The first crew would face the most difficult challenges. Imagine the relief after expecting to establish the fundamentals of civilization, and instead are just assigned your living quarters.
I would definitely prefer to be a leader of new world than just be sent to my room.
I guess. I’m more of a space socialist, myself. Silly me always assumed that equality and collaboration would be a precursor to colonization of other worlds. Musk is trying so hard to prove me wrong. Lol
What if you set out with the idea of starting socialist utopia on a new planet and get there to find booming corporate dystopia?
Put me back to sleep and wake me for the revolution.
Let’s burn this bitch down and start over with the common man in mind, and the needs of everyone met.
Or let’s go find a new planet. With blackjack, and hookers.
I don’t know how you can look around at the world and think that will ever be a thing.
If people stopped starving, beating,.and raping children for 2 generations it would be possible. Humans have no need to compete with each other for survival already. If we could just get a generation or two with minimal human inflicted trauma it would be obvious.
Seems possible to me.
If people stopped starving, beating,.and raping children for 2 generations it would be possible.
How do you propose we achieve this? We’d have to isolate a group of people who’ve never experienced abuse and set them up somewhere the rest of us could never come in contact with them again.
Step one: School breakfast and lunch for all. Food benefits for struggling families on top of that.
Let’s get it done.
Space is big. You can always go out and find a different place.
Except you’re basically a caveman. You leave and you’re one of the world’s foremost engineers, trusted to know everything necessary to build a new settlement from scratch, with no help from Earth.
You get there and your engineering knowledge is 3000 years out of date. The only people who are interested in your skills are archaeologists and anthropologists. They use an app to ask you questions like “Could you demonstrate how you used woodpaper to wipe your anus?”
What a fascinating point. I’d be fine holding antique engineering story hour as my contribution. Who knows what old gems were lost over the years. It sounds like fun, even if I was just a novelty.
If the records survived, they might not need anything from you, because they’ve already watched it all on video. But, maybe some of them would be interested to see it in person once. Even if we know how warriors fought 3000 years ago, it would still be interesting to see a true expert warrior using their weapons in a way that took a lifetime to master.
If the records didn’t survive, you might be a valuable person to study for a while, but it might quickly get tiring to basically be a sideshow performer, there to delight the people who think of you as this ultra-primitive thing that’s nearly an animal.
I would bet it would be pretty frustrating for most people after a while. You’d have this mental image of yourself as a sophisticated, modern person who was respected by his/her peers. Suddenly, you’d be living in a world where people around you might be struggling to contain their disgust. Things that are normal to you like eating meat or peeing in a toilet might be seen as animal-like behaviours.
If you’re lucky, then your sophisticated construction and engineering techniques might be seen as impressive feats of craftsmanship. In a world where robots fasten everything that needs fastening, just driving in a nail or using a screwdriver might be seen as something really fancy, like we’d now see the kinds of stonemasonry that they might have had millennia ago.
But, if your self-image is that of an advanced engineer, and the best you can hope for is to be seen as a quaint old-timey craftsman, that might not be very satisfying.
You’re absolutely correct from an “best practice” standpoint, but only the standards make it into records. That’s the source of our admiration of “old-fashioned know-how.”
Real life experience can’t be catalogued. The index doesn’t have dirt under its nails. Sure, I’d be obsolete and out of place in the day-to-day, but I’d always be ready to coyboy up in a crisis.
In the meantime, I could probably make a decent living creating one-of-a-kind newly handcrafted antiques for the neo-hipsters.
I think I’d really enjoy our movie, btw.
Real life experience can’t be catalogued
In ye olde days it couldn’t. But, what if the current database of YouTube videos survives? You’d get every non-expert trying everything in any way possible. If books and podcasts survive, you’d have every discussion on why things are done a certain way and not another way. Assuming it all survives, there’d be so much more information to future archaeologists and anthropologists than today. Right now we just dig up a shard of pottery and try to figure things out from whatever we can glean from that pottery.
It would make for a cool movie. The only problem is trying to imagine a really distant future that makes the present look barbaric.
They had fun with that in Demolition Man with the three shells. Star Trek TNG did it in The Neutral Zone where they had a bunch of people from the 20th century including a financier who couldn’t accept the lack of money in the future. But it’s really hard to make a future that’s believable and makes the present look barbaric.
Curious that the star is called Barnard because that’s the name of the doctor that first performed a successful heart transplant.
I think its just a common surname
I consulted my Ivy League homeslice Chad G.P.T. III about the surname Barnard and he promptly provided the following response:
“… the surname Barnard, it’s not super common, but it’s not rare either. Here’s a quick breakdown: • In the U.S., it ranks around #2,500 to #3,000 in terms of frequency. That puts it in the mid-range — you’ll definitely run into it now and then, but it’s not like Smith or Johnson (if you’re looking for Johnson, so is Chad) • It’s more common in South Africa, partly because of Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the guy who did the first human heart transplant. The name has some Dutch/Afrikaans roots. • Also seen in the UK, Australia, and Canada with moderate frequency.
Origin-wise, it comes from the Germanic personal name Bernhard (“bear” + “brave/strong”) — which morphed into Barnard in English-speaking countries.
Merry and Pippin: “we should leave only after the 13th breakfast because by then the Eagles will already be on route and we can just use them.”
Jerks didn’t come pick me up on way there? Wtf dudes.
That’s on you bruh. You shouldn’t have placed that bumper sticker that said, “if this spacecrafts a rockin, don’t come a knockin”.
That was the generational spaceship lagging behind you on their 30rd generation, now mutants
Omfg ugh why did i do that!
Ikr? Rude.
Call that one a win.
Take risk of signing up for a 3000 year hyper-sleep trip.
Reap the rewards of being a pioneer without having to do any of the hard work.
join intergalactic ship pilgrimage hoping to be a pioneer to a new world
Land to late stage capitalism and the same oppression you were just trying to escape.
Id shoot myself immediately.
That’s why you outfit your ship with mass drivers.
Any parasites roaming around on your paradise? A couple hundred rocks at 2% light speed will clear that up.
A mission in starfield (shit game but honestly decent writing at the very least) included just this. A generation ship finally arrived at its destination long after FTL travel was invented to find that the intended colony planet was already a fancy resort planet. You have to broker some kind of agreement between the parties.
It’s a couple of Star Trek episodes too. Similar idea is how they found Khan.
50+ years younger too.
Well at least you didn’t have to spend the rest of your life building civilisation from scratch.
Yeah but it’s all strip malls and Arby’s.
Don’t you dare slander Arby’s and the Big Montana!
come to Arby’s where you can meat your maker and give your life meaning, because let’s face it your only real worth is meat.
Could be even worse than that. You could arrive to find a planet dominated by talking apes with humans living as primitive animals, only to later find that your ship whipped back around and you were on Earth all along.
I love you, Dr. Zaius!
You know, this is the live-action remake Disney needs to actually make. They own the rights to The Simpsons and Planet of the Apes. They could absolutely make a feature-length Planet of the Apes musical. And I don’t want them to use the CGI apes like they use in the modern films. Bring back the 1960s makeup. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
If marky mark has anything to do with it we’ll fix it right up.
That’d be why I’d sign up
Couldn’t be bothered to pick him up on the way.
I read an interesting book based on this premise called The Forever War, it’s been awhile but it was pretty good!
Similar premise but with soldiers sent to fight a war and eventually finding it already over.
I remember one where a sect of humanity was being persecuted, and left to try to find a better life in the stars. They failed to find a life, gave up and returned home, but their interstellar trip consumed so many Earth years that by the time they returned, Earth had moved on from persecution and eagerly welcomed their historical memories.
Sadly, I forget the name; it may have been a short story.
This sounds like Methuselah’s Children
I do this with bill collectors.
Something similar happens in the sequel to The Forever War. The main character and his wife are fed up living on a colony controlled by the shared conciousness names Man. So they decide to take a ship into near light speed for the equivalent of 300000 years, only to be stopped by god, told god was bored and that he was going to leave them all behind, then changing physics to prevent them from going so far into the future.
You might also enjoy The Shoulders of Giants.
Thanks for reminding me of this one. It was a really good read.
That was good, thank you!
“fuck you, Sir!”
Technically you just slept through the whole thing
The Fry Maneuver
Not only that, but 3000 years into the future, language has changed so much that the plural of SHEEP is now SHOOP
That’s right, androids do dream of electric SHOOP
Shit’s wild yo
1000 years alone is a wildly long time for language. Granted, written language and education are more accessible than ever, so I imagine language evolution will be significantly slower than it once was, but still I found this short of English over the past 1000 years to be really interesting
It’s also possible that audio recording being a thing that exists will slow changes in language as well.
3000 years is insanely long for language. Consider that the mother fucking alphabet was invented around 1000 BC*, and basically no languages that anyone still speaks existed in their modern forms. Homer hadn’t written the Illiad and the Odyssey yet, and the standard Greek that came to be defined by these works had also yet to develop. If you went back to 1000 BC you’d have no idea what was going on.
*Although previous alphabets existed, the Phoenician alphabet that became the basis for pretty much all modern writing systems in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia was invented around 1100 BC
3 Body Problem has an interesting take on this. Faster than light travel is not possible but communication is, meaning we’re anxiously preparing for an alien war that won’t happen for 400 years but they can see everything we do in real time thanks to quantum entanglement.
Good series, I always recommend the books but haven’t seen the show yet
I loved the Tencent version of the show
I managed to finish the first book, but it was so terrible that I wasn’t willing to read any more or watch the show.
The whole book sets up a big mystery, then solves that mystery with the biggest deux ex machina bullshit ever committed to paper.
macguffins are always just to drive the plot forward, their satisfaction as a solution is usually secondary.
In simpler terms, they paint the cover of the comic book first and sometimes overbid for the purpose of sensationalism, so sometimes Superman has to pretend to punch Lois Lane
It’s not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin isn’t important to the story, it’s just there to serve as motivation for the characters. In the Three Body Problem, the mystery of what happened to science is central to the plot of the entire book.
This isn’t “pretending to punch Lois Lane”. This is “why the hell did Superman just kill Lois Lane!?” The whole plot of the story is that science stops working. Scientists are killing themselves because of it. One of the characters is seeing a countdown when he closes his eyes. Aside from the Three-Body-Problem game parts, the whole rest of the book is structured as a mystery that they’re trying to solve. This mystery is the primary motivation for the characters in the book, and it’s presented as a mystery for the reader to speculate about.
Basically, the book is structured as if it were a murder on a train, and the whole structure of the story suggests that someone on the train is the murderer. But, it turns out that the murderer is Zeus, who descended from the heavens, killed the murder victim for his own reasons, and left. Ta-da, mystery solved! (And there’s the additional bullshit that scientists are committing suicide because their experiments are failing. That’s just so ridiculous. Actual scientists would be so excited by unexpected results. The way to upset a scientist wouldn’t be to have something appear to break the laws of physics. What would upset real scientists would be a replication crisis: either they can’t match someone else’s work, or people call into question their work because nobody can match the results they’re getting.)
And those are just the problems with the “A” plot. The “B” plot is the ultra-stupid simulation of life on a planet in a 3-body system. You know what life would be like in that kind of system: nonexistent. But no, you’re supposed to believe in people being flattened and rehydrated. I mean, come ON. And you’re also supposed to believe that people are playing this “game” and loving it. Has the author ever actually played a game? Has the author ever met any people?
The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the science is bad. It’s just a bad book. It’s a book that dumb people read and they think the author is smart, and if the author is smart the book must be good, it just went above their heads. But, the author isn’t smart, the book isn’t smart, the book isn’t good.
I haven’t read the books, but I did watch the show… I enjoyed the first half, but the second half had so much implausible bullshit that I couldn’t really recommend it. I mean, the first half also had crazy impossible tech - but I feel that’s ok because its part of the setup premise. The stuff I didn’t like in the second half was more implausible decision making and strategising (and also implausible uses for impossible tech).
In any case, I really feel like they wasted a strong setup. I was disappointed at the end, and I’m not intending to watch the next session.
You would hate the books. The author just pulls tech out of his ass constantly.
Which version of the series is better to watch? The American version or the Chinese version?
Aren’t they the same but just dubbed in english? I picked the english one as I didn’t want to read subtitles
Well the Chinese version on Prime doesn’t have any English subtitles so I guess it depends on if you can speak Mandarin
It does have English subtitles though…?
Good show, fantastic books. Recommend to anyone reading this comment and are remotely interested in sci-fi. A lot of facinatong ideas explored throughout the series.
Cryosleep in earth would be pretty baller. Imagine all the people who’d sign up to just skip ahead 50 years.
What’s the name of the movie?
Idiocracy.
Ty !
If you like it. Check out the new show with some of the creators in it. Common Side Effects. Great animated show.
Watch it, and suddenly dozens of memes will make sense.
Fast and Furious 27
lmao havent seen that one. “Welcome to the future! Nothing’s changed.”
This little detour…
I mean if they get there ang there are like ruins and remnants, that’s going to be a good sci-fi horror-detective-thriller story
At least you aren’t a soldier ready to restart a war that’s been settled
Babylon 5 had an episode on this. A sleeper ship was launched and a few years later we got jump gate tech from an alien race.
The Orville too. And apparently this show called “Ark” too (going by other comments). And in books and video games too. Seems to be a common sci-fi trope.
That’s how they found Khan in Star Trek.
It was also the plot of a sci fi story Far Centaurus by AE Van Vogt.
With some variations, used already a few times in games and series.
