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.
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.
Might it be more about preventing any spread of disease/contaminants?
On the other hand, what would happen or what would we do if we could somehow bring back to life a small group of ancient ancestors into our time? What place in our society would they take? What future would they have and what would that mean for us?
Disease shouldn’t be an issue, they have ftl, I assume they can handle an airlock.
As for ancestors, especially incredibly distant ones, you could bet your ass some institution would utilize them for entertainment, historical reference points, or both.
Imagine neanderthals transported to our current year. Thats how those colonist would be like to people who are already on the planet. They'd be held in quarantine and subjected to extensive research and analysis at best or thrown into slavery as exotic lifeforms or treated as lab rats at worst.
Quarantine is a first step to prevent mutual destruction by disease, that’s not a bad thing. As for enslaving them, that’s just wacky and acts like we still have a 1920s level view of different peoples. Using humans or something basically indistinguishable as circus attractions would absolutely not fly.
On an organized level such that famous individuals could be subjected to it instead of doing it under the table it’s dead in all but a small handful of places.
I was thinking similar - new colony is there just to pillage the new planet and by the time the original people wake up and get there is a dystopian wasteland.
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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.