The problem with sleeper ships - eviltoast
  • nm0i@sopuli.xyz
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    5 months ago

    There was a sci-novel about that, I don’t remember who wrote it. Essentially, after FTL got invented they caught up with generation ships and retro-fitted them with FTL drives; overall message of the story was that humans are a valuable resource and they should not be discarded lightly, especially in a mission to seed the galaxy.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Sometimes I’ll be in an office building, or on a job site, or in a hospital room, or even just taking a big shit.

        And I’ll look around and think to myself “Everything here is man made. It all comes from people.” And then I’ll just kinda marvel at the productive and transformative nature of human beings.

        In deep space, that only gets more true. The water you drink, the air you breath, the lights you see by - all the product of human enginuity.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          I’ve thought about this too. A few apes, after a long string of evolution, figured out how to bang the right rocks together to make a television…or even a microprocessor. And that’s just one piece of modern tech that some ape figured out, centuries after another ape wrote the complete works it Shakespeare.

      • teft@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The Neutral Zone (the episode in question) has people that died and then were frozen to try and revive later. The space capsule was in orbit above a planet not en route to another planet. Not exactly the same situation.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        you don’t need money anymore, everything is free and you can do whatever you want.

        "Damn it! How am I going to be better than people then?

      • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        It wasn’t a ship full of people heading to a distant star, that was a bunch of dead people who were frozen at the moment for their death in hopes that sometime in the future a cure for their ailment would be found and then they were set adrift in space.

        • harmsy@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          That wasn’t even the first time Trek did the “catching up to a sleeper ship” plot. TOS did it earlier, and then they made a movie out of that episode.

    • frigidaphelion@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      There is an aspect of the plot in Alastair Reynold’s novel Chasm City (part of the Revelation Space series) that also has to do with this concept.

      • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        I think it involved a planet called …

        spoiler

        … Sky’s Edge, if I recall correctly. Except the “new tech” was not FTL (not a thing in Revelation Space canon) but the practice of ejecting a significant fraction of hibernating colonists and their supplies to buff their deceleration ability in order to hold higher interstellar velocity for longer so as to get a few years “edge” in lead time over other generation ships. All to enable the traitorous ship of the generation ship fleet to raid planetary resources sooner to build up military forces to raid the slower latecomers.