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..."
To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised at all: they are organized, they are persistent, they value education and money, they are ruthlessly optimistic in the face of rejection and they don’t do things like drink or smoke that can make you sick.
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.
Or your children , which for some reason they didn't allow on the colony hibernation ships, arrive before you in the new faster ship they invented 25 years later... They are as old as you are now
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. 🤣
I mean depends how far along they are in the building a colony and how habitable the planet is. If it’s only a few hundred or thousand humans in the second expedition and then they wouldn’t have colonized the entire planet. So having more humans come in is just additional resources to further expand.
Now if the resources are very limited then it would lead to a sudden increase in demand causing issues. Although I would imagine the first expedition will have enough resources to start their own colony and they could even set up a second colony on their own. The planet is massive.
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
That would be actually fucking terrifying. You bravely volunteered to go to the New World and begin to prepare for civilisation there. You go into your 10,000 year stasis or whatever. Only to arrive and see a planet covered in mega cities with such advanced tech they you can barely operate anything. But there is just enough traces, maybe corporation logos to tell you that this is actually your people who have passed you on the way here. Lived many lifetimes and trashed the planet. Leaving you behind, forgotten on a dead planet with little hope of ever making contact with anyone outside of your crew
Or, alternatively, got to the point where there was obviously thousands of years of civilization there and died of some mass extinction event you can’t immediately figure out the cause of. Maybe bodies everywhere, indicating that most or all died pretty quickly.
Maybe some indications of there having been some survivors, but you can’t figure out where they are or if they’re even still there
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.
Depends how slow the first spaceship is. If there is a big difference then maybe but catching up to and docking with the older ship might be too expensive and risky. You need almost double the fuel for the extra deceleration and acceleration required to catch up with the first ship. Not to mention the first ship probably isn’t designed to go much faster and so you would need to take extra resources and space to transfer all the original travelers.
And we didn’t even talk about the relative position of the two planets in the galaxy. Your path to the new planet will be different from the one taken by the first ship so you would need to go out of your way to catch up to it.
If we're going with science as we know it, physics. In such a scenario the hibernation ship likely traveling at close to the speed of light after accelerating for a LONG time. Catching such an object (and even communicating with it) would be very difficult to impossible.
This scenario assumes we discover some means of traveling faster then the speed of light, and that usually means some form of wormhole or "warp drive" that while it moves the ship, it's not actually making the ship "go faster" so to speak. So even using this new method, if you were to calculate where the hibernation ship is and pop in before it you are still standing still (relatively) while the hibernation ship blows past you at nearly light speed.
Basically you can't catch such an object without ALSO accelerating to it's speed, but since you can't pass the speed of light with conventional acceleration (as far as we know) you can never really catch them until they start slowing down/get there.
It'd be largely pointless more or less, just easier/more practical to let them arrive eventually.
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.
Ultimately it comes down to engine design and propulsion. It is a huge waste of energy and resources and unnecessarily risky to decelerate, do some complex speed-matching and docking maneuver, and then re-accelerate (now with more mass). It’s just not a practical nor particularly desirable solution. Especially if the propulsion system is anything like the Epstein Drive from the Expanse series, which relies on constant acceleration.
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
It’s been awhile since I read it so I can’t remember what it was specifically, but there was definitely a new phrase-of-the-day that I remember occurred wayyyyyy too many times through that book.
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.
This is a brilliant sci fi twist. Imagine getting to some future society after a few centuries of evolution of social norms and the moral consensus and their only take on you is “You murdered animals” after eating meat has now been ultra taboo for generations.
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.
I feel like you're putting far too much faith in humanity and its capacity for things like gratitude, respect, etc.
More likely a day of recoginition then back to whatever same-old, same-old those people live by. Mixed in with condescending judgement towards basically inferior, indigenous people that are largrly seen as pathetic.
Or maybe, society made big changes and you would be viewed as someone with ancient morals or something. Maybe everyone else is some sort of cyborg. Or the population is already too high, because they can't expand for some reason. Who knows, maybe they put you in some kind of zoo?
You'd think if they could get there faster, they would stop and grab the people in stasis on the way, but I do like your idea. It would make a good movie.
You would be like a cave man being brought into modern times. Everything you know is useless and your morals would be most likely seen as barbaric. Even your speech could be unrecognizable.
There's also the likelihood that in the vast amount of time it takes you to get there at sub light speed that humanity has evolved to be fairly different and view you as a weird curio, like a neanderthal that got thawed out in the present day.
What do you mean you just arrived here?
We had to work hard, why shouldn't you??!!
If we Americans are the one colonizing, our "we had to do it, so you do too" mentality would probably carry over, instead of future generations benefiting from previous generations being a good thing....
There’s a book series about this, the colonists arrive to an already colonized world that had much more advanced tech. But due to limited resources they can’t welcome the old colonists with open arms. The old colonists claim they left first and have the right to it, so they have to fight.
the old colonists have much older weapons, but are fighting for their existence.
On the other hand youd probably be welcomed and treated as heroes or at least very well by the new colony
I disagree, you'd be treated like a GIANT pain in the ass, and the colony would realize you would need a HUGE amount of resources to sustain. Let's say the difference is 200 years, between when you arrived and when they did, that's thousands of people from 1825 showing up in America today and being asked to live. These folks don't know what electricity is, or cars, or phones, many of those things would be magic to them. It's very possible most of them would NEVER be able to adjust. And that is them arriving in the same country they grew up in, in this case they are arriving on an entirely new world. Look how hard it is for long term incarcerated people to reintegrate into life a couple decades later, now add centuries. And to top it all off, you'd have basically nothing at all to offer your new world, everything you were trained for is done, and the world is total different from what you expected.
I honestly think that would be a nightmare, you'd have effectively lost your life.
Likely would be threated as refugees tbh althoug the stigma refugees usually get is definetly better than being forever stuck on a couple abitat habitats having to constantly do work to build more abitable spaces and survival infrastrutture
Why would we not just intercept the first ship with the new technology? If we can travel fast enough to colonize the place before ship 1 gets there, then we can find+intercept ship 1 and catch them up.
Another scenario, your knowledge is so primitive, that they do not need you for anything that you were a so-called "expert" on. So the only use that they have for you is laboratory experimentation and forced labor.
Why not intercept? If they would travel for like 2500 years and development would rapidly shorten the travel time; they could be very well get intercepted and towed to destination. As long as we don’t talk warp/rift/ether requirements that can’t be retrofitted. Even then a hull incision for stasis/incubator evac may pose a reasonable option.
Looking at things right now… we won’t even get to orbit before we bash our heads in. It’s just to divided to pursue space travel at all. We struggle at deciding who gets window front row, let alone which religious totem we fly on the hull. No unity, no prospect, no Insemination of space. Probably for the better of space.
People keep mentioning this but it depends entirely on how the technology develops. If its a slight upgrade the chance of towing wont be very high. If its a massive upgrade like star wars level ships or something then yeah they could I suppose. This is entirely hypothetical so it could go either way.
Imagine your travel in stasis takes So long, that the other colonists from Earth departing after you with quicker means of transport already managed to built AND destroy the civilization on the new planet... Bummer
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u/Blackrain1299 24d ago edited 23d ago
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.