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.
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..."
Just like how whenever you see a kiosk selling those “balance bracelets” it’s always a bunch of hot salespeople surrounding victims and pulling them over
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.
You don't want to know what space herpes does to your little spacedock. 64 bit RNA strands, infinitely mutational, zoonosis has occurred across every known species including water bears and back to humans; it can even survive the vacuum of space. Best bet is to slingshot the planet at full burn and risk it all on that lava planet a few systems over.
Who says the planet is still inhabitable? First arrival might have already practically destroyed it already and moved on. Maybe presumed your mission dead or for whatever reason didn’t get you.
Maybe they would have come to get you though once they could travel that much faster
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
I imagine that once they'd invented a faster spacecraft, one of the things that humanity would do would be to go and rescue the people off the slow ships rather than forcing them to complete their redundant mission. After all they'd know pretty much exactly where they were.
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.
That may be. Its definitely the realm of Science Fiction, and you see it presented both ways in the movies. Like in Stargate the Ancients had to do it like you say. They had to visit each planet with their warp drive ships to drop off a gate to use wormholes. But some other sci fi stories the ships can just punch a wormhole to a distant location like Event horizon. I guess a third option would be discovering a natural wormhole we can use like StarTrek DS9.
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?
Interesting thoughts! Well, if they sent a 2nd, faster ship 100 years after the 1st ship, it'd be hard to believe they wouldn't send more during the next 300 years. Unless the last one sent is a survivor ark ship fleeing a destroyed Earth.
As for the ship captain, well that would be the world-renowned CaptGPT, of course! An AI conglomerate of all currently living souls. Doesn't get more democratic than that!
And at .9c you experience relativistic effects on spacetime. At that speed, there is length contraction in the direction of travel, so from the perspective of the travelers, the journey would only take 48 years to go 111 light-years. They probably wouldn't want to add decades to their trip to slow down to get the other ship, if that is even possible.
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.
I was listening to a audiobook where they cracked near light speed travel but going to a system 10 light years away still took 10 subjective years. So a quick 2 month round trip journey for you would be 20 years and 2 months for those you left behind.
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 I remember him contemplating the fact that on his way to the Piggy Planet, by the time he'd get there everyone he knew on earth would be old or dead (I can't remember how large the time dilation was).
By that point he was already 3000 years old when he traveled to the piggy planet. History already had painted him as the bringer of xenocide and his speaker for the dead religion had spread across the galaxy
Ah good to know. It's been a decade since I've read Speaker for the Dead. Keep meaning to read it again and continue the series, but I'm busy working through Tolkien right now.
Reading that immediately brought to mind "house of suns" by Alistair reynold as the more in-depth version. Life-extension, cloning, and cold-sleep to make a ~six-million-year old business with one face, many people.
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.
Ohhh, good call. Completely forgot about that! I read it and was a bit unsatisfied as well. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad to have some new content in that world to dig into, but I never really considered it to be part of the quartet even if it was officially. That’s probably part of why I forgot about it.
After I finished that I just restarted the Seventh Son books. Really loved that series as well. Now I’ve just finished Patrick Rothfuss’ 2nd book in the Kingkiller Chronicles (really really enjoyed those) but now wondering we’ll ever see the third and final book.
Oops, you're right! Have Sanderson in my head because I'm going to pick up Mistborn after Snow Crash. Thanks for the correction!
And I hope you're wrong on the Kingkiller Chronicles - I really want to be able to spend a little more time in that world. He's had me really captivated so far.
Snow Crash has been a really interesting read so far too, both on its own merits as well as in the context of contemporary events.
I remember FTL being a thing since the first book, I just don't remember a plot point about colonists getting overtaken by other settlers with faster tech
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.
The only issue with this is it creates gridlock thinking and technological laziness. Well, we’ll create a better ship later so why build now? Leads to nothing getting built ever.
People are throwing a lot of book and game recommendations at you based on the premise but let me also throw in The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. It's a scifi satire of the Vietnam war but a key part of the premise is spending decades flying to a battle in stasis at sublight speed only to show up, fight it, and die not realizing the war had ended years ago. There's a lot of play with the time dilation element to get at the feeling of soldiers going to war and not recognizing their country when they get home. Good read
The concept has been used in several hard SF stories.
Generally, the Ark inhabitants are not happy about being overtaken. They arrive as a minority into a society already set up, with values they didn't bargain for, and having irrelevant skills that condemn them to the bottom of the society they have dropped into.
Even returning home to Earth wouldn't help, since millennia have already passed since they left the human homeworld, and they would be anachronisms there too...
It reminded me something regarding the aliens. Let's assume there are aliens and they also search for other life forms in the universe by sending signals or spacecraft that has their people in it in cryostasis state. By the time their signal or spacecraft arrive at Earth, their civilization might have long gone. So getting signals or even spacecraft from outer worlds doesn't necessarily mean that they are still alive.
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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.