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.
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You get there and your engineering knowledge is 3000 years out of date.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 a “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.
That’s so true. I’ve thought about that quite a lot watching sci-fi. I really enjoy the idea of trying to create a completely new culture or civilization without first seeing it as an inevitable evolutionary progression. I think that’s the only way to really imagine a civilization that far into the future.
I love that you thought of the three shells. It’s absolutely one of my favorite sci-fi mechanics to leave unexplained phenomena up to the viewer or reader. Most stories end up as a bland socialist paradise or a dystopian nightmare. I like the idea of something different altogether, or a blend of present-day and something else entirely. Kind of like how Taco Bell won the fast food wars. Lol
The only problem is trying to imagine a really distant future that makes the present look barbaric.
But it’s really hard to make a future that’s believable and makes the present look barbaric.
This episode of Star Trek: DS9 from 1995 depicts life in 2024
The Bell Riots weren’t what they were cracked up to be. Either that, or they got the date wrong.
But, the writers in that scene went really easy on the set dressers and costumers: “Ok, it’s a street scene in 2024, but everyone is poor, and as a result they don’t have anything built after… say… 1995.”
Curious that the star is called Barnard because that’s the name of the doctor that first performed a successful heart transplant.
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.
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.
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.
Nice nice, and in the 3000 intervening years they’ve developed alpha particle cannons that shred your entire swarm of rocks and puny physical spaceship to white hot quantum loops as they sip megachampagne on their continent sized airships as they watch your fleet unwillingly transition to light
The gun that fired the barrage was the size of a juice box floating somewhere in orbit, they have millions of them
You didn’t even get a chance to pull your finger off of the mass driver button
It’s not made on earth so it’s mega sparkling wine
As if that future civilization would treat you as anything but a zoo specimen
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
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
Dude, listen to 1000 CE English. It’s 90% jibberish even at that point.
so are tiktok comment sections, your point?
I know I was just saying 3000 years and basically nobody alive today understands the language. Even people who devote their whole lives to the languages around at that time are basically just making informed guesses on pronunciation and would probably struggle considerably to understand an actual speaker.
It’s also possible that audio recording being a thing that exists will slow changes in language as well.
Shoop da whoop?
Well at least you didn’t have to spend the rest of your life building civilisation from scratch.
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.
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Couldn’t be bothered to pick him up on the way.
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.
FTL coms are a concession to the story, it would have been terrible without it
IRL quantum entanglement can’t ever provide causality breaking info. In very simple terms, you need correlation to know when the data stream began as just observing the resulting spins still seem just as random before and after the event.
In even more simple terms: Whatever message they can send even if pre-agreed on seems like random heat results until you know the exact moment the transmission began, as confirmed by a light lagged message.
In less simple terms, the misunderstanding comes from treating the metaphor of ‘flipping the spin north switch’ as a literal thing instead of a less-than ideal ‘lies to children’ of what is actually happening to particles that experience spin transition, and the meaning of ‘entangled’ is both less and more strange than people understand.
But again, 3 body problem would have been a terrible story without it,t hat’s why it’s science fiction
Which version of the series is better to watch? The American version or the Chinese version?
From what I’ve heard the Chinese version is rather literal to the books to a fault.
Having read the books I enjoyed the Netflix series, but understand they made some changes to both adapt it to a series (fine) and made a lot of characters westen (a bit unnecessary maybe).
I am excited for season 2
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.
That’s another solution to the Fermi paradox. FTL travel is impossible, but can’t actually be proven to be impossible, so no one wants to be the sucker.
Don’t have to fll. Just have to be a third faster to give them 1000 years head start
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.
It was also the plot of a sci fi story Far Centaurus by AE Van Vogt.
That’s the plot of a nice obscure theatre piece I know, but they don’t travel that far, are awake, and see the other ships pass. It’s awsome and fun for the audience and super frustrating for the characters.
This is a take I never saw before on this matter. Is there a source?
It’s never been officially published and it’s not in English - it trully is obscure. It was played several times though with enough success and I do have the whole thing on my computer somewhere, probably (or at least I know who to ask for it). I’m not sure it’s worth reading in automatic translation, but if you’re interested, I could send it to you.
Oh, then it could be difficult. Thanks anyway.
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
Sounds awesome not only you skipped the hardest part you have everything setup and get to live a good life. Unless of course that was your goal to experience building the colony.
At least you aren’t a soldier ready to restart a war that’s been settled
The real solution to this is simple. You’re a ship full of colonists dreaming of settling a new world, right? So go settle a new world! Ask the citizens of your target world for an FTL-capable spaceship, climb aboard, pick a new target further afield, and head off into the wild blue yonder. It seems that’s the least they could do in such a situation.
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Except the new FTL-capable ships are the result of 3000 years of advancement. You wouldn’t even be able to figure out how to use the bathroom, let alone do the navigation and piloting to reach a new planet.
Imagine we had some Egyptians from -1000 BC who suddenly arrived unexpectedly in the modern world. They think Ra, Anubis and Horus control their fates. Iron is the most advanced technology they know of, but you’re proposing we make them astronauts?
Iron is the most advanced technology they know of, but you’re proposing we make them astronauts?
Honestly, that would be fucking hilarious to watch.
With some variations, used already a few times in games and series.
