I’m surprised this isn’t the central plot device of some blockbuster property.
They didn’t make a movie, but The Forever War is one of my all time favorite novels and deals with this situation exactly.
It’s an important world building device in the book Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds. Which is a fantastic book, highly recommend!
Worse: your sleeper ship arrives at what should be a pristine planet. But FTL capable ships beat you there. And they ruined the planet over a few thousand years. And now they’re sending out refugee ships of their own.
Children of Earth is sort of like that. Amazing book.
Children of Time, not Earth! Also gets my highest recommendation.
Damn now that’s an interesting story
Maybe that’s what happened to us already.
There’s a side quest chain in Starfield that has a generation ship arriving at a planet they claimed centuries ago only to find it’s a corporate owned resort planet.
Basically the premise of Mass Effect Andromeda
Not really, the Angara, Kett, and Remnant were already there. You’re just showing up in the middle of their dispute. The comment was implying your own people developed FTL and fucked everything up, not that you landed in a shit show
Yeah, was gonna say. It’s more like Outriders than anything.
Admission: I stole it.
qntm’s cool science fiction stories are my favorite.
When your daughter looks like this
Sorry too soon
MURPH
Oof, right in the feels
And for the only time in your life, you’re SO well rested!
Oof, what if it turned out you get 3000 years of nightmares and wake up insane?
I liked how it was in raised by we wolves where everyone shared a dream so the kids where technically older than their bodies.
I know another shared dream hyper sleep where the guy in control went mad and tortured the crew until they band together to stop him. Then he arrived dead. I dk name.
Shouldn’t all biological processes be stopped. I’d assume you can’t even dream. You just go under and get back up instantly.
Elite Dangerous players flying loops around generation ships while listening to their horror downfall logs.
It’s still likely the only way you could have made the trip.
They didn’t dock and help you out? Rude.
Who launches a space ship only half full?
No room to take a second crew/passengers+their supplies (food/water) onboard, can’t exactly tow a space ship either (esp FTL)… So, help how?
People who know there’s another ship on the way
That’s an awful lot of cost and effort to launch a ship specifically for ‘rescuing’ another ship that’s not really in any trouble, it’s just a bit slow.
It’s already got the supplies it needs, a set course, and a plan for when they arrive at their destination. It doesn’t really need help.
Then there’s the problem of docking one ship with a second ship that likely wasn’t designed to/with a dock. That’s not a trivial task in a vacuum.
TBH unless they are in some sort of distress; it seems better to let their plan play out. They’ll arrive when they were expecting to, and will have less work to do setting up a settlement when they arrive.
Or you arrive to find the civilization has had time to collapse and given way to the rise of damned dirty apes.
Attempts to prevent this phenomenon involve using what is called the “wait calculation” to predict how long to wait to launch an interstellar journey.
Wow. This is actually the plot for one of the side quests in Starfield. Neat idea; i’d like to see it done in a better game.
There is a recent-ish game that uses this exact premise
Outriders
It’s actually a pretty common sci fi scenario, I remember reading about it in a pop science book in school
It was in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, or in the series at least. His scenario was two warring planets sending out armadas to fight each other, but while they were on their way faster ships were created and sent so when they got there the battle was already over.
It’s stolen from Elite: Dangerous. You can find a few of those colony ships drifting around deep space, but you’re warned with heavy penalties to not interact with them, for this exact reason.
Mm yes they definitely stole this decades old concept from 2014’s Elite Dangerous.
I mean fair, but the original ELITE was released in 1984 and is essentially the same science fiction universe. You’re right though, it’s not a new idea
It’s a widely talked about issue with deep space travel.
ECS Constant in Starfield.
If you have working FTL now, though, and can get there faster why not also intercept the sleeper ships and bring them with you?
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
3000 years is a lot. You can’t imagine how profoundly, unbelievably long that is. In just 65 years we went from the Wright brothers’ first flight to landing on the moon. And technological progress is exponential. Assuming people don’t all kill each other, in a couple hundred years, maybe a thousand, it will likely cost the humanity next to nothing to go pick them up, if they so desire.
A sleeper ship isn’t going to be doing any maneuvers other than constantly accelerating before the halfway point and then constantly decelerating after the halfway point. Predicting the position of the ship at any given moment based on that is a textbook physics 101 problem that students are expected to be able to solve by hand. If you’ve got FTL cracked then you’ve got the computational power to account for any real world variables that would throw off such a prediction.
You’re not quiet getting the scale of the problem.
It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Except the haystack is 100km deep and covers the entire planet. But, you know that the needle should be some where in Manhattan.
It really isn’t. When you know where they started from, and what direction they were supposed to be heading in, then even without knowing how fast they’re supposed to be going, it’s literally as simple as dropping out of FTL at regular intervals behind the sleeper ship and pointing a telescope in the general direction you’re going until you hit the sleeper ship’s light cone. What other posters have suggested about potential technical limitations relating the nature of the FTL drive and/or logistical problems with actually doing a pick up make sense as blocking issues, but finding them to begin with is a solved problem. Like, this is basically “where are Voyager 1 & 2 right now”, and we actually know exactly where they are right now because we’re still picking up their radio signals, powered by a 249W generator (less power than used by a typical modern PC!), from over 136 AU out, and a sleeper ship is going to be way more visible than that.
Maybe they are like people today (or Ferengis in Star Trek) and just don’t care, not seeing any profit in the endeavor.
There is absolutely no way we survive if we continue like we are right now.
Surviving isn’t profitable, SMH my head.
Is that hitchhikers?
I don’t think that, because it’s not the 1930’s any more.
Pure sci-if speculation: Your FTL (or near-c) tech is reliant on a deep gravitational well or a strong radiation source (like a star) to stop. I can see a sci-go scenario where that is the case.
Maybe if you had FTL, but chances are you’d still be limited on fuel and supplies
You have to slow down to the sleeper ship to intercept it, and then speed up again with that extra mass, it probably wouldn’t be practical unless the ship was designed for it
It’s a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.
In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
i mean, you better hope the civilization you find is a good one.
I’d argue the type of people who sign up to be first on an extra-solar planet to settle are exactly the kind of people who would rather shuttle down with a printer and a prayer than find a small town.
I mean, if I were to sign on, I would want to know what the settlement plan is (Like who’s doing what jobs, how will we produce food assuming there is 0 viable land to grow on, what’s the worst case scenario that has been planned for, etc) as well as having a say in said plan… And I know plenty of people who would happily sign on knowing it’s gonna be just them, a tarp, and a Gransfors Bruks axe vs everything the planet can throw at them and they might die inside a week if they aren’t careful.
And yeah, I imagine if I showed up and all the super hard work was done but everything was still getting started, I’d probably be a little more upbeat. But in no way would I want to see a planet filled with people who got there first. Worse yet, got there by being the 8th generation to be born there.
I guess it depends what stage of the colonization effort you’re on. People signing on for the tail end would be ecstatic, probably.
As a rule of thumb, I’m never happy to find a McDonalds.
Why waste your hate on it? I haven’t had McDonald’s in over 25 years now and it causes me no problems to just go past one and not think about it
Humans being humans, I bet there would end up being some huge animosity between the two groups.
In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
As a guy who sometimes gets told “Hey, don’t worry about that work you had to do, you can skip it”, hard agree. No better feeling in the world. And after thinking you’d have to build a whole civilisation from scratch? Yeah, nah, sign me up for the generation ship please.
Imagine if a lost Spanish armada finally arrived at Florida, centuries late, musket-wielding conquistadors raiding a coastal naval academy while a prominent political VIP was giving a speech, taking them hostage like Hernán Cortés did with Moctezuma II (Aztec Empire) or Francisco Pizarro with Atahualpa (Inca Empire).
A generation ship and a sleeper ship are two different things (that we can’t yet do). In one, you live on a ship so your kids can go to a new place. In the other, you don’t really live on a ship so you can go to a new place.
find a nice McDonalds
Going back to the sleep pod for another 50k years.
Only the finest restaurant for me. Tonight, we dine at Taco Bell
After the franchise wars of 2050 all restaurants are taco bell.
Make sure you know how to use the three seashells before eating any Taco Bell.
But is it a good argument? What are the chances a new technologies will be invented that allow for ships that are actually substantially faster? And what are the chances of some conflict or disaster or combination preventing any ships from being built regardless of how fast those ships are?
My view is: As soon as technology is ready there’s an actual 1% chance of a successful mission, launch right away. And keep on launching till you can’t launch anymore. Sure maybe something better will come along, but maybe it won’t. If the window of opportunity is open, don’t wait for it to close.
But in reality I don’t actually think interstellar travel for living humans is possible. There are so many issues, it’s hard to see us overcoming us all. But maybe the state of the world has left me jaded and the future will be bright somehow, who knows. I’d love to be proven wrong, but for now I lean of the side of impossible.
You kind of answer your own question there, honestly. If you’re at the point where you can somehow convince hundreds to thousands of people to get a one way ticket to turning into a space popsicle for the chance of eventually turning into xenomorph chowder, then you can probably also do better than that eventually.
So from that perspective we both hard agree that interstellar travel is probably not practical to any degree of technology below full-on Star Trek. But also, we both hard disagree that “shoot people into space to die as soon as you have the ability” is something that any society is ever going to do. If some modicum of a survival instinct is needed to evolve intelligence, then the answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens looked at the practicalities of actual interstellar travel and went “Hell, no”.
If anybody out there is willing to do interstellar colonization you better believe that it’s because their star is about to pop and they’ll try that exactly once.
Agreed. I always try to think of these kinds of questions in two ways.
The first way is from a hard sci-fi perspective, like how can this become a believable thing. How can we change as little as possible in the universe to make this a real and normal thing, so we can expect a reader to have enough suspend of disbelief to serve as a good backdrop to a story. This way it’s fun to think about these things and see how we can still be living in the real world, but with something cool added. Instead of going full “it’s just magic” and thus cutting out any thought proces.
The second way is from a real life standpoint. Like if we extrapolate our technology into the future, but keep in mind real life limitations, laws of physics etc. So no over unity, no FTL, nothing that would require the power of a star to work but also somehow not be an actual star etc.
So that’s how you can easily get to two kinds of answers from a singular question. And it’s all speculation anyways, just a bit of fun.
First, there have always been people who have thought, “I’m fine with the chance of dying to do this thing.” Free climbers, for instance. If the odds of survival are zero, and your personal effort isn’t going to change it, that number goes down by a lot.
Second, unless we find a FTL solution, surviving in space indefinitely is the first step in interstellar travel, because 3000 years is functionally equivalent to indefinitely. If you’re response to that is sleeper ships, you only survive if the ship survives, and we’re back to the same point. The reason this is important is because if the planet at the destination isn’t required for your survival, you have a lot more flexibility for how you colonize that planet, which vastly improves the odds of success.
As for the Fermi paradox, it doesn’t require that everyone wants to colonize a different star, build a Dyson shell, or whatever, it requires that everyone who doesn’t want to do that be willing to do whatever it takes to stop anyone else from doing it (and can make it count). It’s a slightly different proposition, and one that I think is less likely than other solutions.
That’s what I was thinking - so I got the free cryro without the hard work?
It’s a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.
But then you never send out ships. (Unless you do like embryos or something.)
The obvious solution to this is to just not send the faster shios to the new planet, or do but use it as a hub for further travel, and let the sleeper ship people fulfill their literal purpose.
Celebrate them and support them theres more planets why even bother?
The sleeper ship people would be going to a planet chosen because it was able, the faster ship people would likely be able to choose a better planet anyway.
But also could just meet up with that sleeper ship and like take them with you
The science answer would be there’s probably not that many suitable planets. And probabilities of ships not making it means sending additional ships is a good idea.
Hard disagree on that answer. We have found thousands of possible planet candidates already and we aren’t looking that hard, relatively. The second we have the technical capability to actually get to any other solar system there will be a new instrument in space with the explicit purpose of finding planets we want to travel to
Edit. This new instrument will not magically appear, i meant we will start the process of building one and putting it in place asap
Possible candidates. Because we don’t have the ability to actually know. And it has to be habitable to humans, agriculture, and animal husbandry, which is much stricter than possible (bacteria) life.
As for using new planets for further exploration, it’s possible but will take time to develop the industry (while trying to build your new planet) and watch space for new targets.
Imagine trying to escape humanity only to end up being surrounded by humans again. Nightmare fuel.
Touch grass. Don’t hate people.
Go fuck yourself bud
Nah I got a lady friend for that.
That’s what humanity is best at though. It should be no surprise.
You guys think KFC is still open?
