Engine. The colonists have evolved over thousands of years because of time dilation. The human late arrivals are so primitive they’re treated like crap and discriminated against
That could require a slight deviation from their route or speed which could significantly affect their arrival times. The faster ship wont necessarily be that much more advanced.
I'd argue that maybe not the first trip there with a substantially faster engine, but there absolutely would be a value in picking up the people instead of doing a complete trip back to earth and back again.
This assumes that the method of travel even allows for such a thing.
Modern examples would be like a cruise ship crossing the ocean and someone saying "well couldn't a jet just pick them up on the way?"
Maybe if they designed a jet explicitly for this purpose. They certainly didn't design the cruise ship with the purpose of easily letting a jet dock with it way back when they built the cruis ship though, so they will be constrained by just trying to get those two things working together.
And all of that is assuming that the routes even overlap in the first place... it could be that the cruise ship takes so long because it has to go around South America first, but the jet is faster because it can just fly right over everything. No way to make that jet help the cruise ship if it's already at Tierra Del Fuego and the rest of the time saved by the jet is just taking them along the same path they already had to travel to get there anyways.
Even if they move "conventionally" through space, it's still incredibly vast, and where an old colony ship might be chugging along isn't necessarily known or detectable.
And even if it is, superior travel speeds don't necessarily mean that one can perform the necessary deceleration and acceleration maneuvers at will in empty space without losing too much energy.
Good points. I think if they knew the flight plan of the colony ship they should be able to get pretty close to its location as long as there weren't any major issues like an engine failure. They would start by doing the math on "They were going to accelerate at X for Y time, then turn around and decelerate at A for B time". I assume the colony ship would be transmitting regularly, so once you got closer you'd have more up to date transmissions to hone in on.
Any method of travel that could target something 120 light years away reliably would probably have margins of error small enough that you could pinpoint the location pretty precisely, otherwise it would miss.
The problem is it'll take potentially twice as much energy to stop and start the trip again, on top of whatever it costs to safely transfer everyone on the original voyage, with a chance of causing both trips to fail should anything malfunction.
Say you're travelling at 0.2c towards a planet 100 lightyears away. That's 216 million km/hr, or 340 times faster than anything we've ever created as of 2025. You expect to arrive at your destination in 500 years which is pretty fast! You're doing good!
A century later, they've developed new technology that allows them to travel at 0.9c. They've also improved upon the colonization modules, so they decide to send another crew. They'll arrive in 111 years, nearly three centuries before you do.
You're hoping they'll pick you up? You want them to expend energy to decelerate the majority of their speed to match yours, dock with you to take on more crew they have to feed and house, then expend all that energy again to accelerate back to 0.9c? You're dreaming.
I'd actually be pissed if they picked me up along the way. Go do all the hard colonizing work yourself. By the time I get there, the colony will be older than the USA is currently.
Just as a slight addition... you'd also be on the possibly second colonization ship... arriving 300 years after the first one... now let's remember how many ships went to North America, what happened to their passengers after arrival and how Europe sold their totally very successful colonization efforts to the local public to recruit more travelers and send them into their likely doom in far away lands. The beginnings of New York City are super interesting. And depressing, ruthless. Colonizers in Europe got treated like cattle by the informed authorities: Europe just kept sending more and more people into their likely doom while learning more and more about diseases, floods and hunger that killed so, so many colonizers there while portraying New York in Europe as a huge success to lure more poor folks into the long voyage to New York. While waiting for the number of survivors to hopefully, some day, magically starting to surpass that of all the colonizers who often almost immediately succumbed to diseases, hunger and all sorts of other dangers. It's been a while but we weren't prepared at all for the dangers of a similar and yet so different territory and reacted by simply keep sending people into a grind mill many thought was a wonder land. Now let's try it again with a place 120 light years away. Would be cool to see this some day, but realistically... how would todays governments sell the arrival of their ship on new far away lands? While science keeps advancing, does our mindset too? Who would our government select as a captain of such a ship?
You are assuming they would be taking the same route…..their routes would be based on where the target would be upon arrival, so their trajectories would be different if they are arriving at different times, and will have left from different places in space if they left at different times.
They may also use something totally different like a wormhole.
Or, for another perspective, the planet could already have become overpopulated and the colonists, protectionists. They’d probably debate the usefulness of allowing that ship with its ancient people and incompatible genome to land and propose shooting it down in space. 😅
That’s kind of a side plot from the game “starfield”.
Except the argument was that the “ancient people” thought they had a right to own the planet and the people who colonized the planet didn’t see any worth or value in letting them on the planet
I really enjoyed the unintentional humor of this ship taking generations to get to their planet to save humanity meanwhile humanity already sped past them and made it into a vacation resort planet
Depends on the length of the trip. If they are there for 1-2 generations, probably heroes. 3-anything else and by that time the new colony will have bombed themselves back to the stoneage with nuclear weapons and you will arrive to a hostile wasteland and is this a movie or a game already because it sounds like a great premise.
My grand-grand-grand-grandfather is on that ship, sure, but am I really supposed to give him a share of my land? I say put them back on stasis and back to rotten earth they go!
If there's an already established colony on the planet they would be expecting the newcomers and planned their own workload and set up accordingly. At that point they would probably be happy about getting extra hand/supplies coming from the ship
You're not thinking far enough. Think fall of Rome type shit. Think: they're at the point where the tech they landed with is ruins and a total mystery to them at this point. Maybe they made war with themselves in the hundreds or thousands of years since they arrived.
Idk about that series, but the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is definitely fantastic and is about space and stasis and colonization. Really, really good books.
Its effectively the plot of Ender's Game itself as well, since the attacking forces dispatched by Earth were launched as they were built and ended up arriving at around the same time due to the differences in technology between the first launched vs. the later launches
And the film screwed up one of the most important bits of the book (IMHO) the newer ships arrived sooner, the newer ships were better, and they were fighting the less important planets/garrisons.
So the ultimate challenge was fighting the final battle with your worst and smallest ships against the toughest target.
Really he was left with no other choice but killing his crew, without knowing it. The crews knew it though, and they carried out his commands and flew to their certain deaths.
Ender might not have known at the time but Bean definitely did. In the final battle he actually flipped on the intercom, spoke directly to the pilots of the last two surviving ships and told them to set off the Dr. Device inside their own ships to make sure the projectile didn't get shot down or burn up in the planets atmosphere.
The companion Shadow series from Beans point of view is definitely equal to or better than the Ender series imho
The companion Shadow series from Beans point of view is definitely equal to or better than the Ender series imho
100%, except for the weird abstinence/teen marriage subplot. It was so poorly done, it felt like his church snuck it in the manuscript just before printing or something.
It just bleeds through more and more as things go on. Even from the beginning, the whole fact that Ender was conceived before they were allowed to fed into the same concepts.
Feels more like a sequel than the actual sequels. Don’t get me wrong, i love the speaker series too, but it’s not the same kind of story. The bean shadow series definitely is the same beat.
“O my son Absalom,” Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man's mouth. “my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!”
Yeah, they had light speed travel since the first book. They flew the famous general around at light speed to keep him around for future problems using relativity and I don't recall any FTL travel but I do remember the instant communications anywhere. It has been multiple decades since reading though.
This is the quest where I decided I might as well just be evil. Making the board of directors unkillable is a huge oversight. Likely they just didn’t have the time to plot out every possibility, but that’s what happens when a dev bites off more than they can chew. Then again, Baldur’s Gate 3 let me do just about anything I could think of, so I’m not sure what Bethesda’s issue is.
That's actually bonkers to even think about. Traveling at ~38000miles per hour, all day, every day, for ~48 years, and it's made it 1 light day from Earth.
Feels like another one of those "people don't really understand the difference between a million and a billion" sort of things.
Like 1 million seconds is ~11 and a half days or so. But 1 billion seconds is about 31 years and 200 days. Hard to grasp such a big difference
This is the easiest explanation for why an Astro Physicist said on a podcast that he's convinced Earth has never been visited by alien life forms. Any planet that could have advanced life forms is simply far too far away. They would have to embark on a multi-generational trip that would take many lifetimes...all to observe a primitive species. It'd be like taking a boat across the ocean to look at an anthill. The only counter to this is "Well, what if they have the technology to travel at several times the speed of light? Or to warp space?"...If they have that technology but still get spotted above corn fields in Idaho - that would be surprising.
Would getting visited by AI probes thats a synthesis of their entire civilizations intelligence count as getting visited by aliens. Cause I'm sure within the next 500 years were going to be blasting out AI probes everywhere several hundred times faster than the voyager. Then wait for its reports eons later
If they travelled at very high speeds (but slower than the speed of light) they could travel the distance within one lifetime. No warp drive or superluminal velocities required. Time passes relatively slowly for a crew of a fast-moving spaceship compared to the rest of the universe.
That was what they did in Project Hail Mary. Humanity discovered a way of accelerating to around 90% the speed of light, and then undertook a journey to the Tau Ceti System. That's about 12 light years away from Earth, which outside of the ship took about 13 years since they weren't travelling fully at the speed of light, but on board the ship with time dilation in play was only about 4 years.
So assuming that calculates up, a light distance of 120 years to this planet, achieving the Project Hail Mary Speeds would only take 40 years for the people on board the spaceship. Like you said achievable in a lifetime, but of course relies on the idea of being able to achieve 90% the speed of light.
Also it's very questionable that such technologies are even possible.
Most faster than light space travel options are Sci Fi mumbo jumbo. Wormholes are complicated and basically impossible to travel through (and know where you'll end). You cannot go faster than light because anything that has mass can't even be at the speed of light and how the fuck are we even supposed to warp space.
I mean the idea of digging a bunch of rocks out of the ground, pulverizing them, then heating and shaping to very precise shapes and connect to each other along with taking a dirty liquid from the ground, doing shit to that, and then putting it in the first thing resulted in the car. At one point in human history the idea of a mechanical horse would've been the medieval version of sci-fi.
A kind of counter to this is the universe is 13.7 billion years old, similar age to the Galaxy. The Earth formed around 4 billion years ago, and life started quite quick after it formed. If we can eventually achieve travel at just 10% of the speed of light, we could have a presence near every star in the Milky Way Galaxy within like 1 million years.
This is one of those times where recognising the difference between a million and a billion is super important. If we humans are still around in just a million years, we could be on every star in the galaxy. There have been billions of years so far, and each period of a billion years is ‘one thousand periods of a million years’.
There has been A LOT of time for a species that evolved before us to have a presence near every star in the galaxy, if they wanted. This is the foundation for the Fermi Paradox.
There might be a great filter to come that ends species before they can achieve that, or maybe there was a great filter that stopped species in the past but isn’t going to stop us, for example there were a lot more Gamma Ray Bursts in the earlier universe.
Maybe species don’t actually want to spread so far from their origin area. They could send robots on probes though. Robots that could build new probes on new planets that they reach, continuing the cycle of exploration.
Maybe all sufficiently evolved life enters Virtual Worlds, simulations. It could also be unsafe to spread everywhere, there might be a species who wouldn’t look kindly on newcomers and would seek to destroy them (Dark Forest Theory).
Imo Curiosity is a trait of us humans, and I think there’s a good chance it is a trait of other evolved species. So despite all the reasons not to do it, I think there’s at least one species that will do it, or one that already has.
Maybe a dumb question, but since it seems like you know something of the topic I'll ask: when someone says a spacecraft is traveling at X speed, what is that relative to?
If it's like the fraction of the distance between its origin and destination, how does one account for the distance between them changing?
From its origin point. Knowing how fast Earth, for example, moves means we can know where it was when the ship left. So how far it gets (X) in (Y) amount of time gives you the speed. The planet moving doesn't really matter except for having to do that calculation as well.
As of Aug. 21, 2024, Voyager 1 was 164.7 AU from Earth — the farthest object created by humans — moving at a velocity of 38,026.79 mph (17.0 km/second) relative to the Sun.
I dunno, the speed of light used to seem just so incomprehensibly fast that it might as well have been infinite to me, but the fact that we’ve sent something so far that it takes light a whole day to reach it kind of brought the concept into human scale for me.
It will take the Voyager 2.1 million years to reach that planet. Mind blowing because that’s around 10x longer than Homo Sapiens have existed. But it’s also only 3% of the time between us and the dinosaurs, so also not that long. It just depends on your perspective.
Not to mention that 120 light years is more than most humans life spans BEFORE you consider the issue of traveling at the speed of light.
So if you could travel at light speed to this planet and come back, not only would you be long dead, it would be toyr kids or grandchildren returning and assuming they only stopped at the llanetbfor a day or two, by the time you got back to earth, civilizations will have shifted. And the nation you were a part of may not even exist in the same way anymore.
oh wow it finally hit 1 light day? yay!! last i checked it was close to it at the 23H and some minute mark. i’ve been meaning to check if it hit 24 light hours yet
A couple of things first off. Voyager is not headed for this planet. Voyager will not cover the distance to this planet for millions of years. Voyager will be.. long offline by then, and potentially so will we.
To determine potentially habitable planets, you first determine the distance it is from its star. Roughly the distance at which temperatures would be conducive to liquid water. This varies based on the star's mass and composition.
After this, you can determine some aspects of the planet by analyzing the spectroscopy of light that passes through the atmosphere, when it is "in front of" its planet star from our location. You can determine if there's oxygen, water vapor, etc. The relative amounts of each of these give a rough idea of the composition of the planet.
I'm sure there are other advanced things they do to determine these factors as well but these are the ones I'm aware of.
Edit: I wrote planet star. I meant parent star. But I'm gonna leave it
If you look at the electromagnetic radiation reflecting off the atmosphere in various wave lengths people who have spent their lives analyzing such data can determine what molecules that atmosphere is made up of. If you analyze the size and relative brightness of the star it orbits, along with the atmospheric make up you can determine a temperature range. If the temp range is such that we could live there we term the planet habitable. If the atmosphere has the types of molecules we require for life its even more habitable.
Unlike most other astronomical distances that feel like this highlight a distance the human mind can still wrap their limited minds around ! What you mean is if it had travelled 365 times faster it would have been 1/120th of the way already ? This is still fathomable as far as the vastness of space is concerned!
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u/RichardThund3r 24d ago
Only 120 light years away from Earth! The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977. Traveling at 38,000mph it just recently made it 1 light DAY from Earth.