Time Debt II: Repeat As Necessary.

There's a lot of cheating in science fiction.  Warp drive (or any form of faster-than-light space travel) is cheating, but it's cheating that allows planets in different solar systems to exist in some kind of simultaneous time frame, and as a result to have a Federation of Planets or some similar polity. The alternative would not be a society as we have now, but more like a chess game played by mail - not impossible, but requiring a lot of patience on both sides.

To illustrate the realities of the problem, let us perform an experiment in alternative history.  Let's pretend that the United States government, flushed with hubris thanks to the success of the moon missions, decides to send a mission to Alpha Centauri in 1970.  Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away, but let's say that state of the art technology will require a full decade to complete the trip.

Exactly what's involved in getting the colonists there in one piece is irrelevant - really good suspended animation, or a big ship loaded with all the Tang™ and TV dinners that anyone could want, along with an awfully efficient recycling system.  Whatever it takes, NASA loads the ship up with a thousand of the best and the brightest of both sexes, along with a full quota of axes and fish hooks - well, chainsaws and drilling rigs, more likely - wishes them Godspeed, and sends them on their way. (Hopefully they'd actually send two or three ships - one ship seems like an awfully isolated basket for all those eggs, let's get a little redundancy going.)

Against all expectations from movies and television, everything goes flawlessly, and a thousand colonists land on Alpha Centauri Prime, cleverly name it New Earth*, and set up camp. They wait a few years to make sure that their beachhead on alien soil is going to thrive, then send the ships back to earth with the good news, along with a few tons of whatever resources seem appropriate for the purposes of trade (or debt reduction, depending on how the paperwork is set up), and a few people who have inevitably changed their minds about the whole colonial thing.

The ships make their triumphant return, and another thousand people jump on board. Well...maybe not right away.  After all, science has had 25 years to march forward, and this is where things get interesting.

Going from 1970 to 1995 represents a huge leap in technology. Just look at the lifestyle of the average consumer: the jump from record albums to CDs, VHS to DVD, the introduction of microwave ovens, cell phones, and so on - not to mention computing technology!

So we sensibly take a few years to retrofit the spaceships with computers and DVD players, fill the freezers with people or Hungry Man Dinners™, based on whichever approach you picked originally, then send the ships on their way again.  Ten years later the little fleet arrives and drops what is essentially a technology bomb on the nascent colony.

Repeat the process, and the next round trip provides the colony with MP3s**, iPads, LED screens, 64 bit computing, the Internet, and the complete Harry Potter series, both in book and movie form - or more accurately, as e-books and MP4 files. 

This is just a 20 year round trip. In my previous post on this topic, the colonies had a 150 year circuit - what possible continuity of technology or culture could survive that kind of barrier?  The same problem applies to whatever raw resources the colony is dutifully returning to the mother world.

"Hi, here's a spaceship full of crude oil, right on time." 
"Of what?  Gosh, no, ever since we switched to molecular valence fields, we don't use oil anymore."
"But what about gas?"
"About what - oh, GASOLINE! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"

However, there is a partial solution to this problem. If you start building more ships until you can launch one every six months or three months, you can create a continuum of communication, and start to get something that looks more like a unified society, with raw supplies going one way, and technology going in the other.  I don't think the two groups ever end up at the same level, but when it comes right down to it, it probably doesn't matter.

And then, if you want to turn this into the plot for a book, one day the ships stop coming...

- Sid

* SF author Larry Niven has one group of interplanetary colonists name their new home We Made It.  I think I prefer that approach over the whole "New Whatever" thing.

** Admittedly, this is based on the assumption that the colony isn't making its own new inventions, but somehow I think that if you were busy carving cities out of an alien wilderness, you probably wouldn't be wondering about how to convert your Beatles albums into some kind of digital format.   

Time Debt I: The Charge of the Light Brigade.

I just finished reading The One-Eyed Man, by L. E. Modessit.  It's a hard SF* concept novel that unfortunately never quite captured my interest.  I've had this problem with some of Modessit's writing before - Modessit writes well, but sometimes his characters seem to be driven by motivations that are never quite clear to me, for whatever reason.

In addition, there was a fundamental aspect of the plot which just didn't make sense to me.  The protagonist is an ecologist who has just undergone a bad divorce, in which both his wife and his daughter have done their best to strip him of all his money and possessions.  As such, he leaps at the opportunity to undertake a lucrative government contract to investigate possible ecological misbehaviour by colonists on another planet.

The contract is even more appealing to the ecologist because the round trip will involve a time debt of 150 years. The flight to the colony will only take a month of ship time, but 75 years will pass in the sidereal universe, and when he finally returns after another 75 years of time warp, both his ex-wife and daughter will be long dead.

Okay, wait - 150 years?  What possible authority could a government exert over a colony whose conduct would take 225 years to punish?  (150 years for someone to find out what the colony is doing and return with the news, and another 75 years to send a message back saying "Bad colonists!  No cookie!").

For that matter, wouldn't 225 years be more than enough time to perpetuate an irreversible ecological catastrophe?  As an example, imagine applying the same timeline to something like the American Revolution of 1776. The message from Great Britain telling everyone to just settle down a bit and not do anything rash would have arrived in 2001.

Or maybe Imperial Britain would have sent an expeditionary force when they received the news in 1926 - not sure that squadrons of post-WWI British cavalry would do well against Abrams Main Battle Tanks and Apache helicopters.

- Sid

* "Hard" science fiction relies heavily on scientific concepts.  It's not called that because it's especially difficult, although some of it isn't all that easy, either.  

 

Okay, we've all thought about it at least once.

And now, a picture of Princess Leia choking Captain Kirk.  Here's hoping that you all enjoyed the last day of 2013 as much as Carrie Fisher did.

- Sid

P.S.  My god, it's like some kind of war between stars...you could call it a "Stars War"...