Comment on The problem with sleeper ships
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months agoI think the problem is more matching velocities so you can make the pickup. Also, a certain compatibility between vessels for any kind of docking/passenger exchange.
Even then, there’s a huge energy cost to slowing down mid-flight. It might actually be faster to drop off improvements as you fly by and let the slower vessel upgrade itself using the improvements.
This also opens up a big question of extra-solar transportation economics. If you’re planning to develop Vehicle Y that can outpace Vehicle X, why would anyone get on X to begin with?
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 4 months ago
I kind of picturing it like how planes refuel in the air.
Cause it’s 50 years later. 50 years ago they thought we have flying cars but no one thought of smart phones. Stuff happens. Plus this way you can less people through the ftl because the rest are on their way. something like raised by wolves with androids and human incubators prepping for the rest. Also no gaurentee humans can survive that kind of trip. Could only be able to send a bunch of walle’s setting up the town.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Star Trek was doing digital communicators and tricorders back in the 1960s. Dick Tracy and the Adam West Batman of the 1970s had wristwatch communicators with embedded TVs. And 2001: A Space Odessy had video smart pads, which looked almost identical to the modern Samsung model.
Also, we do have flying cars. They’re called helicopters. This isn’t a difficult technology to create, its a difficult technology to operate and to regulate the use of. If you’ve ever flown in a helicopter before, you’ll know why these things aren’t conducive to heavy traffic.
But the physics around them stays the same. There are soft limits to what we can do today that will be surpassed with improved technology and engineering. But there are also hard limits. Steel has a certain mass and density and a melting point. Every fuel have a maximum efficient yield. Humans have a wide array of conditions they can’t exit without being killed. Building a flying car means fiddling with these variables to make a device that can transport an individual at a high speed safely given a limited amount of energy. Building space ships is an extension of this exercise.
Hawking hypothesized that any First Contact with an alien civilization would almost certain mean running into their exterior network of distant probes and sensors long before we actually meet any biological. It’s possible the best we can do at extended distances is to send Wall-Es. It’s possible the best we can do is send information, targeted in such a way that the destination assembles its own Wall-Es.
That’s before you get into the more philosophical attitudes toward space travel. If you put someone on a spaceship for a thousand years, and then you catch back up with them, are you still talking to Humans anymore? Or are they Spacemans? And are they even your friends or are they rivals in your war over scarce resources? The “Three Body Problem” hypothesis of two space ships passing each other in the night is that one will inevitably attempt to cannibalize the other.