In any other setting, just dragging an asteroid along would be strange, but between rule of cool and the hasty departure, it's such a cool detail that compliments the whole series motif of melding brutalist and organic, and really helps show how insane it is.
I love Sidonia. When they pull a handbrake turn and it kills thousands. Or the heavy mass cannon that hinges out and throws a chuck of Sidonia at something you don't like. Or that it's mostly broken and abandoned. But they're still inventing new stuff and engineering companies compete with each other for contracts in a weird quasi socialist/dictatorship.
@@MostlyPennyCat Also the fact that the inhabitants aren't even human anymore. They are quasi-immortal, or outright immortal in some cases. They also use photosynthesis and clone each other.
@@Paul-cu9lu That's the dictatorship part, _they're_ immortal. They removed immortality from the proles, engineered in photosynthesis and used cloning for -naked anime girls- population problems. Homo superior and homo probably-tastes-great-steamed-and-they're-always-in-season The internal sea is glorious if terrifying. Have you seen their production of Blame! ?
@@MostlyPennyCat that is one thing I do remember. Gotta admit that was pretty brutal. However, I suppose it serves as a lesson on developing artifical gravity without inertial dampeners.
"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."
Shout out to the _Marathon,_ which is actually the Martian moon Deimos, repurposed into a colony ship that took 300 years to reach the system of Tau Ceti. The people who were born during this trip were called BOBs, an acronym for Born On Board.
IIRC the Martian nationals wanted to turn Deimos into another "solar orbiter", which was basically a supermassive cargo ship designed to ferry goods en-masse around the Solar System. But of course, that didn't happen, and Deimos became the Marathon.
Technically... The "Solar Pinhole" psycast is FTL. You create a microscopic wormhole into "the core of a nearby star" in under a second. Could be a lore oversight, or maybe FTL is indeed possible on a microscopic scale. Edit: To be clear, everything else in Rimworld is in the realm of non-FTL scifi, with a dash of consciousness woo-woo mixed in through psycasts. However, this is the only time energy/matter is explicitly transferred at FTL speeds.
@@awsomebot1 Psycasts are archotech-derived, and they've been shown (like with vanometric cells) to be able to violate the laws of physics, so they probably can achieve at least some level of small-scale FTL. No human-made craft can achieve FTL in Rimworld, though.
@jordancorkery4465 I think vanometrics don't necessarily break the laws of physics, just that humans don't understand it. The lore even implies it's not actually free energy because archotechs avoid using it. I think even archotechs don't do FTL other than being able to "connect" to humans instantly (psylink). You could say that's consciousness woo woo, but Solar Pinhole is distinctly FTL travelling of matter/energy
@@awsomebot1 any skip psycast is FTL, yeah, that's kinda what I was saying. But that doesn't translate to interstellar FTL travel; for all we know, there might be some upper limit to how far or how much matter can be skipped across a distance, the same way there's an upper limit to how much archotechs will scale up vanometrics
I really enjoy the near lightspeed travel in Lancer (the ttrpg). While FTL does exist, it's rare, expensive, only connects between specific FTL stations and needs to be set up at both the start and end points, so most interstellar travel is done at nearlight speed instead. A lot of the setting takes into account how a galactic society would be shaped by the fact that going to space for a living basically entirely uncouples you from the regular flow of time. On many of the more remote planets, dedicated space traders are treated almost like mystical fey creatures that show up once every one or two decades and never seem to age
The new game being created by some of the original Mass Effect team, "Exodus" seems to be built around the effects of FTL time dilation for explorer ships and their crews. It's supposed to be a sort of spiritual successor to Mass Effect.
There revelation space series is the Ultra's. An entire culture of transhumans who was operate "lighthuggers" which go to 99% of light. They do all the trade in interstellar space. They use time dilation mixed with hibernation. Though being frozen to a normal person has risks of memory loss and brain damage.
In Lancer, the Aun are also a good example of a generation ship. A 1000-year journey (for them, with time dilation) meant that they formed a religion based on the journey… which as Lancer fans know, didn’t go well when they arrived to the promised land and found someone already got their with faster tech.
@@ninjaxenomorph Oh yeah, right, I forgot to mention that! It's actually a recurring problem in Lancer that people figured out nearlight speed too fast & colonized a bunch of planets before the generation ships they sent got there
The Shatterlings in Alastair Reynolds' "House of Suns" novel are basically this. An early spacefarer made a thousand clones of herself, all with her memories, and sent them out to explore the galaxy at near-lightspeed (no FTL in this setting). They reunite every time they circle the galaxy, once every 200,000 years, to merge their memories and experience their journeys together. It's a vast, haunting tale of a practically ageless family who witness interstellar empires rise and fall with such regularity that they refer to them as "turnover civilizations."
was nice to see a sci-fi where Inertia Matters. plots like pilots being unretrievable as the Sidona cannot turn around fast enough to catch them; or crew getting splattered against walls when the ship has to make an emergency evasion.
Firefly did something unique by having the setting be a highly unusual multi-star system with many habitable worlds (most having been terraformed). Traversing the system with their sublight technologies could take just a few weeks and unless you deliberately tried you were never more than two or three days from someplace to park. Things were close enough together that instant communication was possible across multiple worlds. For comparison real life Earth to Mars transmissions take between 3 and 22 minutes depending on where the planets are in their orbits. Presumably inhabitants of "Earth that was" took generational or stasis ships to that new solar system to colonize it.
Sidonia in the thumbnail is my favorite form of Sublight generational ship travel. Plus the realistic way the showed how it turns and changes course to get avoid attacks that are minutes away and even at high velocities of the heavy mass rail gun it still takes 5 - 10 minutes to reach its destination.
Always wanted to see a sleek soft sci-fi ship like Enterprise duking it out with 700+km monstrosity of a hard sci-fi colony ship that might be less advanced in some tech, but was build to far greater degree of reliability and has scale to back it up(phasers are cool until you remember that said "old timer" would have anti-asteroid CIWS flinging enough antimatter canisters to vaporise incoming planetoids).
TBH a lot of hard sci fi warships (or even warships that could be achieved with our current day technology such as the real USAF proposal for an armed Orion nuclear pulse) have a lot of advantages over soft SF spacecraft. A typical Orion spacecraft can accelerate itself to ridiculous speeds, throw a bunch of slugs filled with deuterium and tritium at any soft sci fi fleet, if they have “energy shields” that can be overwhelmed as seen in most soft sci fi that’s how they work, then that should be enough to overwhelm the vast majority of them. At which point your second volley of thousands of tiny tungsten pellets that hit with nuclear warhead level yields will follow your deuterium fusion shield wreckers, leaving your soft sci fi fleet of ocean liners I mean spacecraft as nothing more than an expanding cloud of hot gas. Most hard SF warships are kind of weak TBH. Their accuracy is stupidly low along with the range of their weapons. Maybe some really advanced soft sci fi ships that have magically super strong armor and energy shields that can charge themselves with the impact of those high speed slugs could stand a chance, but your average star destroyer could be obliterated by an Orion nuclear pulse a thousand times smaller
@@ProductivityAccount-wl3ik Star Trek tends to be underestimated since the heroes are always looking for peaceful solutions but those shields tend to outright ignore nukes. Even the original Enterprise could glass a whole planet by itself, and have hulls that can easily with stand fast maneuvers at relativistic speeds. Still it's an interesting concept. An FTL warship having problems with a sublight generation ship just because it's a massive brick the size of Texas designed to eat all the damage the interstellar medium can throw at it without waking up the people sleeping inside.
@@3Rayfire Part of it is soft-sf ships are literally less structurally sound than something we'd have to build IRL, because, setting aside the reactors and disintegrator weapons, force shields reduce the need to spend resources on hull plating and ablative shielding and what not, *and* access to FTL supply lines (usually) means you can risk outfitting your ships with technology that is both less reliable and requires more advanced manufacturing to run and maintain Truthfully though, the biggest threat to an soft-SF ship from an old pre-ftl behemoth is whatever or whoever is inside it
4:25 please do note that from a physics and medicine perspective; "the ability to 'freeze and thaw a person' dozens, hundreds (if not thousands) of years later all but demands the existence of reviving the dead AND near godlike life extension capacity."
Does it? Age is due to telomeres shortening after attempting mitosis. Therefor, if you stop the bodies functions it doesn't replicate new cells so you don't age... right? Restarting the heart should be possible with implants similar to a pacemaker just a bit stronger. We might need some kind of anti coagulants incase your blood clots. A lot of this would depend on trial and error and what cryogenic even look like. 0:59 Part of why I am simewhat in favour of cloning research used to create brain dead copies so experiments would be somewhat ethical.
@@devonhutchins2176 I can weigh in on part of this. Pacemakers and defibrillators only work on hearts that are beating. The shock doesn't make the heart start, instead it resets the heart rhythm so that the current irregular beats (which would kill you) become a regular rhythm again In the future I imagine they could come up with a more advanced version though
@@rayzerot I am aware and thank you, I should have been more precise with my language. I suggested the idea as if the brain uses electrical impulses to tell the heart when and how to beat it should be possible to replicate such artificially. Hence restarting a stopped heart. There has to be something wrong with my understanding as to why this couldn't be done or it might just be a matter of we haven't bothered building it yet.
@@devonhutchins2176 You can cure age but you gotta find a way to deal with the naturally occuring isotopes in your body dosing you with a lethal level of radiation over centuries and outright killing your cells regardless of stasis or not. Something that's not mentioned at all in this video.
I wanted to write a sci-fi/horror story where the ship was capital-H Haunted because suspended animation is functionally being trapped between life and ☠️ for centuries, but I'm not clever enough. I guess it'll just have to be a background detail.
Talking of maintaining a colony ship with religious fervour. I remember a friend briefly mentioning in elite dangerous colony ships created before the discovery of FTL are treated like uncontacted tribes. There's just so many different things you can do with that. It may be financially unviable but it would definitely be possible to get the descendants of colonists wherever they were going within their lifespan. But the place they were going to colonise is probably already fully inhabited had a devastating war been reduced to ash and rebuilt.
On this note there's several books in the xeelee sequence that focus on this topic in depth. I'd highly recommend giving them a read. If i remember which ones il post them here
In elite dangerous multiple Generation Ships have been found, although on every one except for the Golconda the people onboard were long dead. The Golconda was found with her people still alive.
I think C. J. Cherryh did one, and there have been others. I remember one book where the existing FTL colonists were refugees from "the Kleptocracy," and the newly-arrived STL colonists were like, "Oh. Oh, yeah, that was probably us."
@@Cooldude-ko7ps Yeah, and the Golconda, upon being contacted, had already developed a culture of their own and decided to retrofit their ship to be able to contact the rest of the universe, then continue their nomadic lifestyle.
I always interpreted that the ISV's from Avatar was a ~14 year round trip from Earth to Pandora and Back Again. They stayed in orbit long enough to refuel before heading home. Another ship would arrive shortly after the previous ISV departed. The skeleton crew that was conscious during the trip would have experiences less than 7 years of time passing of course due to relativistic effects. If you look at the timeline from Way of Water, it wasn't 14 + 14 years for the fleet of ISV's to return, it like sub 20 years given that that Spider (Miles Quaritch's kid) was a teenager in the movie but was was a Baby when the Venture Star departed. and the eldest of Jake and Neytiri's kids were again no more than teenagers, or the Pandoran equivalent. After Avatar ends the Venture Star returns to earth (along any other ships in mid transit) as there were many other ships in transit in both directions. Then they regroup to re-arm and re-mobilize to build those large prefab base cores that they dropped from orbit at the start of Way of Water. A fleet of a dozen ISV's all depart a few years later. So say 7 + 3 + 7, well under 20 years to return. The use of fusion drives to clear a large safety zone to enable them to build a secure beachhead was brutal yet effective.
I believe you are correct. Google says that the venture star has a cruising velocity of 0.7c, with a six-month acceleration/deceleration period on either end of the trip. Rough napkin math tells me that the time dilation for 0.7c would mean the trip took something around 7.5 years to an outside observer.
I thought Sully said he was asleep in transit for 6 years in the first movie. It gave the Avatar clone body time to mature so the travel time was a benefit.
The light huggers from revelation space are some of the best non FTL spaceships I’ve ever read or seen. I highly recommend the series for those who love hard science but still want a futuristic setting.
was looking for a comment about this series the first book is my favorite of all the in universe novels and I believe it's up there with the absolute best of fiction
The RPG lancer has a great plot point about sub light ships. A generation ship leaves a dying earth on a journey that will take thousands of years at 50% light speed. Back on earth humans survive the apocholypse rebuild and develop new faster ships and accidently beat the old ship to its destination. Needless to say, when a thousand yeat journey to a new world ends with some other humans sitting on your new Eden, conflict ensues.
Glad that you mentioned Revelation Space here! Reynolds takes things even further with House of Suns, set millions of years in the future in a galaxy fully colonized by humanity, in which the reality that FTL is impossible remains true. The story takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, depending on your reference frame.
But the tech in house of the suns is honestly a bit too advanced for my taste. And it is way too safe. I long for the good old days of inertia suppression machinery deleting researchers out of reality retrocausally because the stood too close to it when it went up
@@anticlaassic "so long suckers! i rev up my state 4 tachyonic drive and create a huge cloud of photons. when the cloud dissipates im drifting completely disabled towards delta pavonis" -Skade
Yeah I love House of Suns too, especially how everything is so advanced that things have looped back around to being like fantasy. - hoojiwana from Spacedock
Minor correction: Satellites in very low Earth orbit do experience negative time dilation (their clocks tick slower) relative to ground because of their high speed. However, the higher a satellite's altitude, the slower their orbit and simultaneously the less they experience gravitational time dilation as well because they're not as deep in Earth's gravity well. Above an orbital altitude of approximately 10.000 km, Satellites actually experience a net positive time dilation (their clocks tick faster) relative to ground.
I caught that to. The delta for speed of GPS for a clock on the ground is about -7 microseconds per day. The delta for gravity strength is 45 microseconds. So each day a "slower" ground clock has to add 38 microseconds to "catch up" to clocks on GPS.
your videos have really helped me efficiently design spacecraft, space warships, space fighters, etc keep up the good work man, I really appreciate the videos.
Was surprised to see a minecraft animation in this video. Looked it up and... what the hell? >"The Three-Body Problem in Minecraft" is a Chinese network animated series based on the science fiction novels The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. Initially, the animation was an unofficial machinima doujin work, but from the second season onwards, it became an official adaptation.
@@Folker46590 The story actually got simpler near the end. One thing people fail to appreciate about Sidonia is that Nihei actually managed to finish off almost all the hanging plot threads. The problem is that he failed to pace the conclusion of the various plots to match the ending of the story, so he got to the point of, okay... now what? ONE ENTIRE VOLUME before the end. I especially like how the transhumanist war plotline got concluded.
Also worth mentioning that Revelation Space (in particular the book Chasm City) also mentions other interstellar voyages from before the Lighthuggers were built: A generation ship flotilla to 61 Cygni A (went badly), and 4 of the frozen embryo type ships (All 4 failed, and were later recolonised by Lighthugger).
Apparently one side effect of the AI raised ship is that they sometimes started Terra forming, so when the conjoiners developed lighthuggers, the planets were kind of ok. The journey to sky's edge went okish...
By the standards on your usual "generation ship sci-fi", the flotilia to 61 Cygni A went extremely successfully. Most of the ships reached the destination, society and knowledge on them never degraded too much, engines and other tech worked as intended during transit and during deceleration burn, and the system was successfully colonized and civilized. The following war was not a fault of starships
@@nickcher7071 Good point I suppose, though if every colony sent out ends up in permanent war then I could easily be argued it's not a good idea to do it.
4:53 Mind uploads and artificial human bodies made to mimic the way human bodies function is a big plot point the game _Xenoblade X._ In order to save as many people as possible, human minds were loaded into servers on ships that also carried the genetic profiles and materials required to clone new bodies for the preserved minds. Most of them slept, while some were in the aforementioned robotic artificial bodies in order to crew the ship.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is an excellent look at the problems of realistic interstellar colonization. One of the main characters is the AI overseeing the generation ship and its inhabitants
I like the sci-fi concept of FTL only being possible outside star systems because interplanetary traversal allows for more dynamic storytelling while interstellar traversal is a whole lot of nothing.
I've seen this done in multiple settings based on the idea that a gravity well of a star basically prohibits FTL use inside the star system. Problem is, they often violate their own rules.
@reliantncc1864 I mean depends. Hyperspace in Star Wars Legends treats the gravity well is not truly an issue, ships can fly straight through them without being destroyed but the way it's described is that the effect of the gravity well is a maze and Requires you to make adjustments that can only be done if you possess literal future sight. Meaning only Force Users can pull it off and supposedly only those extremely well trained or gifted.
@@Seeyou45 The existence of some settings that don't do it that way does not negate my point that some of them do. Also, Star Wars is the king of violating their own rules.
@@reliantncc1864Still, the notion that it's very much not possible to do normally, but some rare few entities _can_ do it, makes for interesting plot devices.
@@mnxs Sure, I agree. Dune took it further (and earlier) by making it so only rare individuals can do FTL at all, and for the same reason: seeing the future.
One of the issues that can come up, and is covered in some fiction, is the possibility of being technologically and literally outpaced during the course of the voyage. This is common in settings with FTL, where the concept of generation ships is often introduced by the heroes' ship coming across an old slowboat in deep space, but it can occur even without FTL - a relatively slow generation ship taking hundreds of years to cross between stars might be overhauled by one built fifty or a hundred years later that's capable of reaching a much higher percentage of the speed of light.
Actually happens in Outriders (the wannabe Destiny-killer game). And IIRC the space-dwelling humans in Becky Chambers' books live on a fleet of generation ships that were in flight when FTL was discovered, but decided to stay in space when they were subsequently recovered. Edit: since I left the error for a week, it gets immortalised here; when I said 'The First Decendent', the game I was actually thinking of was 'Outriders'. And I call myself a gamer...
The Honor Harrington books have this in the backstory - the primary star system of the setting, Manticore, was claimed by sleeper ship colonists, and when they arrived 500 years later, an FTL ship was there to say "welcome, your investments back on Earth went great and you have stupid amounts of money to start the colony with. Supplies are already on site and en route."
@westrim Those are on my 'to read' list; already read some of Weber's other works (namely the Safehold and Out of the Dark series). They might be next after Alien Clay, depending on how bored I get with Baxter's Coalescence....
@@IainG10 I will say, Weber is a good writer but has some bad habits that become increasingly pronounced by his releases in the 2010s. What it amounts to as a reader is, don't be afraid to skim through pages, and if you think you've read something before, you likely literally have. He does a LOT of technical details and As You Knows plopped right into the middle of a characters internal dialogue, including entire pages describing alien sign language, and when the side series begin a couple of mainline books have a third of their text copied directly from those books. This is when he's not simply padding out wordcount. But then, if you've read Safehold, then you've already gotten a good dose of a lot this. If you want some distilled Weber, I do recommend reading Empire from the Ashes, which ends up forecasting a lot of his later writing.
For a really cool look at a galaxy spanning civilization that doesn't have access to FTL (but does have stasis/cryo tech) read House of Suns by Allastair Reynolds
Glad I came across this video because I definitely plan on writing a few stories in my personal IP about derelict Generation Ships, even though most races have access to FTL (primarily Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators); Superheroes are often dispatched to investigate the derelict vessels to see if the ships themselves can be salvaged or repurposed (which is important, even in a post-scarcity, quasi-Solarpunk society), and more importantly, rescue and recover anyone on board!
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Hey! It's an 1852 Studebaker wagon! I bet we could get this thing running, especially if we thaw out those rubes in the front seat.
I dunno, I always thought it would be kinda cool to have a generational ship that travels all this way and how they pass on the knowledge and the desire for this to each generation. If centuries have passed and none of the original people made it to the destination - what if they finally arrive at their destination and there's people who don't WANT to leave the ship? It's all they've ever known after all. I just think it's kinda weird to assume that there wouldn't be SOME percentage of the people who were just too scared/detached from the idea of living on a planet to want to go since they have no frame of reference for it.
Jack Mcdivitt did a series where they cover this in great detail throughout the books. They run into one that looks like an astroid but is a generational ship that dips and scoops fuel from planetary atmospheres, edit) the book describes it as probably being milennia old by how scared and fused the hull was, they never find sentient crew but hear mechanical chatter that sounded complex.
Here is a bizarre scenario. 1. Ship 1 launches a 90yr travel to colonize a planet based on current tech.🚀 2. during those 90 years, earth discovers revolutionary warp technology. 3. Ship 1 arrives, finds the planet already colonized 89.9 years ago by Earth
I'd love to see you guys do a breakdown on the Sidonia. I don't know how unrealistic it is, but it's cool as hell and a pleasant surprise for a Netflix original.
Haha, I'm so glad you brought up Revelation Space and the Lighthugger ships. It's my absolute favorite sub-lightspeed sci-fi setting. Time dilation plays such an integral role in those stories. Even if you're a near-immortal augmented Ultranaut, you'll still have to deal with news being several decades or centuries out of date by the time you reach your destination. Just amazingly brain-breaking stuff. It makes FTL seem boring in comparison!
The pblem with a generation ships crew treating their mission as a religion was covered by Robert Heinlein in Orphans of the Sky. It's a kids novels. so don't expect too much out of it. But you should give it a read if you can find a copy. Heinlein is also responsible for coining the term Gerneration Ship.
As a bonus, pointy spike ships also looks faster. Pointy ships also have a benefit of being scary. Don't forget to paint it red for maximum speed boost!
One of my fovsrite STL systems is in the book Ringworld. The "puppeteer" race didn't build any ships or massive generational station. They took their home planet and another four, look them in a five body orbit around each other and launched the whole thing to a close to light speed. They thought safer to move planets and accelerate them at near light speed, over any other metod, even though they had FTL ships and tech, they still choose the less risky option.
Shout out to David Weber in his Honorverse world building. Not only having cryo ships that don't keep the pasdengers in stasis 100% of the time, time dilation effects, and a plot point of later developed FTL travel beating colonists to their new home (for good and for ill). Also, that B5 episode with the sleeper ship that launched only a couple years before first contact with the Centauri.
@@Qwarzz It was originally written before that particular discovery was confirmed. Later retconned to be waves on the barrier between normal-space and hyper-space.
@@Qwarzz The later books suffer from "protection from editors" and ramble on, but they can usually be found for cheap in e-book, because Baen actually understands proper digital pricing. The spin-off with Eric Flint is awesome.
Mind upload is one of the things I LOVED from the Altered Carbon universe (the books, we don't talk about the show) The idea that humanity could transmit information at FTL speeds, but can't get physical objects into hyperspace opened up the entire concept of the universe. You send a seed ship to a world, the AIs on board model the environment, write a biotech, nanotech etc etc solution to terraforming, start in on it, then decant the minds of the colonists into cloned bodies. And you want to go from Harlan's World to Earth, you pay for a hyperspace needlecast to Earth and are decanted into a rented (bought etc) body for the duration. It was a great universe design.
I don't know how you keep producing interesting and cool videos so consistently, but I'm glad that you do. It's always nice to have one waiting after work
what the hell was that three body minecraft thing? I'm gonna need an official Spacedock reading/watching list because you seem to find the darndest things
To anyone who enjoys settings, especially space opera settings, where slower than light interstellar travel is the norm, I can wholeheartedly recommend Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. The STL there isn't just some setting gimmick, but has a major impact on the stories told and the storytelling, in several interesting ways.
Generation ships were used in a lot of RPGs for a twist in the 80s and 90s. Both Might and Magic and Phantasy Star 3 revealed that their worlds were massive generation ships as part of their plots.
For anyone who wants a humorous but GREAT take on generational ship crews and the effects on not only the human mind but an isolated society as a whole, I highly recommend "Severance" by Chris Bucholz. Incredibly underrated Sci Fi novel.
Ever so slightly saddened that Lightyear got a decent amount of screen time but Gunbuster got none. That OVA was my first introduction to relativistic speeds, with the pilots of the titular Gunbuster robot going on missions that to them would last days while years went by on earth. It questioned what watching your friends and loved ones growing old and dying without you would do to a person and in the finale they sacrifice one of theor reactors to destroy the aliens causing the trip home to take thousands of years with them returning unsure if there was a humanity left to return to.
Ah, love its black-and-white sixth episode, not to mention that perspective flip in the sixth episode of sequel series DieBuster. Other than that, I hear ya. Hell, I would have even preferred the Ender's Game movie adaptation over that unimpressive Disney spin-off film.
One that I remember about this topic that I rarely see talked about, even with the larger fanbase, is Gundam Stargazer. It is a short story about the development of a mobile suit that is meant for deep space exploration rather than combat. The centerpiece of the whole thing is a learning AI and the Voiture Lumiere system, that last of which serves as a sort of solar sail. Acceleration is slow, but it is constant. It is meant for long period interstellar travel and exploration. This short I felt really captured that distinct awe and curiosity of space which is quite rare to see in sci-fi these days.
@@DKNguyen3.1415 While it is never explained why it was designed as a mecha in universe rather than some kind of probe, my personal headcannon is that they simply took what they already had, that being the frame of a military mobile suit, and then reworked it for this new purpose rather than building something from the ground up. Another possibility could be due to the AI as it is meant to learn from humans piloting the machine before it is sent off on it's own, and thus they use what is already well supported. But again, it was a very short story and never had any chance to really delve deep into its ideas and concepts which perhaps would have given an explanation for some of these questions if given the chance.
I think it would be interesting to see nonftl travel ships in a world with ftl. Would be interesting to see why someone would choose to use the flow mode. Perhaps religious, or a weird way of vacationing. Or perhaps factory ships that use the travel time to produce goods for the eventual colony world they are going to
Avoiding predatory species? FTL is magic from sci fi. Maybe an FTL society being able to generate the jump would also be able to easily detect it and maybe even follow the signal.
1:50 that depends. Yes, the satelites do experience a teeny-tiny bit of time dilation, but we also do, because of Earth's gravity And down here we experience MORE time dilation than the GPS satelites, for example. They have to constantly "rollback" time to keep in sync with us
Yep, that's why you always hear people saying "the time on the GPS satellites needs to be adjusted", people won't believe you saying "we're traveling faster here on earth", relatively it's that straight forward 👍
By changing the orbit, it is possible to balance a satellite's clock using its velocity to tick at the same rate as on the surface. But it would be LEO and not suitable for GPS. Their velocity isn't enough to cancel out the lower gravitational field. Clocks tick faster up there
My first introdction to relativistic space travel is Turn Right At Orion by Mitchell Begelman. It's is truely mind-blown for me that if going fast enough, someone can go thought the space and history of the entire universe within the human life span.
Another potential option for shielding is to keep your water at the front end of your ship. A mushroom shaped cap filled with water would shield well against particles and radiation. As for micrometeors, you'd need to armor the cap differently.
Nice callout for ‘The Songs of Distant Earth’. I was actually thinking of the ice shield the ship had in front to help with the interstellar dust while firing its Quantum Drive.
I think a sufficiently large self-sustaining ship would be no different than living on a planet. We are, technically living in a giant spaceship where few people are actively sabotaging the life support system for their own wealth.
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Nostalgia for infinity is my absolute most favorite ship in any scifi ever... It was just soo cool and unique... Love it to bits
I'm a simple man, I see Sidonia, I like. It was a lonely show, but it helped me through a lonely time in life, so it holds a special place in my heart.
What many people don't undrstand is that when time dilation starts and the time goes slower for you, you will start to see the universe move around you and you will be able to fly through the universe seemingly with FTL but only because of time dilation. One you have flown to system 1000 lys away im mere seconds (from your POV) and return home, when you get there 2000 years on earth have passed and humanity is not what it were when you left 2 seconds before from your POV.
Poul Anderson's Starfarers is basically about this. No FTL, but the ships can travel at just under lightspeed. The entire book is about dealing with relativistic effects. You also have Joe Haldeman's The Forever War.
The Alien franchise is clear that interstellar travel requires stasis, but not how long it takes. The Sulaco and Prometheus seem to reach other systems without skipping generations of time. Ripley's escape craft takes 57 years to reach and pass Earth but it's probably not built for such distances.
I like the idea of not taking a spaceship but a space _city_ to the new system. Supporting resources definitely included. It provides a variety of employment opportunities, variety of entertainment options and just all the psychological support humans need.
If you haven't watched Knights of Sidonia yet, you should, because it's exactly that! Just keep in mind that, well, it *is* anime, with some of the common pitfalls... Still love it, though.
1. Have you ever heard of Earth Star Voyager? I don't recommend it, but it had a half measure take on the generation ship with a crew of youths/children/wunderkinds, scheduled to be adults when they reached their destination. 2. Like flying through a particle beam cannon? What if you fired one in front of the ship and fly behind it in the gap it makes? ... I think I just re-invented the deflector dish.
Per Particle beam cannon and a big sail (,,Matter- Sail") accalerate to the Stars ➡️ sail and particle beam is the perfekt shield for Interstellar dust and gas 🤔
I've been playing around with a concept for a low(ish)-tonnage, low(ish)-tech interstellar ship. It has a conscious crew at all times, and they have to raise their own replacements, but unlike the typical generation ship design, the crew is small and uses a stockpile of frozen gametes or embryos (collected before launch from a much larger population) to maintain genetic diversity. No need to propel an entire small country up to relativistic speed or conquer the extreme challenge of bringing people back to life after freezing them.
2:15 you actually can not, the edge of the observable universe is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light, so even at light speed you can never reach it
In a closed system large enough to house a balanced amount of livestock and plants meat really isn't less efficient. All of its "losses" are just byproducts that with even a little manipulation will actually help plant through CO2 and animal wastes which fertilize. They'd essentially just be another passenger getting their outputs recycled back into their input, but you can eat them and get proteins as well as a more balanced diet. If you've seen an aquaponics setup it's essentially the same thing except there's no outside input as you'd have to use the plants to feed the animals i.e. herbivore livestock. As well as tons of edible fish eat plants as is, you can almost get an aquaponics setup to be a relatively closed loop if it's large enough and you have a way of converting the plants into fish food such as algae.
Speaking of things you would need to worry about when it comes to a long voyage crews mental health, BORDOM, oh lord bordom, imagine you packed for a week long trip when it comes to fun stuff, and then had only that for entertaiment for DECADES.....
Aww, this takes me right back! One of the first science-fiction concepts I ever came up with, in my early teens, was a generation ship that, when it arrived at its destination, had very few inhabitants who actually wanted to abandon their onboard culture to go colonize a planet. Not exactly deeply original, but it was one of the first story ideas that I hadn't just ripped off one of my favorite creators, so I remember it fondly.
Honorable mention to Andromeda's "Bellerophon"... Humanity not having FTL yet decided to brute force the issue and just built a ship with such massive engines it was able to get up to 99.999 % of lightspeed.
I appreciate that story because it didn't skimp on the impossibilities for modern man to get to another star. In fact, almost every challenge presented is applicable to getting a man to Mars. We don't have systems that can keep humans alive for months to get there, and more months to get back. Yes, we have the space station, but we don't have rockets large enough to send the space station to Mars. This keeps people thinking of what are our limits and what can we do to overcome them.
I've always pictured a sub lightspeed craft utilising a constant string of sling shot manoeuvres and when it gets to a target system it takes a final U-turn slingshot to slow down around the host star.
@Spacedock another great video for thought as always. While I know the channel is based around film and video content- I feel the novel "Noumenon' by Marina Lostetter is a great example of generational mission dependency that isn't mentioned here but exemplifies hundreds of year long journeys driven by initial parameters that turn from protocol to survival/dogma- but manage to pull through due to multiple factors. Which make for an important plot point if organic life needs to sustain itself through events listed. An opposite side of this is Andy Martin's "Project Hail Mary" in which Humanity can barely retain it's ability to function after interstellar travel. All of course dependent on what a creator is striving for. But I feel like these two are worth mentioning because they are stories that measure humanity from polarizing ends of the scale between a collective and an individual moving the story and plot/goal forward.
I like how the Staircase Program in Three Body Problem was described as a lightsail spacecraft propelled by a series of exploding nuclear bombs that are not carried onboard the ship.
Amazing, I honestly thought you were in your late teen's by the sound of your voice. Who knew you're a grown man! Brilliant, thank you for surprising me and my jaded old ways.
Something that wasn't considered in the video where generation ships are concerned is this,; how do you convince a crew of people who were born and grew up on a space ship to move down to a planetary body once the trip is over? Especially if it is the third or fourth generation raised in space? The artificial environment is all that they know and is comforting and safe to them. I doubt that the majority of them would want to leave once the ship arrived.
Knights of Sidonia kind of takes this into account. The titular vessel is a "seed" ship, capable of deploying smaller colony ships to habitable worlds along its route. When it gets close enough to a viable system, a colony ship is staffed entirely with volunteers from among the Sidonia's hundreds of thousands of crew, while the rest stay aboard to continue the journey.
It's not in the book for long, but I really like the relativistic voyage in Mickey 7(soon to be Mickey 17 in cinema) And they wipe out a planet with a relativistic bullet, which is awesome
Remember, it's not about the destination, it's about the cosmic horrors beyond comprehension along the way.
“The real treasure was the mental and physical trauma we received along the way.”
And all the beautiful radiations.
Will horrors beyond my comprehension be scary if I don't get them?
😄😄😀😁
Lol thats the slogan they use to recruit people for the voyage?? 😂
The Sidonia is my favorite iteration of a generation ship, rugged, built to last and a BFG to boot.
In any other setting, just dragging an asteroid along would be strange, but between rule of cool and the hasty departure, it's such a cool detail that compliments the whole series motif of melding brutalist and organic, and really helps show how insane it is.
I love Sidonia.
When they pull a handbrake turn and it kills thousands.
Or the heavy mass cannon that hinges out and throws a chuck of Sidonia at something you don't like.
Or that it's mostly broken and abandoned.
But they're still inventing new stuff and engineering companies compete with each other for contracts in a weird quasi socialist/dictatorship.
@@MostlyPennyCat Also the fact that the inhabitants aren't even human anymore. They are quasi-immortal, or outright immortal in some cases. They also use photosynthesis and clone each other.
@@Paul-cu9lu
That's the dictatorship part, _they're_ immortal. They removed immortality from the proles, engineered in photosynthesis and used cloning for -naked anime girls- population problems.
Homo superior and homo probably-tastes-great-steamed-and-they're-always-in-season
The internal sea is glorious if terrifying.
Have you seen their production of Blame! ?
@@MostlyPennyCat that is one thing I do remember. Gotta admit that was pretty brutal. However, I suppose it serves as a lesson on developing artifical gravity without inertial dampeners.
"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."
Wise words from Douglas Adams
Nothing wise about that
42
Was just re-watching that last week but Don't Panic !
And it still is just one car hour away, if your car could drive upwards.
Shout out to the _Marathon,_ which is actually the Martian moon Deimos, repurposed into a colony ship that took 300 years to reach the system of Tau Ceti. The people who were born during this trip were called BOBs, an acronym for Born On Board.
ESCAPE WILL MAKE ME GOD
Hey Bob
IIRC the Martian nationals wanted to turn Deimos into another "solar orbiter", which was basically a supermassive cargo ship designed to ferry goods en-masse around the Solar System. But of course, that didn't happen, and Deimos became the Marathon.
Durandal? more like door-handle
Tau Ceti and Deimos both are major points in THE EXPANSE sotryline.
Shoutout to Rimworld, a setting with fully interstellar civilizations and multiple settled worlds with super high tech, but no FTL
Technically... The "Solar Pinhole" psycast is FTL. You create a microscopic wormhole into "the core of a nearby star" in under a second.
Could be a lore oversight, or maybe FTL is indeed possible on a microscopic scale.
Edit: To be clear, everything else in Rimworld is in the realm of non-FTL scifi, with a dash of consciousness woo-woo mixed in through psycasts. However, this is the only time energy/matter is explicitly transferred at FTL speeds.
yesssssssssss i love rimworld!
@@awsomebot1 Psycasts are archotech-derived, and they've been shown (like with vanometric cells) to be able to violate the laws of physics, so they probably can achieve at least some level of small-scale FTL. No human-made craft can achieve FTL in Rimworld, though.
@jordancorkery4465 I think vanometrics don't necessarily break the laws of physics, just that humans don't understand it. The lore even implies it's not actually free energy because archotechs avoid using it.
I think even archotechs don't do FTL other than being able to "connect" to humans instantly (psylink). You could say that's consciousness woo woo, but Solar Pinhole is distinctly FTL travelling of matter/energy
@@awsomebot1 any skip psycast is FTL, yeah, that's kinda what I was saying. But that doesn't translate to interstellar FTL travel; for all we know, there might be some upper limit to how far or how much matter can be skipped across a distance, the same way there's an upper limit to how much archotechs will scale up vanometrics
SIDONIA IN THE THUMBNAIL WE ARE SO BACK
such an underrated show!
Come for the Hard Sci-Fi space battles, stay for the gratuitous fan-service
@@weldonwin yes, but also the space battles
I think the thumbnail has been changed. 😢
Movie was a let down. Dead things should stay dead.
@@MisterPuck, I think it is now possible to have multiple ones, and youtube will change between them from time to time.
I really enjoy the near lightspeed travel in Lancer (the ttrpg). While FTL does exist, it's rare, expensive, only connects between specific FTL stations and needs to be set up at both the start and end points, so most interstellar travel is done at nearlight speed instead.
A lot of the setting takes into account how a galactic society would be shaped by the fact that going to space for a living basically entirely uncouples you from the regular flow of time. On many of the more remote planets, dedicated space traders are treated almost like mystical fey creatures that show up once every one or two decades and never seem to age
The new game being created by some of the original Mass Effect team, "Exodus" seems to be built around the effects of FTL time dilation for explorer ships and their crews. It's supposed to be a sort of spiritual successor to Mass Effect.
There revelation space series is the Ultra's. An entire culture of transhumans who was operate "lighthuggers" which go to 99% of light. They do all the trade in interstellar space. They use time dilation mixed with hibernation. Though being frozen to a normal person has risks of memory loss and brain damage.
In Lancer, the Aun are also a good example of a generation ship. A 1000-year journey (for them, with time dilation) meant that they formed a religion based on the journey… which as Lancer fans know, didn’t go well when they arrived to the promised land and found someone already got their with faster tech.
@@ninjaxenomorph Oh yeah, right, I forgot to mention that! It's actually a recurring problem in Lancer that people figured out nearlight speed too fast & colonized a bunch of planets before the generation ships they sent got there
The Shatterlings in Alastair Reynolds' "House of Suns" novel are basically this. An early spacefarer made a thousand clones of herself, all with her memories, and sent them out to explore the galaxy at near-lightspeed (no FTL in this setting). They reunite every time they circle the galaxy, once every 200,000 years, to merge their memories and experience their journeys together. It's a vast, haunting tale of a practically ageless family who witness interstellar empires rise and fall with such regularity that they refer to them as "turnover civilizations."
The Sidonia! Wooo ... would be fun to see you guys do a breakdown video over it sometime
was nice to see a sci-fi where Inertia Matters. plots like pilots being unretrievable as the Sidona cannot turn around fast enough to catch them; or crew getting splattered against walls when the ship has to make an emergency evasion.
Firefly did something unique by having the setting be a highly unusual multi-star system with many habitable worlds (most having been terraformed). Traversing the system with their sublight technologies could take just a few weeks and unless you deliberately tried you were never more than two or three days from someplace to park. Things were close enough together that instant communication was possible across multiple worlds. For comparison real life Earth to Mars transmissions take between 3 and 22 minutes depending on where the planets are in their orbits. Presumably inhabitants of "Earth that was" took generational or stasis ships to that new solar system to colonize it.
Sidonia in the thumbnail is my favorite form of Sublight generational ship travel. Plus the realistic way the showed how it turns and changes course to get avoid attacks that are minutes away and even at high velocities of the heavy mass rail gun it still takes 5 - 10 minutes to reach its destination.
What ever happened to that show? It was on Netflix for a couple seasons then I don't know if it ended or went somewhere else.
@@lifeworthliving3022 seasons and one movie, that’s all that’s been animated
@@lifeworthliving302 have to read the Manga get the rest of story sadly.
7:54 always appreciate seeing Planetes callouts, such an underrated sci-fi. Same guy that does Vinland Saga for anyone who enjoys that.
Planetes so good
I remember reading the first three or four manga a couple decades ago, was really good
Always wanted to see a sleek soft sci-fi ship like Enterprise duking it out with 700+km monstrosity of a hard sci-fi colony ship that might be less advanced in some tech, but was build to far greater degree of reliability and has scale to back it up(phasers are cool until you remember that said "old timer" would have anti-asteroid CIWS flinging enough antimatter canisters to vaporise incoming planetoids).
TBH a lot of hard sci fi warships (or even warships that could be achieved with our current day technology such as the real USAF proposal for an armed Orion nuclear pulse) have a lot of advantages over soft SF spacecraft.
A typical Orion spacecraft can accelerate itself to ridiculous speeds, throw a bunch of slugs filled with deuterium and tritium at any soft sci fi fleet, if they have “energy shields” that can be overwhelmed as seen in most soft sci fi that’s how they work, then that should be enough to overwhelm the vast majority of them. At which point your second volley of thousands of tiny tungsten pellets that hit with nuclear warhead level yields will follow your deuterium fusion shield wreckers, leaving your soft sci fi fleet of ocean liners I mean spacecraft as nothing more than an expanding cloud of hot gas.
Most hard SF warships are kind of weak TBH. Their accuracy is stupidly low along with the range of their weapons.
Maybe some really advanced soft sci fi ships that have magically super strong armor and energy shields that can charge themselves with the impact of those high speed slugs could stand a chance, but your average star destroyer could be obliterated by an Orion nuclear pulse a thousand times smaller
I don't think it would be that easy
You would probably enjoy "The Man-Kzin Wars" by Larry Niven
@@ProductivityAccount-wl3ik Star Trek tends to be underestimated since the heroes are always looking for peaceful solutions but those shields tend to outright ignore nukes. Even the original Enterprise could glass a whole planet by itself, and have hulls that can easily with stand fast maneuvers at relativistic speeds.
Still it's an interesting concept. An FTL warship having problems with a sublight generation ship just because it's a massive brick the size of Texas designed to eat all the damage the interstellar medium can throw at it without waking up the people sleeping inside.
@@3Rayfire Part of it is soft-sf ships are literally less structurally sound than something we'd have to build IRL, because, setting aside the reactors and disintegrator weapons, force shields reduce the need to spend resources on hull plating and ablative shielding and what not, *and* access to FTL supply lines (usually) means you can risk outfitting your ships with technology that is both less reliable and requires more advanced manufacturing to run and maintain
Truthfully though, the biggest threat to an soft-SF ship from an old pre-ftl behemoth is whatever or whoever is inside it
4:25 please do note that from a physics and medicine perspective; "the ability to 'freeze and thaw a person' dozens, hundreds (if not thousands) of years later all but demands the existence of reviving the dead AND near godlike life extension capacity."
Does it?
Age is due to telomeres shortening after attempting mitosis. Therefor, if you stop the bodies functions it doesn't replicate new cells so you don't age... right?
Restarting the heart should be possible with implants similar to a pacemaker just a bit stronger. We might need some kind of anti coagulants incase your blood clots.
A lot of this would depend on trial and error and what cryogenic even look like. 0:59
Part of why I am simewhat in favour of cloning research used to create brain dead copies so experiments would be somewhat ethical.
@@devonhutchins2176 I can weigh in on part of this. Pacemakers and defibrillators only work on hearts that are beating. The shock doesn't make the heart start, instead it resets the heart rhythm so that the current irregular beats (which would kill you) become a regular rhythm again
In the future I imagine they could come up with a more advanced version though
@@rayzerot I am aware and thank you, I should have been more precise with my language.
I suggested the idea as if the brain uses electrical impulses to tell the heart when and how to beat it should be possible to replicate such artificially. Hence restarting a stopped heart. There has to be something wrong with my understanding as to why this couldn't be done or it might just be a matter of we haven't bothered building it yet.
@@devonhutchins2176
You can cure age but you gotta find a way to deal with the naturally occuring isotopes in your body dosing you with a lethal level of radiation over centuries and outright killing your cells regardless of stasis or not. Something that's not mentioned at all in this video.
I wanted to write a sci-fi/horror story where the ship was capital-H Haunted because suspended animation is functionally being trapped between life and ☠️ for centuries, but I'm not clever enough. I guess it'll just have to be a background detail.
Talking of maintaining a colony ship with religious fervour. I remember a friend briefly mentioning in elite dangerous colony ships created before the discovery of FTL are treated like uncontacted tribes. There's just so many different things you can do with that. It may be financially unviable but it would definitely be possible to get the descendants of colonists wherever they were going within their lifespan. But the place they were going to colonise is probably already fully inhabited had a devastating war been reduced to ash and rebuilt.
On this note there's several books in the xeelee sequence that focus on this topic in depth. I'd highly recommend giving them a read. If i remember which ones il post them here
In elite dangerous multiple Generation Ships have been found, although on every one except for the Golconda the people onboard were long dead. The Golconda was found with her people still alive.
I think C. J. Cherryh did one, and there have been others. I remember one book where the existing FTL colonists were refugees from "the Kleptocracy," and the newly-arrived STL colonists were like, "Oh. Oh, yeah, that was probably us."
@@Cooldude-ko7ps Yeah, and the Golconda, upon being contacted, had already developed a culture of their own and decided to retrofit their ship to be able to contact the rest of the universe, then continue their nomadic lifestyle.
I always interpreted that the ISV's from Avatar was a ~14 year round trip from Earth to Pandora and Back Again. They stayed in orbit long enough to refuel before heading home. Another ship would arrive shortly after the previous ISV departed. The skeleton crew that was conscious during the trip would have experiences less than 7 years of time passing of course due to relativistic effects.
If you look at the timeline from Way of Water, it wasn't 14 + 14 years for the fleet of ISV's to return, it like sub 20 years given that that Spider (Miles Quaritch's kid) was a teenager in the movie but was was a Baby when the Venture Star departed. and the eldest of Jake and Neytiri's kids were again no more than teenagers, or the Pandoran equivalent.
After Avatar ends the Venture Star returns to earth (along any other ships in mid transit) as there were many other ships in transit in both directions. Then they regroup to re-arm and re-mobilize to build those large prefab base cores that they dropped from orbit at the start of Way of Water. A fleet of a dozen ISV's all depart a few years later. So say 7 + 3 + 7, well under 20 years to return. The use of fusion drives to clear a large safety zone to enable them to build a secure beachhead was brutal yet effective.
I believe you are correct. Google says that the venture star has a cruising velocity of 0.7c, with a six-month acceleration/deceleration period on either end of the trip. Rough napkin math tells me that the time dilation for 0.7c would mean the trip took something around 7.5 years to an outside observer.
You are correct. I think Hoojiwana made a goof.
The trip each way between Earth and Pandora is indeed 7 years.
I thought Sully said he was asleep in transit for 6 years in the first movie. It gave the Avatar clone body time to mature so the travel time was a benefit.
@@MichaelRainey yup "It doesn't feel like six years --like a fifth of Tequila and an ass kicking" Cryo was 5 years, 9 months, 22 days.
The light huggers from revelation space are some of the best non FTL spaceships I’ve ever read or seen. I highly recommend the series for those who love hard science but still want a futuristic setting.
I agree, right up until we get to how Conjoiner Engines work.... The rest of the ship is still great though!
was looking for a comment about this series
the first book is my favorite of all the in universe novels and I believe it's up there with the absolute best of fiction
The RPG lancer has a great plot point about sub light ships. A generation ship leaves a dying earth on a journey that will take thousands of years at 50% light speed. Back on earth humans survive the apocholypse rebuild and develop new faster ships and accidently beat the old ship to its destination. Needless to say, when a thousand yeat journey to a new world ends with some other humans sitting on your new Eden, conflict ensues.
Love the confused captain O’Neil when talking about time dilation. excellent stargate meme
That’s Colonel..with two L’s 😉
That's O' Neil, with two L's (hold up three fingers). There's another guy, no sense of humor.
As a matter of fact, it does say Colonel on his uniform. (It doesn't)
Am I the only one who thinks that SG-1 has too much unused meme potential?
Yes, same here. I also love that for "psychological damage on long cruise", Pandorum is used a as background images.
Glad that you mentioned Revelation Space here! Reynolds takes things even further with House of Suns, set millions of years in the future in a galaxy fully colonized by humanity, in which the reality that FTL is impossible remains true. The story takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, depending on your reference frame.
But the tech in house of the suns is honestly a bit too advanced for my taste. And it is way too safe.
I long for the good old days of inertia suppression machinery deleting researchers out of reality retrocausally because the stood too close to it when it went up
@@anticlaassicSolid reference
@@anticlaassic "so long suckers! i rev up my state 4 tachyonic drive and create a huge cloud of photons. when the cloud dissipates im drifting completely disabled towards delta pavonis" -Skade
@ *blows up in her face immediately*
„Hahhahhhahahahahahahhahahha“
-the wolf inside Falkas head
Yeah I love House of Suns too, especially how everything is so advanced that things have looped back around to being like fantasy.
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Minor correction: Satellites in very low Earth orbit do experience negative time dilation (their clocks tick slower) relative to ground because of their high speed. However, the higher a satellite's altitude, the slower their orbit and simultaneously the less they experience gravitational time dilation as well because they're not as deep in Earth's gravity well. Above an orbital altitude of approximately 10.000 km, Satellites actually experience a net positive time dilation (their clocks tick faster) relative to ground.
I caught that to. The delta for speed of GPS for a clock on the ground is about -7 microseconds per day. The delta for gravity strength is 45 microseconds. So each day a "slower" ground clock has to add 38 microseconds to "catch up" to clocks on GPS.
your videos have really helped me efficiently design spacecraft, space warships, space fighters, etc keep up the good work man, I really appreciate the videos.
Don't forget about heat build up! It's incredibly difficult to shed heat in a vacuume, especially on longer voyages 👍
Love your channel ❤
Cooling lasers (invented by David Brin)
Was surprised to see a minecraft animation in this video. Looked it up and... what the hell?
>"The Three-Body Problem in Minecraft" is a Chinese network animated series based on the science fiction novels The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. Initially, the animation was an unofficial machinima doujin work, but from the second season onwards, it became an official adaptation.
Holy shit I need to get my hands on that ASAP
Mineslop and Three slop problem. Yuck.
@@youtubehandlesux I guess bro's brain has collapsed into 2D a bit earlier than expected
@@youtubehandlesux apparently it's the most book-accurate adaptation lmao. you need to grow some taste for once
@@discflame>Chinese
"I've been to the edge of space - there is just.......... more space."
-Jayne Cobb (Firefly) 😁🤘
A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything
Knights of Sidonia is criminaly underrated
Nah. It got bungled with a series that never found time to answer questions and the mangas pacing is...... eh.
It had its good parts but some of it was just stupid.
@@trazyntheinfinite9895 The quality of the manga falls off towards the end and the story itself just gets stupid and incomprehensible.
Not really.
@@Folker46590 The story actually got simpler near the end. One thing people fail to appreciate about Sidonia is that Nihei actually managed to finish off almost all the hanging plot threads. The problem is that he failed to pace the conclusion of the various plots to match the ending of the story, so he got to the point of, okay... now what? ONE ENTIRE VOLUME before the end. I especially like how the transhumanist war plotline got concluded.
Also worth mentioning that Revelation Space (in particular the book Chasm City) also mentions other interstellar voyages from before the Lighthuggers were built: A generation ship flotilla to 61 Cygni A (went badly), and 4 of the frozen embryo type ships (All 4 failed, and were later recolonised by Lighthugger).
Apparently one side effect of the AI raised ship is that they sometimes started Terra forming, so when the conjoiners developed lighthuggers, the planets were kind of ok.
The journey to sky's edge went okish...
By the standards on your usual "generation ship sci-fi", the flotilia to 61 Cygni A went extremely successfully. Most of the ships reached the destination, society and knowledge on them never degraded too much, engines and other tech worked as intended during transit and during deceleration burn, and the system was successfully colonized and civilized. The following war was not a fault of starships
@@nickcher7071 Good point I suppose, though if every colony sent out ends up in permanent war then I could easily be argued it's not a good idea to do it.
4:53 Mind uploads and artificial human bodies made to mimic the way human bodies function is a big plot point the game _Xenoblade X._ In order to save as many people as possible, human minds were loaded into servers on ships that also carried the genetic profiles and materials required to clone new bodies for the preserved minds. Most of them slept, while some were in the aforementioned robotic artificial bodies in order to crew the ship.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is an excellent look at the problems of realistic interstellar colonization. One of the main characters is the AI overseeing the generation ship and its inhabitants
I like the sci-fi concept of FTL only being possible outside star systems because interplanetary traversal allows for more dynamic storytelling while interstellar traversal is a whole lot of nothing.
I've seen this done in multiple settings based on the idea that a gravity well of a star basically prohibits FTL use inside the star system. Problem is, they often violate their own rules.
@reliantncc1864 I mean depends. Hyperspace in Star Wars Legends treats the gravity well is not truly an issue, ships can fly straight through them without being destroyed but the way it's described is that the effect of the gravity well is a maze and Requires you to make adjustments that can only be done if you possess literal future sight. Meaning only Force Users can pull it off and supposedly only those extremely well trained or gifted.
@@Seeyou45 The existence of some settings that don't do it that way does not negate my point that some of them do.
Also, Star Wars is the king of violating their own rules.
@@reliantncc1864Still, the notion that it's very much not possible to do normally, but some rare few entities _can_ do it, makes for interesting plot devices.
@@mnxs Sure, I agree. Dune took it further (and earlier) by making it so only rare individuals can do FTL at all, and for the same reason: seeing the future.
One of the issues that can come up, and is covered in some fiction, is the possibility of being technologically and literally outpaced during the course of the voyage. This is common in settings with FTL, where the concept of generation ships is often introduced by the heroes' ship coming across an old slowboat in deep space, but it can occur even without FTL - a relatively slow generation ship taking hundreds of years to cross between stars might be overhauled by one built fifty or a hundred years later that's capable of reaching a much higher percentage of the speed of light.
Actually happens in Outriders (the wannabe Destiny-killer game). And IIRC the space-dwelling humans in Becky Chambers' books live on a fleet of generation ships that were in flight when FTL was discovered, but decided to stay in space when they were subsequently recovered.
Edit: since I left the error for a week, it gets immortalised here; when I said 'The First Decendent', the game I was actually thinking of was 'Outriders'. And I call myself a gamer...
The Honor Harrington books have this in the backstory - the primary star system of the setting, Manticore, was claimed by sleeper ship colonists, and when they arrived 500 years later, an FTL ship was there to say "welcome, your investments back on Earth went great and you have stupid amounts of money to start the colony with. Supplies are already on site and en route."
@westrim Those are on my 'to read' list; already read some of Weber's other works (namely the Safehold and Out of the Dark series). They might be next after Alien Clay, depending on how bored I get with Baxter's Coalescence....
@@IainG10 I will say, Weber is a good writer but has some bad habits that become increasingly pronounced by his releases in the 2010s. What it amounts to as a reader is, don't be afraid to skim through pages, and if you think you've read something before, you likely literally have.
He does a LOT of technical details and As You Knows plopped right into the middle of a characters internal dialogue, including entire pages describing alien sign language, and when the side series begin a couple of mainline books have a third of their text copied directly from those books. This is when he's not simply padding out wordcount. But then, if you've read Safehold, then you've already gotten a good dose of a lot this. If you want some distilled Weber, I do recommend reading Empire from the Ashes, which ends up forecasting a lot of his later writing.
@westrim Like Neal Asher; whenever he talks about hornets in the Polity, he has the same copy-pasted paragraph. I've seen it at least 3 times now....
For a really cool look at a galaxy spanning civilization that doesn't have access to FTL (but does have stasis/cryo tech) read House of Suns by Allastair Reynolds
Glad I came across this video because I definitely plan on writing a few stories in my personal IP about derelict Generation Ships, even though most races have access to FTL (primarily Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators); Superheroes are often dispatched to investigate the derelict vessels to see if the ships themselves can be salvaged or repurposed (which is important, even in a post-scarcity, quasi-Solarpunk society), and more importantly, rescue and recover anyone on board!
Hey! It's an 1852 Studebaker wagon! I bet we could get this thing running, especially if we thaw out those rubes in the front seat.
I dunno, I always thought it would be kinda cool to have a generational ship that travels all this way and how they pass on the knowledge and the desire for this to each generation. If centuries have passed and none of the original people made it to the destination - what if they finally arrive at their destination and there's people who don't WANT to leave the ship? It's all they've ever known after all. I just think it's kinda weird to assume that there wouldn't be SOME percentage of the people who were just too scared/detached from the idea of living on a planet to want to go since they have no frame of reference for it.
@@NerrawGnap I like that
Knights of Sidonia , super cool thumbnail ship
Jack Mcdivitt did a series where they cover this in great detail throughout the books. They run into one that looks like an astroid but is a generational ship that dips and scoops fuel from planetary atmospheres, edit) the book describes it as probably being milennia old by how scared and fused the hull was, they never find sentient crew but hear mechanical chatter that sounded complex.
Here is a bizarre scenario.
1. Ship 1 launches a 90yr travel to colonize a planet based on current tech.🚀
2. during those 90 years, earth discovers revolutionary warp technology.
3. Ship 1 arrives, finds the planet already colonized 89.9 years ago by Earth
I'd love to see you guys do a breakdown on the Sidonia. I don't know how unrealistic it is, but it's cool as hell and a pleasant surprise for a Netflix original.
Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Aurora is a no-punches-held exploration of how hard this kind of space travel is. It’s a brutal read
Still, one of the best Sci-Fi books I've ever read.
Haha, I'm so glad you brought up Revelation Space and the Lighthugger ships. It's my absolute favorite sub-lightspeed sci-fi setting. Time dilation plays such an integral role in those stories. Even if you're a near-immortal augmented Ultranaut, you'll still have to deal with news being several decades or centuries out of date by the time you reach your destination. Just amazingly brain-breaking stuff. It makes FTL seem boring in comparison!
sidonia mentioned
The pblem with a generation ships crew treating their mission as a religion was covered by Robert Heinlein in Orphans of the Sky.
It's a kids novels. so don't expect too much out of it. But you should give it a read if you can find a copy.
Heinlein is also responsible for coining the term Gerneration Ship.
As a bonus, pointy spike ships also looks faster.
Pointy ships also have a benefit of being scary.
Don't forget to paint it red for maximum speed boost!
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One of my fovsrite STL systems is in the book Ringworld. The "puppeteer" race didn't build any ships or massive generational station. They took their home planet and another four, look them in a five body orbit around each other and launched the whole thing to a close to light speed. They thought safer to move planets and accelerate them at near light speed, over any other metod, even though they had FTL ships and tech, they still choose the less risky option.
0:58 wait wait wait , did i just see the three body problem IN MINECRAFT, sorry bro im pausing ur vid and watching this.
Same. (It's bad for his channel though.)
Yeah you can find it on TH-cam it’s actually VERY good absolutely recommended
Nice to see Revelation Space getting a mention. Great series of novels, needs more love on youtube!
Love the pandorum scenes! And big ups for featuring Zando!
Shout out to David Weber in his Honorverse world building. Not only having cryo ships that don't keep the pasdengers in stasis 100% of the time, time dilation effects, and a plot point of later developed FTL travel beating colonists to their new home (for good and for ill).
Also, that B5 episode with the sleeper ship that launched only a couple years before first contact with the Centauri.
Gravity waves in Honorverse also go faster than light for some reason. Highly recommended book series tho!
@@Qwarzz It was originally written before that particular discovery was confirmed. Later retconned to be waves on the barrier between normal-space and hyper-space.
@@templarw20 I need to continue reading them at some point.
@@Qwarzz The later books suffer from "protection from editors" and ramble on, but they can usually be found for cheap in e-book, because Baen actually understands proper digital pricing. The spin-off with Eric Flint is awesome.
Let’s go…it’s just gonna take a while to get there.
the reference to Revelation Space threw me for a loop
Amazing books! Love them.
SOMA AND Alastair Reynolds in the same Spacedock video?! My two favorite obscure sci-fi universes!
Mind upload is one of the things I LOVED from the Altered Carbon universe (the books, we don't talk about the show) The idea that humanity could transmit information at FTL speeds, but can't get physical objects into hyperspace opened up the entire concept of the universe. You send a seed ship to a world, the AIs on board model the environment, write a biotech, nanotech etc etc solution to terraforming, start in on it, then decant the minds of the colonists into cloned bodies. And you want to go from Harlan's World to Earth, you pay for a hyperspace needlecast to Earth and are decanted into a rented (bought etc) body for the duration. It was a great universe design.
I'm happy to see Blindsight getting referenced.
Id love to see this channel cover Rorschach and Big Ben or the Icarus Array and Theseus.
I don't know how you keep producing interesting and cool videos so consistently, but I'm glad that you do. It's always nice to have one waiting after work
The Enzman Echolance is my favorite of Sublight ships, and hopefully one day they will be real
I came here so early the interstellar ship didn’t set off yet
what the hell was that three body minecraft thing? I'm gonna need an official Spacedock reading/watching list because you seem to find the darndest things
Glad to hear revelation space mentioned, as soon as I saw the title, that was the reference in my mind.
To anyone who enjoys settings, especially space opera settings, where slower than light interstellar travel is the norm, I can wholeheartedly recommend Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. The STL there isn't just some setting gimmick, but has a major impact on the stories told and the storytelling, in several interesting ways.
Generation ships were used in a lot of RPGs for a twist in the 80s and 90s. Both Might and Magic and Phantasy Star 3 revealed that their worlds were massive generation ships as part of their plots.
Nice to see Knights of Sidonia referenced. I'll be honest I clicked because I saw the Sidonia in the thumbnail.
For anyone who wants a humorous but GREAT take on generational ship crews and the effects on not only the human mind but an isolated society as a whole, I highly recommend "Severance" by Chris Bucholz. Incredibly underrated Sci Fi novel.
Ever so slightly saddened that Lightyear got a decent amount of screen time but Gunbuster got none. That OVA was my first introduction to relativistic speeds, with the pilots of the titular Gunbuster robot going on missions that to them would last days while years went by on earth. It questioned what watching your friends and loved ones growing old and dying without you would do to a person and in the finale they sacrifice one of theor reactors to destroy the aliens causing the trip home to take thousands of years with them returning unsure if there was a humanity left to return to.
Ah, love its black-and-white sixth episode, not to mention that perspective flip in the sixth episode of sequel series DieBuster.
Other than that, I hear ya. Hell, I would have even preferred the Ender's Game movie adaptation over that unimpressive Disney spin-off film.
for a real tearjerker, watch "Voices of a Distant Star"
One that I remember about this topic that I rarely see talked about, even with the larger fanbase, is Gundam Stargazer. It is a short story about the development of a mobile suit that is meant for deep space exploration rather than combat. The centerpiece of the whole thing is a learning AI and the Voiture Lumiere system, that last of which serves as a sort of solar sail. Acceleration is slow, but it is constant. It is meant for long period interstellar travel and exploration. This short I felt really captured that distinct awe and curiosity of space which is quite rare to see in sci-fi these days.
Is that for real? A deep space exploration mecha? That's taking the impracticality of Mecha to a whole new level
@@DKNguyen3.1415 While it is never explained why it was designed as a mecha in universe rather than some kind of probe, my personal headcannon is that they simply took what they already had, that being the frame of a military mobile suit, and then reworked it for this new purpose rather than building something from the ground up.
Another possibility could be due to the AI as it is meant to learn from humans piloting the machine before it is sent off on it's own, and thus they use what is already well supported.
But again, it was a very short story and never had any chance to really delve deep into its ideas and concepts which perhaps would have given an explanation for some of these questions if given the chance.
I think it would be interesting to see nonftl travel ships in a world with ftl. Would be interesting to see why someone would choose to use the flow mode. Perhaps religious, or a weird way of vacationing. Or perhaps factory ships that use the travel time to produce goods for the eventual colony world they are going to
Avoiding predatory species? FTL is magic from sci fi. Maybe an FTL society being able to generate the jump would also be able to easily detect it and maybe even follow the signal.
i think this topic deserves a few more videos, theres just so mutch to talk about, and its soooo interesting.
1:50 that depends. Yes, the satelites do experience a teeny-tiny bit of time dilation, but we also do, because of Earth's gravity
And down here we experience MORE time dilation than the GPS satelites, for example. They have to constantly "rollback" time to keep in sync with us
Yep, that's why you always hear people saying "the time on the GPS satellites needs to be adjusted", people won't believe you saying "we're traveling faster here on earth", relatively it's that straight forward 👍
He actually got it backwards. GPS satellites experience time faster than on the surface of the Earth
By changing the orbit, it is possible to balance a satellite's clock using its velocity to tick at the same rate as on the surface. But it would be LEO and not suitable for GPS. Their velocity isn't enough to cancel out the lower gravitational field. Clocks tick faster up there
@@tomholroyd7519 I love this fact, it's like we live near our very own black hole, it's lower mass but it still drags our clocks slower all the same
My first introdction to relativistic space travel is Turn Right At Orion by Mitchell Begelman. It's is truely mind-blown for me that if going fast enough, someone can go thought the space and history of the entire universe within the human life span.
Another potential option for shielding is to keep your water at the front end of your ship. A mushroom shaped cap filled with water would shield well against particles and radiation. As for micrometeors, you'd need to armor the cap differently.
Nice callout for ‘The Songs of Distant Earth’. I was actually thinking of the ice shield the ship had in front to help with the interstellar dust while firing its Quantum Drive.
I think a sufficiently large self-sustaining ship would be no different than living on a planet. We are, technically living in a giant spaceship where few people are actively sabotaging the life support system for their own wealth.
Nostalgia for infinity is my absolute most favorite ship in any scifi ever... It was just soo cool and unique... Love it to bits
It's been a long time since I've seen Knights of Sidonia brought up. Great series, wish more of it was animated.
I'm a simple man, I see Sidonia, I like. It was a lonely show, but it helped me through a lonely time in life, so it holds a special place in my heart.
What many people don't undrstand is that when time dilation starts and the time goes slower for you, you will start to see the universe move around you and you will be able to fly through the universe seemingly with FTL but only because of time dilation. One you have flown to system 1000 lys away im mere seconds (from your POV) and return home, when you get there 2000 years on earth have passed and humanity is not what it were when you left 2 seconds before from your POV.
Poul Anderson's Starfarers is basically about this. No FTL, but the ships can travel at just under lightspeed. The entire book is about dealing with relativistic effects. You also have Joe Haldeman's The Forever War.
I swear, hearing that Battlezone music every time I open one of your videos, hits me with a nostalgia pang that cuts deep.
The Alien franchise is clear that interstellar travel requires stasis, but not how long it takes. The Sulaco and Prometheus seem to reach other systems without skipping generations of time. Ripley's escape craft takes 57 years to reach and pass Earth but it's probably not built for such distances.
I like the idea of not taking a spaceship but a space _city_ to the new system. Supporting resources definitely included. It provides a variety of employment opportunities, variety of entertainment options and just all the psychological support humans need.
If you haven't watched Knights of Sidonia yet, you should, because it's exactly that!
Just keep in mind that, well, it *is* anime, with some of the common pitfalls...
Still love it, though.
1. Have you ever heard of Earth Star Voyager? I don't recommend it, but it had a half measure take on the generation ship with a crew of youths/children/wunderkinds, scheduled to be adults when they reached their destination.
2. Like flying through a particle beam cannon? What if you fired one in front of the ship and fly behind it in the gap it makes? ... I think I just re-invented the deflector dish.
Per Particle beam cannon and a big sail (,,Matter- Sail") accalerate to the Stars ➡️ sail and particle beam is the perfekt shield for Interstellar dust and gas 🤔
I've been playing around with a concept for a low(ish)-tonnage, low(ish)-tech interstellar ship. It has a conscious crew at all times, and they have to raise their own replacements, but unlike the typical generation ship design, the crew is small and uses a stockpile of frozen gametes or embryos (collected before launch from a much larger population) to maintain genetic diversity. No need to propel an entire small country up to relativistic speed or conquer the extreme challenge of bringing people back to life after freezing them.
2:15 you actually can not, the edge of the observable universe is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light, so even at light speed you can never reach it
In a closed system large enough to house a balanced amount of livestock and plants meat really isn't less efficient. All of its "losses" are just byproducts that with even a little manipulation will actually help plant through CO2 and animal wastes which fertilize. They'd essentially just be another passenger getting their outputs recycled back into their input, but you can eat them and get proteins as well as a more balanced diet. If you've seen an aquaponics setup it's essentially the same thing except there's no outside input as you'd have to use the plants to feed the animals i.e. herbivore livestock. As well as tons of edible fish eat plants as is, you can almost get an aquaponics setup to be a relatively closed loop if it's large enough and you have a way of converting the plants into fish food such as algae.
Speaking of things you would need to worry about when it comes to a long voyage crews mental health, BORDOM, oh lord bordom, imagine you packed for a week long trip when it comes to fun stuff, and then had only that for entertaiment for DECADES.....
Aww, this takes me right back! One of the first science-fiction concepts I ever came up with, in my early teens, was a generation ship that, when it arrived at its destination, had very few inhabitants who actually wanted to abandon their onboard culture to go colonize a planet. Not exactly deeply original, but it was one of the first story ideas that I hadn't just ripped off one of my favorite creators, so I remember it fondly.
Honorable mention to Andromeda's "Bellerophon"... Humanity not having FTL yet decided to brute force the issue and just built a ship with such massive engines it was able to get up to 99.999 % of lightspeed.
P90s
that's so human lol
Except you'd need near infinite fuel in reality to move that much mass at that speed
@@ryanhorton9594 they probably got that issue resolved if they are using infinite ammo P90s
@@DKNguyen3.1415 fair lol
I appreciate that story because it didn't skimp on the impossibilities for modern man to get to another star. In fact, almost every challenge presented is applicable to getting a man to Mars. We don't have systems that can keep humans alive for months to get there, and more months to get back. Yes, we have the space station, but we don't have rockets large enough to send the space station to Mars. This keeps people thinking of what are our limits and what can we do to overcome them.
Personally I’m gonna give space travel a miss until someone can prove Einstein wrong and figure out how to achieve superluminal speed.
Does that apply to interplanetary travel
It's not necessary to disprove Einstein. FTL is based on warp drive, not by travelling faster kinetically.
8:35 revelation space got mentioned!!!!!
That’s what i‘ve been waiting for, that’s what it’s all about !! Wohooooooo
when indestructable tenticle monster lurks in space, distance is a secondary problem.
I've always pictured a sub lightspeed craft utilising a constant string of sling shot manoeuvres and when it gets to a target system it takes a final U-turn slingshot to slow down around the host star.
Radiation is the biggest problem with any space travel
And time....
@Spacedock another great video for thought as always. While I know the channel is based around film and video content- I feel the novel "Noumenon' by Marina Lostetter is a great example of generational mission dependency that isn't mentioned here but exemplifies hundreds of year long journeys driven by initial parameters that turn from protocol to survival/dogma- but manage to pull through due to multiple factors. Which make for an important plot point if organic life needs to sustain itself through events listed.
An opposite side of this is Andy Martin's "Project Hail Mary" in which Humanity can barely retain it's ability to function after interstellar travel. All of course dependent on what a creator is striving for. But I feel like these two are worth mentioning because they are stories that measure humanity from polarizing ends of the scale between a collective and an individual moving the story and plot/goal forward.
Lastly the issue of being bypassed by faster, more advanced drive tech while on route.
Wow, Sidonia no Kishi in the thumbnail and shown for a few seconds in the video? That makes me happy.
The three body problem in minecraft?!?!
Was wondering the exact same thing
Yeah it started off as a fan project but it later turned into an official one with the Zhang Berihai saga.
I like how the Staircase Program in Three Body Problem was described as a lightsail spacecraft propelled by a series of exploding nuclear bombs that are not carried onboard the ship.
>See Sidonia in the thumbnail
>click video
Simple as that.
Amazing, I honestly thought you were in your late teen's by the sound of your voice. Who knew you're a grown man! Brilliant, thank you for surprising me and my jaded old ways.
Something that wasn't considered in the video where generation ships are concerned is this,; how do you convince a crew of people who were born and grew up on a space ship to move down to a planetary body once the trip is over? Especially if it is the third or fourth generation raised in space? The artificial environment is all that they know and is comforting and safe to them. I doubt that the majority of them would want to leave once the ship arrived.
Knights of Sidonia kind of takes this into account. The titular vessel is a "seed" ship, capable of deploying smaller colony ships to habitable worlds along its route. When it gets close enough to a viable system, a colony ship is staffed entirely with volunteers from among the Sidonia's hundreds of thousands of crew, while the rest stay aboard to continue the journey.
well said. so many great and different stories to be told if you remove the 'magic ftl' device.
Great topic choice. Many aspects I never considered before. Keep up the great work!
It's not in the book for long, but I really like the relativistic voyage in Mickey 7(soon to be Mickey 17 in cinema)
And they wipe out a planet with a relativistic bullet, which is awesome