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The problem with sleeper ships
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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I think you kind of missed my point here.
Think about the infrastructure needed to communicate with Voyager. How many people would be capable of rebuilding it, if it would break? Given something like a major war, or a pandemic, might those people die or simply be shifted to more pressing issues? Since a sleeper ship doesn't have an active crew, stuff might simply break on their side too. Maybe an asteroid hits the dish.
I'm not arguing that it's impossible to build technology to keep in touch, I'm arguing that those who do the touching vanish. That's a different angle.
The space beacon doesn't have to be far out. Just far enough no one nukes it in WW3.
The FTL civilization will likely notice a radio signal from within our solar system.
You're looking the wrong way, literally.
It's not about us being found by another civilization, it's about a sleeper ship being forgotten by us.
I want a future FTL capable Earth civilization to find the sleeper ship. The Earthlings are likely to notice a radio signal within our solar system as they build up for FTL.
We can forget all about it. The beacon will be attractive to them.
What are you talking about?
A ship travelling to another star system will not fly as slow as Voyager and will be well outside of the solar system within decades. What kind of beacon do you think would be strong enough to ping continuously, for 3000 years, at increasingly high energy levels? We're talking megawatts of power.
A beacon you leave behind. A small satellite left in Sol that contains notes.
Fuck. Did you think the sleeper ship was radioing Earth? It could have a local broadcast, but not at all my point.
Edit: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beacon Beacons don't have to move.
often they don't, that's where the term beacon comes from. Saying that they don't have to is a little wrong, since it's probably more accurate to state that "they don't have to stay stationary" instead.
voyager still works today, so no problems there. It's had a few issues, but those were able to be fixed remotely, interestingly enough.
It's unlikely that the entirety of humanity would ship itself off in one go, it would take hundreds, probably thousands of ships to remove humanity from the planet, and even then not everyone would want to leave.
So as far as managing infra, it would be fine, those would be the last people to leave, simple as that, and even beyond that some remote communication and admin would be possible.
You could easily keep like 5% of the sleeper ship population up and working on it, i would expect that to be the case frankly. You could likely manage it pretty effectively from that point on, if certain services fail you could automatically wake up a maintenance team i suppose.
I think you're thinking way too 21st century, when this post is thinking 77th century.