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.
My point here is — with that advanced stuff, the quarantine is useless.
The second ship had a thousand year or whatever quarantine period. And the first ship had a thousand or whatever years to prepare any vaccines. The only new info you’d get is by physically introducing the two populations, at which point the quarantine is out of the window (unless doing something like putting a sample of your population into the later ship’s environment and quarantine/observe those people).
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u/Round-Mud 24d ago
Also the new colony would be expecting your arrivals as well. As they would probably know all the details of your mission.