The problem with sleeper ships

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.
- 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~~ sleeper ship please.
  
  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.
  
  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).
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
  
  There is also the possibility of information transfer so the people on board the ship (or an automaton) could enhance the vessel and make it faster mid flight
- 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
- That’s what I was thinking - so I got the free cryro without the hard work?
- i mean, you better hope the civilization you find is a good one.
- 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
- Humans being humans, I bet there would end up being some huge animosity between the two groups.
- shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
  Dune: Fremen Origin, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson.

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.
- Damn now that's an interesting story
  
  Admission: I stole it.
  qntm’s cool science fiction stories are my favorite.
  
  Basically the premise of Mass Effect Andromeda
  
  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.
  
  Maybe that’s what happened to us already.
- Children of ~~Earth~~ Time is sort of like that. Amazing book.
  
  Children of Time, not Earth! Also gets my highest recommendation.

I really don't see the problem here. They did all the hard work for you and they probably all pity you.
- Yup, civilization is already set up and you don't need to scrape by in the wild for the rest of your life. Plus you get 3000 years of memes to catch up on!
  
  3,000 year steam backlog
  
  Imagine how pissed someone who wanted to get away from civilization via the generation ship would feel
  
  Buddy that's all I wanted to do.
- What even is the alternative? Wait 50 years and be too old for space travel?

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.
- message of the story was that humans are a valuable resource
  HA! Fiction indeed.
  
  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.
  
  They made it make sense in the outer worlds
- 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.
  
  At least he didn't have boneitis.
  
  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?
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  I think it involved a planet called … ::: spoiler 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. :::
- Heinlein wrote one with a similar (though not the same) idea
- Galaxy's Edge

Or you know, this is discussed in advance and the faster ships pickup the slower ships on the way (if possible).
I get the world is a shit show, but it is less so when we discuss.
Fun meme though.
- Given the brittleness of civilization, chances are the backup tapes with the exact flight planes get lost during a thunderstorm and 50 years later nobody remembers this ship even exists.
  
  50 years is terribly short. 500 maybe.
  Also, resolvable. Space beacons, stone tablets, etc.
  If you can think of it, so can they.
  
  50 years later nobody remembers this ship even exists
  Famously, nobody knows about the Apollo Moon mission today, because we lost all the records from 60 years ago.
  
  brittleness of civilization? last i checked civilization has managed to survive 12'000 years since it first came about.
- Or you know, this is discussed in advance and the faster ships pickup the slower ships on the way (if possible).
  Or in an infinite universe just go to a different planet.
- If we assume that the ship, while traveling, always moves towards its destination, but it might be off by up to 1 degree. Then the margin of error for its position would grow until about the midway point in the journey. I have no idea how to calculate this, unfortunately, but I'd image there'd be a lot of space you need to cover if you want to find the ship.
  
  Yes. That is a problem. Not least of all for the sleeper ship.
  I am going to assume any higher technology follow-up ship will only do best effort.
  So, then there is a good window for memes about "lost" sleeper ships.
- faster ships pickup the slower ships on the way
  That's not how space travel works, at all, unfortunately.
  
  With 2 jumps it is. Jump to calculated position of old ship. Load cryo beds onto new ship. Jump to destination.

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.
- 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 a widely talked about issue with deep space travel.
- 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.

Imagine trying to escape humanity only to end up being surrounded by humans again. Nightmare fuel.
- That's what humanity is best at though. It should be no surprise.
- Touch grass. Don't hate people.
  
  Go fuck yourself bud

When your daughter looks like this
Sorry too soon
- MURPH
- Oof, right in the feels

Or you arrive to find the civilization has had time to collapse and given way to the rise of damned dirty apes.

Such a plot device has been used in every sci-fi universe I've been interested in. It's not even funny.
- Galaxy's Edge did a pretty cool take on this with the billionaires who fled a dying earth and became the Savages who lost their minds in the deep black. The remaining humans on earth built FTL like 20 years after they left and had like 3000 years to establish a galaxy wide Republic before they encountered the insane Savages who spent all that time experimenting on their own and trying to become actual gods.
  
  Back in my day the quest to reach spiritual enlightenment by ascending to divinity was a proletariat tradition. Is there nothing these bourgeois assholes won't co-opt?
- Yeah generation ships and surprises are old.
  A classic example, non-stop, goes back to the 1950s, for example.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Stop_(novel)

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Chemist isn't on the corner?
  
  Is that hitchhikers?
  
  I don't think that, because it's not the 1930's any more.
- 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
- 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.

Elite Dangerous players flying loops around generation ships while listening to their horror downfall logs.

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?
- Shouldn't all biological processes be stopped. I'd assume you can't even dream. You just go under and get back up instantly.
- 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.

ECS Constant in Starfield.

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.
  
  They are planning to do a movie out of it
- It's an important world building device in the book Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds. Which is a fantastic book, highly recommend!

Attempts to prevent this phenomenon involve using what is called the "wait calculation" to predict how long to wait to launch an interstellar journey.

It's still likely the only way you could have made the trip.

- This is an argument for the sleeper ship. You get there and enjoy an already set up and running civilization in the prime of your life.

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

Outriders. Absolutely underrated game
- No, it's just not very good.
  
  It so could have been, though. A lot of wasted promise.

It's a neat idea from a sci-fi perspective, but when you think about the most efficient forms of space propulsion (slingshots around large gravity wells) I'm not sure how we'll manage to do much better.
Either you catch up to someone before they leave the solar system or you're just going to shorten the time needed to reach their terminal velocity.
There's a diminishing return as you approach the speed of light, and FTL travel isn't exactly a trivial hurdle.
- You could say that the amount of time it would take for an interstellar trip at non-FTL speeds is also not exactly trivial.
  We can sort of try to imagine how technology could develop in tens of thousands of years, but... not really.
  
  We can sort of try to imagine how technology could develop in tens of thousands of years, but… not really.
  To some extent, I think we've become blinded by the progress we've made in the last century relative to the progress we made in the millennium before that. For the vast majority of our 10,000 years of human civilization, life was of relatively uniform technological variance. We're in a big uptick of progress in this moment, but eventually (I'd argue very soon) we're going to exhaust the natural limits of our surroundings and the advances of technology will run up against the limits of our material conditions.
  Then we very easily could be in a world where the modern day "high tech" nature is the baseline for decades, perhaps even centuries or millennia. Also, very possible we dip into a Dark Age. We've done it before. And its not as though this degree of manufacturing infrastructure is cheap or easy to maintain indefinitely.

The closest thing in terms of a novel would be "Far Centaurus" by A. E. van Vogt

If FTL is impossible (as is likely the case) there is a point where a better ship can't catch up, even if its going like 0.9c.
- Every time I read about or listen to someone's explanation of why faster than light travel is completely impossible it always makes no sense to me.
  I have tried to understand it more times than I can count but every explanation seems to revolve around faster than light travel breaking causality because of information traveling back in time due to relativity. Granted it's always physicists who are explaining why faster than light is impossible and I'm a complete layman so there may be a translation issue there.
  
  See Orion's Arm's explanation:
  https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-faq&topic=FTL%20in%20OA
  And related concept's like a wormhole's failure mode (EG they immediately collapse if ever positioned in a way that allows for actual FTL travel):
  https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
  https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4754be03eb3bc
  Orion's Arm is really cool because it's set in the far future, but it tries to limit AI engineering to what's theoretically possible with current physics (just not with current engineering), and they have good explanations for it all. For example, warp drives are a thing, and theoretically plausible, but they do not allow for FTL travel.

You guys think KFC is still open?