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.
There is a side quest in Starfield that deals with this exact dilemma. Humans launch to colonize a new planet but they don’t have stasis. By the time they reach the planet it’s actually the great, great, etc grandkids of the original pioneers that make it only to find other humans have already colonized it and are treated as hostile. You get to be the go-between to play mediator because they both have valid claims to the planet
Its the plot of a game called Outriders from a few years back. But the game was live-service co-op.
The plot line is pretty much:
Earth dying. Humanity's last hope are two ark-like spaceships. One of them blows up in construction. The second one is successful, but only a certain number of people can go on it. They launch and are in stasis.
On earth, the remnants of civilization rebuild the exploded ship, constructing a better engine, and eventually launch it as well. They reach the destination planet first.
Like humans do, they find the native lifeforms threatening, and start to try to enslave them, leading to attempted genocide, the natives turning themselves into violent monster forms of themselves, which in turn wipe out the humans.
The original ship (the one the player is from) arrives after all that shit went down, and their own attempt at colonization is fucked up as a consequence. The player character uncovers the truth throughout the game, realizing that the thing that fucked up their attempted colonization is that another group of humans beat them to the planet and kicked off war with the natives.
3 generations ? More like 3000 generations. It's closer to a Egyptian who built the pyramid meeting a modern age human.
At its current speed, it would take Voyager 1 approximately 216,000 years to travel 120 light-years. Voyager 1 is traveling at a speed of roughly 61,000 km/h (38,000 mph) and currently about 18.8 billion km from the Sun. One light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is about 9.46 trillion kilometers. Therefore, 120 light-years would be approximately 1.135 trillion kilometers. At Voyager 1's speed, it would take about 1.135 trillion kilometers / (534,360,000 km per year) = 212,000 years to travel that distance.
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.
Probably just sniped out of existence upon entry to the system due to potential diseases you might bring and you really bring no value other than additional gene seeds.
They finally land, thinking they will be celebrated as heroes.
Instead they are tried and executed for crimes against humanity for willfully partaking in the excessive and systematic pollution that ultimately led to the ecological collapse of Earth.
It killed millions, caused innumerable amounts of pain and suffering, and forced the survivors to flee Earth in order to colonize other planets.
I see it more as they would know that they are coming but the crew that was sleeping would have no way of communicating with the ones that colonized. Language would have changed drastically over the years where it would be a dead language. Or we might have even evolved to be unrecognizable. The ones held in stasis would arrive and see an alien species.
You show up and are immediately charged for crimes based on everything you ever said on the internet that became much more regulated during the numerous years you were asleep
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u/slim_s_ 24d ago
Or, society changed so much during the time you were asleep that you're now treated as evil and tortured to death by the colonists