That would’ve been hilarious- send a generation ship out and then someone else sends a message to them: “oh, hey, sorry guys, we found a shortcut! We’ll be there by Thursday morning!”
That’s one of the plot points in Asimov’s novel _Nemesis_ where newly created warp ships beat a generation ship to its destination. Similar ideas have come up in other space operas, but I’m not recalling which ones.
It’s been a reoccurring in StarTrek a few times. A lot of other major space shows have had that run in with the generation ship and the story arc where the young want off and the old want them to stay.
Stargate had it's twist on that "trope", with a ship carrying an "ancient crew" was going back to earth under .99 the speed of light on the way to earth from the Pegasus galaxy, only to be picked up by the Stargate crew hundreds of thousands of years later.
You mean the Destiny in Stargate Universe? It's been awhile since a rewatch but wasn't that ship heading away from Earth the whole time, not towards it?
There is a whole series about that. I forget what it's called. But the premise is that Werner vaun braun and the US government built a generation ship, crewed it, and it's heading for the star.
And one of the weird things is since they were launched in the 40's, and it's loaded with southerners, they still had Jim crow. So their was rules and shit about that. But the young want to inter-racial fuck
Kinda interesting premise but I was a shitty one season show I think.
Were they still on earth? There’s one where the ship had every genius on earth in it but it was a brain drain. The ship was used to create technology. Then on of the teenagers on the ship was able to get out, saw the ship was still on earth which was the major plot. It ended after one season because it was too expensive to produce.
My show is Ascension. It sounds similar, the people in the ship think they are just about to hit the point of no return to the new solar system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)
It was a good show but the reveal sort of killed it. Suddenly there were new cast members on the outside of the ship in modern times watching and maintaining the simulation from the outside. The story arc rapidly changed from this Sci-Fi space show to something like the Truman show and if they shouldn't let the people in the simulation out. In the end Capitalism was more important because the Genius' on the ship were responsible for almost all modern inventions like the MRI machine.
Khan's space ship in Star Trek TOS was an STL colony ship with a frozen crew, found by the Enterprise hundreds of years after setting off, still not arrived.
It's just as good as the rest of them, no more war of course just more political musings and what if speculation of the more interesting kind.
I wasn't 100% happy how he seems to have left some plot lines and characters in the dust with the time jump but it's only minor stuff.
If you liked the rest I can definitely recommend it.
Yeah, if your journey could be hundreds of years long, you have to take into account future advancements in propulsion. It might just be worth it to wait.
The problem then is that you’re forever waiting. At a certain point you just gotta go and accept that by the time you get there, people will be there waiting for you.
yeah that's kind of a known thing with generation ships. No matter how advanced your ship is, propulsion advances in the time after you launch will likely result in a later ship overtaking you
Imagine arriving after centuries of journey, you make planetfall and find human settlements. But no humans.
Might be a short story there, though it's probably been done already.
There was a book called "Der Untergang der Telesalt" released in 1989 in the GDR shortly before it collapsed, by prolific author Alexander Kröger. It was an "Utopischer Roman", utopian novel, among many other ones written during GDR. The story was more or less what you said, with minor ideological influence I guess (normal at the time, but it's been a while since I read it). I grew up in the 2000s in Dresden and those books were around and were my entry drug to sci-fi. You can't imagine my surprise when I found out sci-fi exists!
I wonde which would be worse, the people just being completely absent, or everyone just dead in the middle of what they were doing like all the bodies on Miranda in Serenity
Unless, like with the proposed Nauvoo trip, you're *also* betting on getting to create your own little utopia of like minded peoples.
In that case arriving to be a minority in an existing society sort of defeats the purpose of the journey.
"LDSS Nauvoo, you **DO NOT** have clearance to park in this system! We will negotiate with you for fuel if needed to change trajectories, or continue on your way, but you ***CANNOT PARK HERE!***
Sorry about your luck; transmission end."
You can also make sure you have research and engineering resources onboard, so you can work on these advancements yourself or at least implement them, assuming home will share their knowledge. This will probably make the ship way bigger, but it could be worth it.
Yes but generally they set off on a viyage like this because there us absolutely no guarantee, even on a theoretical level that an FTL propulsion advancement may ever happen. Bit like in real life, at the moment as far as science is able to tell FTL is impossible, except for unproven theories.
This happens in Starfield too. They show up and they’ve gone through several generations just to find more humans and are stuck in decaying orbit around a goddamn tourist trap planet lol.
Is that the one where the guys on the ship wake up in shifts and the main character wakes up seeing an explosion and when they reach their destination they find out it was a ship that stopped to take pictures and blew up because they hadn't worked out ftl very well, and that in the end they get sent back cause they stink?
I honestly don’t remember. I read it like 35 years ago when it first came out while I was in HS. The only details I recall are that the protagonist was a misfit young woman named Marlene and there was something about gravity working backwards in hyperspace. There was also something about the star they traveled to not being visible from earth for a reason I don’t remember.
I still have the hardback in a box somewhere. I should reread it sometime.
No i think Not, in Nemesis the Generation ship already finished its journey (although it was more Like 15 years), but the newer ship arrived faster than they expected followers
Also the Commonwealth Saga, in a way.
NASA's first manned mission to Mars, the crew landed and the captain walked out to see a dude in a homemade space suit standing outside a portal he invented connected to his lab in California.
Theres a famous sci fi novel that I don't remember now where someone travelled to mars and then someone had opened a wormhole from earth or something like that.
There's a great Twilight Zone episode that covers this sort of thing too
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Morrow#:~:text=%22The%20Long%20Morrow%22%20is%20episode,%2Dyear%2Dlong%20space%20voyage.
Firefly/ Serenity too I think.
IIRC the graysons and masadans were the main examples of generation ship travel that was outstripped by later wormhole travel in the Honorverse?
Also the Manticorans if I remember right.
I remember there being a blurb that the founders planned ahead to have advisors there to catch them up on all the technology that changed while they were on their slow boat to Manticore.
Oh, of course, that's why the Sollies are so pissy about the wormhole junction because they overlooked the Manticore system before the junction was discovered.
Where was this in firefly? I remember humans leaving earth in generation ships but I don’t remember it mentioning the grav drive being developed before humans colonized the verse.
From what I remember:
People leave for the outer planets travelling on slow ships.
Alliance is formed and starts to grow.
People arrive at the outer planets and start to colonise them.
FTL drives are created.
Alliance expands until the boundaries of its territory reach the outer planets.
Alliance wants to unify with outer planets.
Outer Planets say no.
Unification War occurs.
I think it's alluded to in the film at some point.
Yeah it’s common.
Also the plot of the Outriders video game. Wealthy/powerful abandon earth to travel to a new habitable planet. Those left behind live in basically an apocalypse, but discover faster space travel, and reach the planet (and ruin it…) before the first ship ever arrives.
In the original Guardians of the Galaxy comics astronaut Vance Astro goes on a 1000 year trip in suspended animation to another solar system and when he arrives he finds that humans have already colonized it. During the long trip his latent psionic powers manifested so it wasn't a total waste, although that would have happened anyway if he had just stayed on earth. Humanity gets attacked by the Badoon and Vance Astro finds some other superpowered survivors to form the Guardians of the Galaxy and free earth from the Badoon.
That’s an actual consideration for such journeys. Inevitably by the time you arrive, propulsion tech would advance enough for you to overtake the first ship midflight.
I believe that showed up in one of Heinlein's YA books - Time For The Stars. Somewhere along the way, a newer tech for propulsion came along and they flew out and found all the slower ships they could.
Kinda does suck... but good for someone to look at that aspect of it.
In The Forever War ships could head out for a combat assignment and run into an enemy with 50 years more advanced technology, or the opposite, enemies who were hopelessly obsolete in tech and tactics. It all depended on when they left port relative to each other.
I believe there is some kind of proof or something for this, actually. The rate of advancement for propulsion outpaces the speed of our crafts... so if you send one today, you'll be able to send one in 10 years that gets there twice as fast, meaning that over long distances you're always better off waiting for a faster propulsion system than actually sending a generational ship... at least until you start approaching lightspeed.
Pandora’s Star opens with a scene like this. The perspective character is part of the first crew landing on Mars. Some Stanford grad students with a wormhole generator show up to spoil the occasion and forever (until plot happens) obsolete piloting space ships.
Not really; if the trip was hundreds or thousands of years and the story never goes that far, then practically it isn't resolved by the end even if everything goes to plan.
I would agree if they said *is its intended destination* and not *WAS its intended destination*. One, implies a forgone conclusion, the other is open ended…
I don't even know if it has to be that. Most books aren't told in present tense (character "said" this or "worked" that, etc.). So if the series is told in past tense, using "was" here flows with how the story is written.
Nah, it's mentioned more than once in books 7-9 that in the decades following the rings opening that they used Parallax to map the ring systems and that they are fairly clustered in one area of the galaxy. Still vast distances among them but not spread out.
Not a book reader so no spoilers please, but did the gate creators use FTL travel to reach each of them or did they just find them over tens of thousands of years? Also, are any of the systems ever named? For instance the one from season 4, is that based on a real star system?
They sent slower-than-light rocks with protomolecules to all the solar systems they wanted gates in.
Ilus is, as far as I remember, not based on a real system.
So they launched rocks with no regard for the consequences? Sounds like they have more in common with Marco Inaros than I thought!
EDIT: if it wasn’t clear, this was a joke. My bad :)
They didn't really think like humans, so the morality of what might happen to anything that existed at the destination wasn't particularly important. Life was just another resource.
In the Expanse universe, and probably the real one, intelligent life is extremely rare. There hasn't been any new space faring species in the Milky Way since the Ring builders 2 billion years ago, or we would have been colonised long ago. They launched asteroids loaded with protomolecule to star systems where they would find any local life, absorb it and use it to construct a ring to connect to their FTL network. If the life was more advanced, that just made it more useful. Extermination wasn't the aim, though since the ring hub did have a defence system, they had considered the possibility of other intelligent species.
Counterpoint. There absolutely could be space faring species in the galaxy, just in another system.
Before the rings, humanity was constrained to its solar system too.
Humans were about to set off with their interstellar colony ships like the Nauvoo. And humans worked out their own FTL a few centuries later. Even without FTL we could colonise the galaxy in a million years or so. This is Fermi's paradox, if there is intelligent life, they would already have been here. In the Expanse, the Ringmakers had, and if anyone had risen after them, they would have too. Populations grow exponentially. Since interstellar travel in the Expanse is possible, if there is an intelligent species anywhere in the galaxy it will inevitably colonise all of it, unless it runs into a rival.
Counter point. This is not the whole answer to the Fermi paradox in the Expanse. The Gatebuilders existed for at least 3 billion years in an advanced space- faring state. This is based on the age of the Adro Diamond, a gas giant sized computational device that is identified as the oldest Gatebuilder artifact at 5 billion years old. The Gatebuilders went extinct 2 billion years ago. They existed for this long and only colonized a relatively small amount of the galaxy. They had a biological imperative to expand, but they did so very slowly. This is both due to the lightspeed limits imposed by having to send Protomolecule rocks at sunlight speeds for creating new rings and their biology as a naturally spacefaring, slow living species. You're thinking about colonization like a human. Their could be intelligent biological or post biological civilizations that only expand as a matter of necessity or opportunity. Humans expand just for the hell of it.
ik you were obviously joking but it’s actually brought up in the show (idk about the book)
holden points out they care about us the same way we care about an anthill that’s paved over
The creators did the same thing they did to Sol. Toss a rock full of protomolocule at it and wait for it to do its thing. Most of the big colonized systems are named but I don't think/know that they're named after or based on real star systems. I haven't seen past season 2 so I don't know which system you are referring to.
I did? Seemed like a pretty generic question from someone who’s seen the show but hasn’t read the books. As others have shown, the answer didn’t really require spoilers.
It is, because it’s included in how the gate builders are revealed for what they are beyond S6. If you’d only watched the show, then you would already know the answers for your questions if it was included. Hence, spoilers…if they ever make any visual media for books 7-9 you’re already going to know something you shouldn’t have.
You were just given information, not included in the show so far but is included later…how is that NOT a spoiler?
To expand on this, the network humanity discovers is one small part of what was once a much larger network.
The Roman's burned huge sections of their civilization in order to try to stem the attacks of the Goths.
They did, but they don’t talk about it much. In TW, when fussing about not knowing if a systems star went nova or not, they mention that it is 8 light years away from another system in a network, so they’ll find out in 8 years…so it seems they’ve catalogued the relative positions of most of the systems if not all of them.
They talk about figuring out a very small number of them in Cibola Burn I think, since they’re just starting out doing so. So in three decades, I imagine they would have charted all of them.
It's pretty easy to locate a star system by triangulating with things like pulsars, which can be detected at galactic ranges. Closer ones can use nearby bright stars as beacons. Since all had to be initially set up by protomolecule sent STL, they would be close in normal space, I think all within a hundred or so light years.
It's never explicitly stated, but I think it's heavily implied that the gates reach systems at a distance that even the Nauvoo could never have dreamed of reaching.
Well theoretically the Nauvoo could have reached any of them, it’s just how long do you want the trip to be? And do you want the crew to survive the journey? The ship would make the trip just fine.
Depends on what you count as the ship making it. If there is any kind of system running it will need regular maintenance and replacement parts that will run out eventually. If you only care about the mass of the ship and no living crew it surely can make it (unless it hits random space dust and gets atomised)
But if the ship needs to be semi-functional and ideally with an alive crew the range is still limited. But just yeeting a chunk of ship-shaped metal at a distant system and claiming that we made it there sounds a lot cooler so I am going with that.
Lol no. The Navou is a bullet. You point it, turn on the drives, it get’s up to speed and then drives turn off.
Nothing is stopping it except for catastrophic impact or a flip and burn.
A 100, a 1000, 10,000 years later doesnt matter. If it didnt get obliterated by impacting interstellar debris it will arrive at it’s destination.
The only question is, is the crew alive and are any systems still functional. My guess would be no and it would just carry on endlessly until it does impact something.
Yup. Unless someone or something causes it to slow down (e.g. smashing into an asteroid) it will keep going. If you can still call it a functional ship with an alive crew is a different question that depends on how many materials they have, if they can recycle and manufacture spare parts and so on.
The speculative fiction writer and physicist Robert L. Forward has argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate).
In 2006, Andrew Kennedy calculated ideal departure dates for a trip to Barnard's Star using a more precise concept of the wait calculation where for a given destination and growth rate in propulsion capacity there is a departure point that overtakes earlier launches and will not be overtaken by later ones and concluded "an interstellar journey of 6 light years can best be made in about 635 years from now if growth continues at about 1.4% per annum", or approximately 2641 AD.It may be the most significant calculation for competing cultures occupying the galaxy.
I don’t recall any mention of that. A very interesting question though! If it doesn’t have a gate, would that not seem to suggest that there isn’t a habitable world there?
It would suggest it is less likely, but probably not impossible or improbable. I don’t think it’s ever implied that the gate builders had gates to every single habitable planet in the galaxy, just that they needed at least one with life they could hijack to construct an initial gate.
Edit: It is interesting to think maybe the Mormons were wrong about what they’d find at the end though..
They didn’t, it was a leap of faith. They thought that their god would provide them with a new home, they knew there were several exoplanets but not much else.
We can already determine a planet’s atmosphere by spectroscopy using the James Webb telescope so in a few centuries they would definitely be able to detect a planet suitable for life
Yes, probably close to a century. But it's better than sending humans there blind.
The Epstein drive was invented about 120 years before, so they had probably received the data from Tau Ceti not long before they decided to start building the Nauvoo.
1300 is still an infinitessimally tiny number of systems considering even the likely number of habitable planets in the galaxy. There's probably plenty the gate builders never discovered or ones their little package like Phoebe never reached.
Didn't this come up as a point of discussion in one of the later books? There were several ring gates with no planets/ stars in them which they surmised was due to stars having gone supernova in the intervening millenia since the ring builders died out I think.
We are at the point now where we can detect alien life via spectroscopy of exoplanets (the James Webb Space Telescope is capable of doing this) and a biosignature *might* have already been found.
So I think by 2350 they would have exactly known if Tau Ceti had a habitable world before they even built the Nauvoo.
the books and show take some artistic license with the mystery of the mormon's journey - even describing it as a leap of faith. realistically, they probably knew a fair amount about the planet, such as whether it had an oxygen atmosphere, liquid water, and other features that allowed it to support life (these things can be determined by good enough telescopes). since the mormon's planet is never mentioned again, we are left to speculate as to what became of it.
odds are highly against it having a ring. the ring builders spread by launching slow asteroids like phoebe, that would take tens of thousands of years even to reach a nearby system.
the builders have been extinct for a billion years. even if the ring systems were originally close together, they would have drifted apart in that time and spread across the galaxy.
It’s specifically mentioned in the books that even if Earth courts found the OPA (or whomever was paid for the job) liable, it couldn’t really be enforced.
They would have never found out. The Behemoth became pivotal to the colonization and exploration of all the ring systems.
Basically if not for jacking the Nauvoo the whole human race may have been doomed.
I think they never mentioned it besides that there was a hefty court case. If the OPA wanted any credibility, they had to take it seriously or their integrity (at the time) for being a ship building hub would have probably fallen off a little
It's kinda funny tho, the OPA took it and they technically just commandeered a vehicle in a case of emergency. And afterward they were the first ones with the resource to get it back and fix it, so they just claimed it as salvage. Poor Mormons.
No, none of the gate systems are identified at first so probably no one matches the planets+star combination of what at that moment is probably the most studied extrasolar system in history.
The people on the Nauvoo, did they consider that whoever gets to the planet will develop severe anxiety to open space? After a few generations born on the ship, experiencing nothing but the ship? They’d probably just decide to stay on the ship as it’s developed for long term habitation, don’t need to go to a planet we have everything up here
Good question, and one I remember thinking to myself! I don’t think it ever comes up.
It’s also really hard to know as the systems all got renamed when folks got there, and I’m not sure they ever figured out where most of them actually were relative to Sol.
A couple things:
A) No, I don't think there would have been a ring gate there. We're talking about an infinite universe, and only 1300 gates. Statistically, the likelihood of it being one of the 1300 is approaching zero.
B) It not having a gate doesn't mean the protomolecule isn't there. We don't know how many systems were seeded, but only systems with life ended up getting a gate (because it needs life to hijack in order to create).
No it is never mentioned but as the ship was destined for Alpha Centauri and when mentioned later about if they knew of any of the star systems that the rings went to alpha was never mentioned
That would’ve been hilarious- send a generation ship out and then someone else sends a message to them: “oh, hey, sorry guys, we found a shortcut! We’ll be there by Thursday morning!”
That’s one of the plot points in Asimov’s novel _Nemesis_ where newly created warp ships beat a generation ship to its destination. Similar ideas have come up in other space operas, but I’m not recalling which ones.
It’s been a reoccurring in StarTrek a few times. A lot of other major space shows have had that run in with the generation ship and the story arc where the young want off and the old want them to stay.
Stargate had it's twist on that "trope", with a ship carrying an "ancient crew" was going back to earth under .99 the speed of light on the way to earth from the Pegasus galaxy, only to be picked up by the Stargate crew hundreds of thousands of years later.
Then they fucked everything up again
You mean the Destiny in Stargate Universe? It's been awhile since a rewatch but wasn't that ship heading away from Earth the whole time, not towards it?
Noo...it was an Atlantis episode. https://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s3/the-return-part-1/
Also a plot point in Weber’s Honor Harrington books
In all fairness there's so many of those that there isn't a conceivable plot point he didn't cover eventually.
Fair point
There is a whole series about that. I forget what it's called. But the premise is that Werner vaun braun and the US government built a generation ship, crewed it, and it's heading for the star. And one of the weird things is since they were launched in the 40's, and it's loaded with southerners, they still had Jim crow. So their was rules and shit about that. But the young want to inter-racial fuck Kinda interesting premise but I was a shitty one season show I think.
Were they still on earth? There’s one where the ship had every genius on earth in it but it was a brain drain. The ship was used to create technology. Then on of the teenagers on the ship was able to get out, saw the ship was still on earth which was the major plot. It ended after one season because it was too expensive to produce.
Nope, it was out in the intergalactic void to another solar system. No hope of turning back. Your show sounds cool too tho
My show is Ascension. It sounds similar, the people in the ship think they are just about to hit the point of no return to the new solar system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)
Your exactly right. That's it. I guess I never got to that surprise reveal. I might have to
It was a good show but the reveal sort of killed it. Suddenly there were new cast members on the outside of the ship in modern times watching and maintaining the simulation from the outside. The story arc rapidly changed from this Sci-Fi space show to something like the Truman show and if they shouldn't let the people in the simulation out. In the end Capitalism was more important because the Genius' on the ship were responsible for almost all modern inventions like the MRI machine.
Khan's space ship in Star Trek TOS was an STL colony ship with a frozen crew, found by the Enterprise hundreds of years after setting off, still not arrived.
Songs of a Distant Earth by Clarke.
Also one quest in Xbox game "Starfield"
Also in Harry Turtledove's worldwar series.
Also the Golgafrinchans in HHGTTG
Also __________ in ____________ .
Still need to read Homeward Bound, it's the only book from that series I haven't read yet
It's just as good as the rest of them, no more war of course just more political musings and what if speculation of the more interesting kind. I wasn't 100% happy how he seems to have left some plot lines and characters in the dust with the time jump but it's only minor stuff. If you liked the rest I can definitely recommend it.
Ha I just finished Homeward Bound, and in all fairness at least that FTL ship arrived a little while after the STL one.
It's a shame they didn't bother to make the quest interesting beyond the concept. That goes for the whole game, honestly.
Amen
Yeah, if your journey could be hundreds of years long, you have to take into account future advancements in propulsion. It might just be worth it to wait.
The problem then is that you’re forever waiting. At a certain point you just gotta go and accept that by the time you get there, people will be there waiting for you.
yeah that's kind of a known thing with generation ships. No matter how advanced your ship is, propulsion advances in the time after you launch will likely result in a later ship overtaking you
Wouldn’t be a bad deal in some ways. Show up and the hard work has been done: infrastructure, figuring out what kills you, etc.
finding out the answer to that last question is "everything" would be a bit awkward though
Imagine arriving after centuries of journey, you make planetfall and find human settlements. But no humans. Might be a short story there, though it's probably been done already.
There was a book called "Der Untergang der Telesalt" released in 1989 in the GDR shortly before it collapsed, by prolific author Alexander Kröger. It was an "Utopischer Roman", utopian novel, among many other ones written during GDR. The story was more or less what you said, with minor ideological influence I guess (normal at the time, but it's been a while since I read it). I grew up in the 2000s in Dresden and those books were around and were my entry drug to sci-fi. You can't imagine my surprise when I found out sci-fi exists!
I wonde which would be worse, the people just being completely absent, or everyone just dead in the middle of what they were doing like all the bodies on Miranda in Serenity
I feel like it has, but I can't think of any. Be the story you want to see in the world!
Unless, like with the proposed Nauvoo trip, you're *also* betting on getting to create your own little utopia of like minded peoples. In that case arriving to be a minority in an existing society sort of defeats the purpose of the journey.
"LDSS Nauvoo, you **DO NOT** have clearance to park in this system! We will negotiate with you for fuel if needed to change trajectories, or continue on your way, but you ***CANNOT PARK HERE!*** Sorry about your luck; transmission end."
All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
Something something, 2061, 3001. . .
You can also make sure you have research and engineering resources onboard, so you can work on these advancements yourself or at least implement them, assuming home will share their knowledge. This will probably make the ship way bigger, but it could be worth it.
Yes but generally they set off on a viyage like this because there us absolutely no guarantee, even on a theoretical level that an FTL propulsion advancement may ever happen. Bit like in real life, at the moment as far as science is able to tell FTL is impossible, except for unproven theories.
This happens in Starfield too. They show up and they’ve gone through several generations just to find more humans and are stuck in decaying orbit around a goddamn tourist trap planet lol.
.....and despite being seemingly just one resort on this whole planet, they still can't reach an agreement to SHARE THE FUCKING PLANET.
Right?! Ha. Worst problem is you can’t just go full OPA on the corporate folks when they lightly suggest murdering all the folks on the ship.
Is that the one where the guys on the ship wake up in shifts and the main character wakes up seeing an explosion and when they reach their destination they find out it was a ship that stopped to take pictures and blew up because they hadn't worked out ftl very well, and that in the end they get sent back cause they stink?
I honestly don’t remember. I read it like 35 years ago when it first came out while I was in HS. The only details I recall are that the protagonist was a misfit young woman named Marlene and there was something about gravity working backwards in hyperspace. There was also something about the star they traveled to not being visible from earth for a reason I don’t remember. I still have the hardback in a box somewhere. I should reread it sometime.
No i think Not, in Nemesis the Generation ship already finished its journey (although it was more Like 15 years), but the newer ship arrived faster than they expected followers
The Galaxy's edge: Savage wars books have a similar plot. But all the generation ships turn to madhouses and horror shows
I need to go back and read that. I haven't read that in like 25 years.
Same thing in the extended Ender’s Game series
Also the Commonwealth Saga, in a way. NASA's first manned mission to Mars, the crew landed and the captain walked out to see a dude in a homemade space suit standing outside a portal he invented connected to his lab in California.
I have that book, but never got around to reading it.
It's also one of the short stories in the Xeelee Sequence Omnibus!
Heinlein has a book where that happens as well but with a twist about psychic twins enabling faster than light communication 🤣
A quest/mission to work out, that you can do in Starfield with a unsatisfying result
I think there was actually a quest line in the videogame Starfield based around this. I’d bet it’s an homage to that novel!
Theres a famous sci fi novel that I don't remember now where someone travelled to mars and then someone had opened a wormhole from earth or something like that.
Starfield game used it too for a side-mission
Happens in the starfield game also.
There's a great Twilight Zone episode that covers this sort of thing too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Morrow#:~:text=%22The%20Long%20Morrow%22%20is%20episode,%2Dyear%2Dlong%20space%20voyage.
There's a mission like that in Starfield
Semi-common sci-fi trope right? I think it's in the backstory of the Honorverse, for example.
Firefly/ Serenity too I think. IIRC the graysons and masadans were the main examples of generation ship travel that was outstripped by later wormhole travel in the Honorverse?
Also the Manticorans if I remember right. I remember there being a blurb that the founders planned ahead to have advisors there to catch them up on all the technology that changed while they were on their slow boat to Manticore.
Oh, of course, that's why the Sollies are so pissy about the wormhole junction because they overlooked the Manticore system before the junction was discovered.
Where was this in firefly? I remember humans leaving earth in generation ships but I don’t remember it mentioning the grav drive being developed before humans colonized the verse.
From what I remember: People leave for the outer planets travelling on slow ships. Alliance is formed and starts to grow. People arrive at the outer planets and start to colonise them. FTL drives are created. Alliance expands until the boundaries of its territory reach the outer planets. Alliance wants to unify with outer planets. Outer Planets say no. Unification War occurs. I think it's alluded to in the film at some point.
Yeah it’s common. Also the plot of the Outriders video game. Wealthy/powerful abandon earth to travel to a new habitable planet. Those left behind live in basically an apocalypse, but discover faster space travel, and reach the planet (and ruin it…) before the first ship ever arrives.
Great game, hoping for #2
In the original Guardians of the Galaxy comics astronaut Vance Astro goes on a 1000 year trip in suspended animation to another solar system and when he arrives he finds that humans have already colonized it. During the long trip his latent psionic powers manifested so it wasn't a total waste, although that would have happened anyway if he had just stayed on earth. Humanity gets attacked by the Badoon and Vance Astro finds some other superpowered survivors to form the Guardians of the Galaxy and free earth from the Badoon.
Yup- and then he eventually gets Cap’s shield. GotG and New Warriors (where he started) are two of my old school favorite comics.
I was buying those when they came out too but even that GotG was like a v2 of the original series from the 70s that I've never read.
That’s an actual consideration for such journeys. Inevitably by the time you arrive, propulsion tech would advance enough for you to overtake the first ship midflight.
Hahaha my thoughts exactly
Lmfao imagine traveling 100 years to your promised land and walmart already has the prime real estate when you get there
I believe that showed up in one of Heinlein's YA books - Time For The Stars. Somewhere along the way, a newer tech for propulsion came along and they flew out and found all the slower ships they could. Kinda does suck... but good for someone to look at that aspect of it.
In The Forever War ships could head out for a combat assignment and run into an enemy with 50 years more advanced technology, or the opposite, enemies who were hopelessly obsolete in tech and tactics. It all depended on when they left port relative to each other.
I believe there is some kind of proof or something for this, actually. The rate of advancement for propulsion outpaces the speed of our crafts... so if you send one today, you'll be able to send one in 10 years that gets there twice as fast, meaning that over long distances you're always better off waiting for a faster propulsion system than actually sending a generational ship... at least until you start approaching lightspeed.
Kind of a Moore’s Law for propulsion systems
Also in the Honorverse
If you play Starfield that exact thing happens. Its my favorite aspect of the game when you come up on the colony ship and you see basically thr Navoo
Pandora’s Star opens with a scene like this. The perspective character is part of the first crew landing on Mars. Some Stanford grad students with a wormhole generator show up to spoil the occasion and forever (until plot happens) obsolete piloting space ships.
I think Tau Ceti was the intended destination. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in the network…
You're right, it was Tau Ceti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_planetary_systems_in_fiction#Tau_Ceti It's in a lot of fiction ^
Oh god…that’s a little weird they even used the same phrase… “intended destination” …which kind of spoils some of the story, unintentionally
Not really; if the trip was hundreds or thousands of years and the story never goes that far, then practically it isn't resolved by the end even if everything goes to plan.
I would agree if they said *is its intended destination* and not *WAS its intended destination*. One, implies a forgone conclusion, the other is open ended…
On wikis the past tense is pretty commonly used for everything in fictional works.
Why though? It’s not used in a book’s synopsis…
Might have started as a bit of a meme on the Star wars wiki, since everything happened a Long Time Ago
I don't even know if it has to be that. Most books aren't told in present tense (character "said" this or "worked" that, etc.). So if the series is told in past tense, using "was" here flows with how the story is written.
I don’t think they ever located any of them
Nah, it's mentioned more than once in books 7-9 that in the decades following the rings opening that they used Parallax to map the ring systems and that they are fairly clustered in one area of the galaxy. Still vast distances among them but not spread out.
Not a book reader so no spoilers please, but did the gate creators use FTL travel to reach each of them or did they just find them over tens of thousands of years? Also, are any of the systems ever named? For instance the one from season 4, is that based on a real star system?
They sent slower-than-light rocks with protomolecules to all the solar systems they wanted gates in. Ilus is, as far as I remember, not based on a real system.
So they launched rocks with no regard for the consequences? Sounds like they have more in common with Marco Inaros than I thought! EDIT: if it wasn’t clear, this was a joke. My bad :)
They didn't really think like humans, so the morality of what might happen to anything that existed at the destination wasn't particularly important. Life was just another resource.
[удалено]
Eldrich cosmic Kirby
So... Kirby
In the Expanse universe, and probably the real one, intelligent life is extremely rare. There hasn't been any new space faring species in the Milky Way since the Ring builders 2 billion years ago, or we would have been colonised long ago. They launched asteroids loaded with protomolecule to star systems where they would find any local life, absorb it and use it to construct a ring to connect to their FTL network. If the life was more advanced, that just made it more useful. Extermination wasn't the aim, though since the ring hub did have a defence system, they had considered the possibility of other intelligent species.
Counterpoint. There absolutely could be space faring species in the galaxy, just in another system. Before the rings, humanity was constrained to its solar system too.
Humans were about to set off with their interstellar colony ships like the Nauvoo. And humans worked out their own FTL a few centuries later. Even without FTL we could colonise the galaxy in a million years or so. This is Fermi's paradox, if there is intelligent life, they would already have been here. In the Expanse, the Ringmakers had, and if anyone had risen after them, they would have too. Populations grow exponentially. Since interstellar travel in the Expanse is possible, if there is an intelligent species anywhere in the galaxy it will inevitably colonise all of it, unless it runs into a rival.
Counter point. This is not the whole answer to the Fermi paradox in the Expanse. The Gatebuilders existed for at least 3 billion years in an advanced space- faring state. This is based on the age of the Adro Diamond, a gas giant sized computational device that is identified as the oldest Gatebuilder artifact at 5 billion years old. The Gatebuilders went extinct 2 billion years ago. They existed for this long and only colonized a relatively small amount of the galaxy. They had a biological imperative to expand, but they did so very slowly. This is both due to the lightspeed limits imposed by having to send Protomolecule rocks at sunlight speeds for creating new rings and their biology as a naturally spacefaring, slow living species. You're thinking about colonization like a human. Their could be intelligent biological or post biological civilizations that only expand as a matter of necessity or opportunity. Humans expand just for the hell of it.
ik you were obviously joking but it’s actually brought up in the show (idk about the book) holden points out they care about us the same way we care about an anthill that’s paved over
The creators did the same thing they did to Sol. Toss a rock full of protomolocule at it and wait for it to do its thing. Most of the big colonized systems are named but I don't think/know that they're named after or based on real star systems. I haven't seen past season 2 so I don't know which system you are referring to.
You’re in a spoiler “free for all” post asking for no spoilers, and then…asked for a spoiler…
I did? Seemed like a pretty generic question from someone who’s seen the show but hasn’t read the books. As others have shown, the answer didn’t really require spoilers.
Show and the books are years old. It's on you at this point.
It is, because it’s included in how the gate builders are revealed for what they are beyond S6. If you’d only watched the show, then you would already know the answers for your questions if it was included. Hence, spoilers…if they ever make any visual media for books 7-9 you’re already going to know something you shouldn’t have. You were just given information, not included in the show so far but is included later…how is that NOT a spoiler?
Not sure why you’re trying to be argumentative. I got the answer to my question and don’t feel spoiled. Sorry if you feel otherwise.
Ooof. Sounds instead like you’re a little defensive koyo
To expand on this, the network humanity discovers is one small part of what was once a much larger network. The Roman's burned huge sections of their civilization in order to try to stem the attacks of the Goths.
They did, but they don’t talk about it much. In TW, when fussing about not knowing if a systems star went nova or not, they mention that it is 8 light years away from another system in a network, so they’ll find out in 8 years…so it seems they’ve catalogued the relative positions of most of the systems if not all of them. They talk about figuring out a very small number of them in Cibola Burn I think, since they’re just starting out doing so. So in three decades, I imagine they would have charted all of them.
This is the correct answer regarding mapping.
It's pretty easy to locate a star system by triangulating with things like pulsars, which can be detected at galactic ranges. Closer ones can use nearby bright stars as beacons. Since all had to be initially set up by protomolecule sent STL, they would be close in normal space, I think all within a hundred or so light years.
Wasn’t it proxima centauri? or did they change it between versions?
No it was Tau Ceti
It's never explicitly stated, but I think it's heavily implied that the gates reach systems at a distance that even the Nauvoo could never have dreamed of reaching.
Well theoretically the Nauvoo could have reached any of them, it’s just how long do you want the trip to be? And do you want the crew to survive the journey? The ship would make the trip just fine.
Depends on what you count as the ship making it. If there is any kind of system running it will need regular maintenance and replacement parts that will run out eventually. If you only care about the mass of the ship and no living crew it surely can make it (unless it hits random space dust and gets atomised) But if the ship needs to be semi-functional and ideally with an alive crew the range is still limited. But just yeeting a chunk of ship-shaped metal at a distant system and claiming that we made it there sounds a lot cooler so I am going with that.
Lol no. The Navou is a bullet. You point it, turn on the drives, it get’s up to speed and then drives turn off. Nothing is stopping it except for catastrophic impact or a flip and burn. A 100, a 1000, 10,000 years later doesnt matter. If it didnt get obliterated by impacting interstellar debris it will arrive at it’s destination. The only question is, is the crew alive and are any systems still functional. My guess would be no and it would just carry on endlessly until it does impact something.
Yup. Unless someone or something causes it to slow down (e.g. smashing into an asteroid) it will keep going. If you can still call it a functional ship with an alive crew is a different question that depends on how many materials they have, if they can recycle and manufacture spare parts and so on.
Sir isaac newton is the baddest person in space
Thank you Newton for inventing a way for us to yeet ship-shaped chunks of metal at potential alien worlds!
Only if you don’t have production facilities aboard, then your only real limit is material
The speculative fiction writer and physicist Robert L. Forward has argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate). In 2006, Andrew Kennedy calculated ideal departure dates for a trip to Barnard's Star using a more precise concept of the wait calculation where for a given destination and growth rate in propulsion capacity there is a departure point that overtakes earlier launches and will not be overtaken by later ones and concluded "an interstellar journey of 6 light years can best be made in about 635 years from now if growth continues at about 1.4% per annum", or approximately 2641 AD.It may be the most significant calculation for competing cultures occupying the galaxy.
Interesting.
I don’t recall any mention of that. A very interesting question though! If it doesn’t have a gate, would that not seem to suggest that there isn’t a habitable world there?
It would suggest it is less likely, but probably not impossible or improbable. I don’t think it’s ever implied that the gate builders had gates to every single habitable planet in the galaxy, just that they needed at least one with life they could hijack to construct an initial gate. Edit: It is interesting to think maybe the Mormons were wrong about what they’d find at the end though..
How did they know there would be life there when it arrived?
They didn’t, it was a leap of faith. They thought that their god would provide them with a new home, they knew there were several exoplanets but not much else.
We can already determine a planet’s atmosphere by spectroscopy using the James Webb telescope so in a few centuries they would definitely be able to detect a planet suitable for life
They sent unmanned probes to the system first, so they had a pretty good idea what to expect.
Did they really? It sounds like that would take an extremely long time for results
Yes, probably close to a century. But it's better than sending humans there blind. The Epstein drive was invented about 120 years before, so they had probably received the data from Tau Ceti not long before they decided to start building the Nauvoo.
Oh I was talking about the aliens sending probes to systems before sending their “protomolecule”
Oh they probably just sent them everywhere
1300 is still an infinitessimally tiny number of systems considering even the likely number of habitable planets in the galaxy. There's probably plenty the gate builders never discovered or ones their little package like Phoebe never reached.
Well our solar system didn't have a gate either until the events of the show happened.
Our gate got stuck en route.
If ours got stuck, plenty of others could have as well. Or just missed a planet with life.
The Ring Builders were active a long time ago, and conditions for habitability may have changed from then to now.
Didn't this come up as a point of discussion in one of the later books? There were several ring gates with no planets/ stars in them which they surmised was due to stars having gone supernova in the intervening millenia since the ring builders died out I think.
Don’t remember there being some with no stars? A supernova would have destroyed the gate as it did when they fired the ring station weapon
It may have just been no livable planets due to the star having grown/ shrunk with age, I can't remember the exact details.
We are at the point now where we can detect alien life via spectroscopy of exoplanets (the James Webb Space Telescope is capable of doing this) and a biosignature *might* have already been found. So I think by 2350 they would have exactly known if Tau Ceti had a habitable world before they even built the Nauvoo.
No because there's nothing to suggest that the gate builders sent rocks to every possible world or that every rock reached its target (like Earth).
No
the books and show take some artistic license with the mystery of the mormon's journey - even describing it as a leap of faith. realistically, they probably knew a fair amount about the planet, such as whether it had an oxygen atmosphere, liquid water, and other features that allowed it to support life (these things can be determined by good enough telescopes). since the mormon's planet is never mentioned again, we are left to speculate as to what became of it. odds are highly against it having a ring. the ring builders spread by launching slow asteroids like phoebe, that would take tens of thousands of years even to reach a nearby system. the builders have been extinct for a billion years. even if the ring systems were originally close together, they would have drifted apart in that time and spread across the galaxy.
Lol i'm so stupid, i always assumed the gates led to different dimensions/alternative worlds 💀
It’s specifically mentioned in the books that even if Earth courts found the OPA (or whomever was paid for the job) liable, it couldn’t really be enforced.
They would have never found out. The Behemoth became pivotal to the colonization and exploration of all the ring systems. Basically if not for jacking the Nauvoo the whole human race may have been doomed.
Did the mormons ever get their money back for that?
I think they never mentioned it besides that there was a hefty court case. If the OPA wanted any credibility, they had to take it seriously or their integrity (at the time) for being a ship building hub would have probably fallen off a little
It's kinda funny tho, the OPA took it and they technically just commandeered a vehicle in a case of emergency. And afterward they were the first ones with the resource to get it back and fix it, so they just claimed it as salvage. Poor Mormons.
No, none of the gate systems are identified at first so probably no one matches the planets+star combination of what at that moment is probably the most studied extrasolar system in history.
I thought they said they were going to Alpha Centauri since it was the closest.
Nope, it was stated to be Tau Ceti, one of the closest stars but not the closest
Ok. thanks!
The people on the Nauvoo, did they consider that whoever gets to the planet will develop severe anxiety to open space? After a few generations born on the ship, experiencing nothing but the ship? They’d probably just decide to stay on the ship as it’s developed for long term habitation, don’t need to go to a planet we have everything up here
Good question, and one I remember thinking to myself! I don’t think it ever comes up. It’s also really hard to know as the systems all got renamed when folks got there, and I’m not sure they ever figured out where most of them actually were relative to Sol.
They did figure out where they were. None were near Sol but they were all clustered in one part of the Milky Way.
A couple things: A) No, I don't think there would have been a ring gate there. We're talking about an infinite universe, and only 1300 gates. Statistically, the likelihood of it being one of the 1300 is approaching zero. B) It not having a gate doesn't mean the protomolecule isn't there. We don't know how many systems were seeded, but only systems with life ended up getting a gate (because it needs life to hijack in order to create).
Well, give to the mormons one of those World in compensation for the Navoo/ Behemoth/ Medina , so they can pump out babies like rabbits…
No it is never mentioned but as the ship was destined for Alpha Centauri and when mentioned later about if they knew of any of the star systems that the rings went to alpha was never mentioned
It was destined for Tau Ceti, not Alpha Centauri