The other challenges of space

[MatthewVilter]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

So...suppose the cryoships that arrived on the colony passed through some kind of time anomaly, or were held in flight by these 'Seeders', while the other colonies evolved and changed. Maybe everybody else arrived on their target worlds 50 million years ago...

I like this idea a lot! How about this: Something goes wrong in hyperspace and when the colonists wake up the computer tells them where their target was supposed to be was empty space. So it made some observations and took them to a different new home. The colonists try to use stellar drift to figure out the time but nothing is right! It has been so long* or they have come so far that old starmaps are useless!

*I don't actually know that modern or near future drift predictions don't run past the heat death of the universe.

Edit: I suppose dark matter could do something unexpected and keep the universe livable for longer then expected. Or maybe the ships are in a new universe!

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Dustin

Sounds like fun.This is troublesome without some additional handwaving. I have a hard time imagining an automated cryogenic system that doesn't track time somehow. Does the method of space propulsion itself disconnect ship time from universe time?

If the computer became completely corrupted and did a hard-reboot from backup, anyone checking it would only be able to tell how long it had been since reboot. They basically woke up and all the clocks were blinking 12:00.

Okay, probably still unrealistic, but it certainly isn't the biggest handwave in the background. My disbelief suspenders would accept it if you did something good with it.

[Langy]

A more realistic reason for them not knowing how long they've been in cryosleep would be random relativistic time dilation effects during FTL that they can't account for. Sure, the ship would have a clock and be able to say how long it's been in flight subjectively, but it wouldn't be able to accurately predict how long it's been in flight objectively, especially if they're far enough away from known pulsars that they can't use them to figure out where they are or what year it is, objectively.

In order to get that far they'll probably have to be in a different galaxy or something, though. Either that, or be around a hundred million years into the future, when all the known pulsars will have stopped pulsing.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

They may exist, but did they necessarily make it onto the ships? If all the engineering talent was working on the drives and cryosystems, who would be working on lasers? And who would bring them on board?

It doesn't make any difference.

Even if the laser-weapon tech was left behind on Earth, if you've got starflight you've got the tech to weaponize lasers (at least). So if the colony-world has built itself up to the point that it can be launching exploratory vessels over interstellar distances, than they're going to have the potential to create serious high-energy laser weapons.

Lasers, especially high-frequency lasers, are too potentially useful as weapons (and for other things too!) in space for them not to be under development in such a society, it would be really weird if it was not so.