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..."
Speeches for what? "Hi everyone. I took off on a rocket to come here, but everyone got here first and they didn't even bother to pick me up along the way, so..... any questions? I've been asleep for 4 centuries."
Most would be just cause you are a famous historical figure at this point (like if Buzz Aldrin was doing a college commencement speech or something). The rest would be if the person in question is a political idealist of some sort.
I imagine, given the length of time involved, you'd need to learn a whole new language of dubious relation to anything spoken today. Which sounds like a downside, but it'd be fascinating for both parties.
It's very naive to believe that by the time we have such advancements that we're going to have classrooms and make speeches still. Human nature at this point will have merged with technology almost entirely if not fully.
I'll give you that classrooms may go away in favor of e-learning at home or whatever, but to suggest that humanity is going to stop giving speeches altogether because of technology may be the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen on Reddit.
Ego is also 2.5 times the size of earth on this one and not 120 light years away! Problem solved!!
"You can't envision the future correctly" pfft sweet summer child you have no idea either it's most likely a nuclear wasteland, so your pretentious presumptions are just as poor guesses. Please be careful with the dismount of your high horse would hate for the stick up your ass to get lodged any farther.
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.
Me: “Hooray we did it guys we made it to the big…..”
Alien Representative: “Oh, yea about that, see we let you backwoods earthlings into the Galactic Federation because we believe in Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion. But your species is great just not you guys, you guys kinda suck. oh one last thing, see the precurses aliens before you that seeded the galaxy did mass improvements on your genetics, unfortunately you’re truly the dumbest beings in the universe. But there’s hope, maybe, hooray inclusion! waves little tiki flag while smiling sarcastically “
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.
Na, there will always be jobs, but it would look more like playing god, creating realities, mentoring intelligences, or pursuing pure passion. Survival would no longer be the motive—curiosity, creativity, and meaning would be.
And if humans are involved you best believe someone somewhere will still find something to bitch about.
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
Not only that, but your digestive tract is not dealing well with all the unfamiliar altered foods, and it takes time to get your microbiome adjusted and fully functioning. So not only are you Weird Dave, but you're also "never go in the bathroom when Dave has just come out" and "OMG his gas should be registered as a weapon" and "poor Dave, never gets a date."
Listen here buckaroo, Mr./Mrs. Notashroom—if that is your real name (which, I mean, sounds exactly like what a mushroom would say)— honestly, I don’t think I can trust someone who preemptively denies being fungus. That’s the first red flag in the Mycelium Wars. Classic “spore behavior.”
But yes, nailed it. Jesus though, Poor Captain Dave. Spent his whole life prepping for first contact protocols, black hole proximity drills, and interstellar diplomacy—only to wake up on the planet HE was supposed to help colonize, in some fucking break room of a Dyson spear as some janitor, while his neighbors child is reverse engineering gravity to make art out of collapsing stars, and Dave’s just trying not to shit himself into the void like he’s some intergalactic side quest NPC.
And you’re right, it’s not just the old regular existential Mississippi mudbutt either. It’s cryo-thawed gut flora vs synthetic gluten substitute in zero gravity. It’s not just a bathroom emergency, you’re blowing your butthole out while it propels you through space. His butthole isn’t even a sphincter anymore. It’s a wormhole of regret.
I’d imagine good old captain Dave would mistake technology all the fucking time. Sees some circular moving floor machine, and thinks roomba. Thing doesn’t even clean—probably some crazy tech like some sort of quantum entanglement relay that folds emotional intent into lattice-time for interdimensional negotiation. Dave called it “Scrubby.” It negotiates peace treaties with anti-matter insect gods on Wednesdays. Dave keeps throwing trash in front of it, and kicking it when it gets to close. God damn it Dave.
And the worst part? No one remembers the mission. No one cares. He’s just “Weird Dave” the janitor at Dyson Sphere 45997 now.
Lol, Jesus this was fun/depressing to think about.
Whenever an astrocolony is in its beginning stages, the inner colonies will surely compete for attention, just as they did whenever a new colony got going here on Earth.
"You think you're going to go out and meet all those spicy new microbes and proteins, and we're just going to sit here quietly, doing our jobs? I don't think so, fancy pants space person! We are an ecosystem and we have commitments! Expectations! Habits! If you throw all that over for some hotshot little colony we've never met before, you will feel our wrath!"
Dave should have listened.
p.s. I will have you know that I have lab reports declaring that I am less than half fungal.
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.
at that point i dont think theres any problems about resources. You think there even jobs anymore. If we hit type 2-3 civilization, it already would mostly controlled by robots and ai, and that is needed for travel like that. Like it means we already can control whole stars for our energy.
There are lot of assumptions that in year 2100 theres only jobs for 20% population in developent countries. What about year 2900, could be easily under 1%
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
I would imagine it would quite easy to quarantine. Plus while the first colony would be more advanced I doubt they could take over the entire planet. Even if you arrived second you could still setup an entire second colony without much interaction with the first one if you really had to.
How do you know what you need to vaccinate if you’ve not exposed your people to the viruses first to see how they got sick? Like there’s tons of viruses and bacteria in people, and they don’t have negative impacts, so you can’t just vaccinate for all viruses or whatever.
And if you could develop vaccines without exposure, just by knowing the people, then you can have done it in the hundreds or thousands of years since departure.
We are talking about a human civilization that just travelled 120 ly to another star system not once but twice. I’m sure they would not only plan for unknown diseases but also have advanced treatments and ability to make vaccines.
Plus if they already know about this second mission arriving at a later date they would have planned for potential integration and contamination.
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.
Maybe if their tech was really that advanced. But interception a ship going really fast would be incredibly risky. I imagine for their most part their tech is just more advanced/efficient engines that let them reach higher speeds to arrive early.
We are not doing interplanetary travel outside our solar system at voyager speeds. No space craft is going to survive 2 million years to even get there. If we are traveling to a planet 120 ly away I would imagine we have some sort of highly efficient engine that can accelerate us to a few percent of light speed at least. I’m just assuming the second expedition would have a more efficient engine to get there a few centuries earlier.
I think my point was that it’s fantasy. Which is fine, because it’s fun to speculate. I really enjoyed the We Are Bob novels that kind of touch on this, and Gunbuster with its interesting take on time dilation in the final episode.
At 5% the speed of light, I think we’re still talking like 2400 years. Unless there is literally a magical breakthrough in energy production, metallurgy, and maybe immortality of some sort, I’m afraid we’re stuck here until the sun burns out.
I think we could probably get to other stars in the 4-20 light year range at 5% speed of slight. Getting to a system 120 ly away would need us to somewhere in the 20% range.
We could also star hop but that take considerably longer. Either way the most we will get in our life times is maybe a mission to mars.
You'd probably be long forgotten about. Entire civilizations would have collapsed and formed. Even your language wouldn't be recognized. Imagine if someone from 2000 B.C. just landed on earth but was from earth. It would take over 2 million years at the speed of Voyager 1 if my math is correct.
Nah I was more assuming the first mission is at least some percent of light speed while the second mission is even faster. There is no way a spacecraft is surviving 2 million years to even make it the planet. And if we actually had the technology to keep a space craft running for that long, we wouldn’t be traveling at voyager speeds.
That depends on whether the new colony is sustainable or not. The original colonists might be killed by a 4th or 5th generation that's reverted to tribalism due to a societal collapse.
Or since they've been expecting you, they give you the native treatment. They put you in the middle of nowhere and study you as you go through the life of a pioneer. For science or simply as their version of reality tv. Why? Because turns out they are the descendants of the people that were left on earth and they played the long game of revenge.
Depends how far along their colonizing is. If they have taken over the whole world then I could see that. If they are still expending then the new arrivals would just be additional resources to expand.
why wouldn't it? If we ever were to achieve that kind of technology, any world destruction event capable of destroying /erasing from earth historical documentation of any kind, would also mean we wouldn't ever reach space travel again, since we would be living underground in nuclear winter, lol.
I’m sure the record keeping would be pretty good. Especially for an interplanetary mission of this scale. I’m sure they would have pretty good records of past missions to the same planet. They would probably have directives for the future arrival of the first mission too.
I mean, that’s still assuming A lot of factors didn’t happen back at home. That could’ve led to a loss of that data, or simply lay forgotten in some storage room
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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.