If space travel has the problem that newer colony ship would overtake older colony ships, couldn't they just attach new engines to the old ships?

[UCT]

A game I really like had a cool solution to this problem, it’s called Xenoblade Chronicles X. What they did is that everyone that was brought on the colony ships were put into a life support storage system that would keep them frozen and healthy. They would then create life like robot versions of themselves to continue doing the jobs they needed to do. Though of course aliens attacked them and fucked everything over and they had to have epic anime robot battles to save the Life storage system.

 

[Chromeo]

This is seriously counting your chickens before they hatch

 

[Bionicle of War]

Imagine being a 1945 colony ship and by the time you arrive the planet has been fully colonized by pooners, trannies and niggers.

I can't imagine pooners or trannies colonizing anything. Niggers that became trannies and pooners, on the other hand? Now that would be horrifying.

 

[Betonhaus]

Imagine being a 1945 colony ship and by the time you arrive the planet has been fully colonized by pooners, trannies and niggers.

if that happens, the colony ship is likely to arrive after the first colony dies out. The pooners and trannies will never have children and will die out after a generation or two, and the niggers will not be able to keep the colony operational and starve or suffocate to death.

 

[cigint]

It would make more sense for the engineers on the ship to develop better engines

No, designing and manufacturing new fucking engines on board a spaceship makes considerably less sense than delivering and retrofitting new engines with a faster spaceship, which already makes almost no sense.

 

[The best and greatest]

Why colonize space with people at all? I get solar system maybe but more broadly It'd be better to let robots do it and then they can just periodically send resource shipments towards Sol
The gains would be a trickle at first, but the coalescence of material and human labor resources in a single point would make truly massive space engineering projects possible

 

[cigint]

Why colonize space with people at all? I get solar system maybe but more broadly It'd be better to let robots do it and

The idea is that something catastrophic can happen to a whole planet, e.g. a giant meteor strikes it. And, something catastrophic can also happen to an entire solar system as well, e.g. quasar sterilizes every world around the star, wandering black hole, etc.

So colonizing other planets and other systems is a hedge: even if something catastrophic like this happens, human life can continue elsewhere. Ye shall reclaim the old wastes, and so on. There is absolutely no reason not to do this if we have the ability, beyond an edgy teenager's babbys-first-misanthropy logic à la "humans don't deserve to survive wahh I hate my dad".

Now, will we ever have the ability to do this, or are we going to drown in niggers and experience a complete competency cascade, spiraling into a society that's unable to maintain even our current level of technology? That's the real question.

 

[Betonhaus]

Why colonize space with people at all? I get solar system maybe but more broadly It'd be better to let robots do it and then they can just periodically send resource shipments towards Sol
The gains would be a trickle at first, but the coalescence of material and human labor resources in a single point would make truly massive space engineering projects possible

Eventually you're going to have to send humans. Might as well send them in the first trip, where they still have the ship to live in while they prepare the planet.

 

[The best and greatest]

The idea is that something catastrophic can happen to a whole planet, e.g. a giant meteor strikes it. And, something catastrophic can also happen to an entire solar system as well, e.g. quasar sterilizes every world around the star, wandering black hole, etc.

So colonizing other planets and other systems is a hedge: even if something catastrophic like this happens, human life can continue elsewhere. Ye shall reclaim the old wastes, and so on. There is absolutely no reason not to do this if we have the ability, beyond an edgy teenager's babbys-first-misanthropy logic à la "humans don't deserve to survive wahh I hate my dad".

Now, will we ever have the ability to do this, or are we going to drown in niggers and experience a complete competency cascade, spiraling into a society that's unable to maintain even our current level of technology? That's the real question.

Eventually you're going to have to send humans. Might as well send them in the first trip, where they still have the ship to live in while they prepare the planet.

So Ill take the devil's advocate position and posit that if you colonize other star systems with human colonists you are effectively condemning the human race to division and eventual war against itself.

Think of how tortoises on the islands of Galapagos diverged from each other after population groups get separated off for thousands of years.

Imagine how different we'll become from each other after tens or hundreds of thousands of years being lightyears away from each other? Imagine when these dispirate genetic mutations of humanity inevitably come to view themselves as different from each other even if the variations between them are ultimately surface level or trivial?

We should instead stand together, one humanity, sharing a single fate. Better that way

 

[Betonhaus]

Imagine how different we'll become from each other after tens or hundreds of thousands of years being lightyears away from each other? Imagine when these dispirate genetic mutations of humanity inevitably come to view themselves as different from each other even if the variations between them are ultimately surface level or trivial

Imagine if by the time it's economical to have a war fleet enough of nearby resources have been made available that there is no need to interact with the other colony

 

[The best and greatest]

Imagine if by the time it's economical to have a war fleet enough of nearby resources have been made available that there is no need to interact with the other colony

Who's to say these hypothetical pseudo-humans will even view things that way?
Who's to say one system doesn't get it in their heads that they are the superior expression of the human genome and that it is their moral obligation to reseed humanity at the expense of lesser sub-species?

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

No, designing and manufacturing new fucking engines on board a spaceship makes considerably less sense than delivering and retrofitting new engines with a faster spaceship, which already makes almost no sense.

You could if you had a big enough ship. Like if you had 2 million people in an O'Neill cylinder-sized ship (so at least 10^15 kg), and education geared toward churning out engineers and scientists, and there were large onboard supplies of rare alloys, it might be possible to retrofit a generation ship with new engines to go faster. You probably do need something that big to colonize another star system to begin with since it reduces the odds you'll turn society into inbred cousin fuckers who forget how to use their technology halfway through the journey.

So Ill take the devil's advocate position and posit that if you colonize other star systems with human colonists you are effectively condemning the human race to division and eventual war against itself.

Think of how tortoises on the islands of Galapagos diverged from each other after population groups get separated off for thousands of years.

Imagine how different we'll become from each other after tens or hundreds of thousands of years being lightyears away from each other? Imagine when these dispirate genetic mutations of humanity inevitably come to view themselves as different from each other even if the variations between them are ultimately surface level or trivial?

We should instead stand together, one humanity, sharing a single fate. Better that way

It's more that people in one star system could unleash a galaxy-destroying plague like nanobot swarms, destroy the universe with a vacuum collapse trying to tap zero point energy, mutate themselves into furries who think they're the master race, etc. Since there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone and countless trillions brown dwarfs, rogue planets, etc. (which are awesome places to live if your society runs on nuclear fusion), this means the odds rise exponentially.

 

[cigint]

So Ill take the devil's advocate position and posit that if you colonize other star systems with human colonists you are effectively condemning the human race to division and eventual war against itself.

We are already condemned to division and war against ourselves. Colonizing other star systems is the only way to disarm the power to destroy ourselves completely and permanently, which we currently possess via nuclear arms.

 

[HorseInTheWindow]

I think there is another more hard problem to solve. How will you find the first ship? Rarely people think how actually big space is. A lot of times we can't find regular ships in the oceans and they are less than a grain of sand in comparison to the space.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I think there is another more hard problem to solve. How will you find the first ship? Rarely people think how actually big space is. A lot of times we can't find regular ships in the oceans and they are less than a grain of sand in comparison to the space.

It's not easy to change direction in space because of how rockets work, so there's a very limited section of space where the ship could be. If they fired their own engines for even a second when pointed toward Earth, they would be even easier to see since any rocket big and powerful enough to travel to the stars could be seen from an insane distance away.

Or you know, just use a laser signal to beg Earth to send you a bigger rocket.

 

[millais]

You could if you had a big enough ship. Like if you had 2 million people in an O'Neill cylinder-sized ship (so at least 10^15 kg), and education geared toward churning out engineers and scientists, and there were large onboard supplies of rare alloys, it might be possible to retrofit a generation ship with new engines to go faster. You probably do need something that big to colonize another star system to begin with since it reduces the odds you'll turn society into inbred cousin fuckers who forget how to use their technology halfway through the journey.

Maybe the people on Earth could also transmit plans and instructions for building new engines to the colony ship, for the crew members to build in their own engineering workshops with their own stores and supplies.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Bolting newer, more powerful engines to a generation ship thats possibly hundreds of years old is a engineering nightmare. That old metal would be fatigued as shit, barely even able to handle its current thrust levels. Build a new faster ship.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Bolting newer, more powerful engines to a generation ship thats possibly hundreds of years old is a engineering nightmare. That old metal would be fatigued as shit, barely even able to handle its current thrust levels. Build a new faster ship.

A spaceship going to another star system only fires its main engines twice--once to speed up, once to slow down. And the only wear and corrosion in space on timescales lower than millions of years is caused by collisions with debris which only hit the front of the ship.

 

[WelperHelper99]

A spaceship going to another star system only fires its main engines twice--once to speed up, once to slow down. And the only wear and corrosion in space on timescales lower than millions of years is caused by collisions with debris which only hit the front of the ship.

You overestimate the strength of your spacecraft. Metal wears out. Going as fast as it needs to get to another star system means it's experiencing a absurd amount of G's. You also fail to consider it might need to make multiple burns, further increasing the wear. Also space debris goes fucking fast. A pebble might as well be a cannon shell.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

You could if you had a big enough ship. Like if you had 2 million people in an O'Neill cylinder-sized ship (so at least 10^15 kg), and education geared toward churning out engineers and scientists, and there were large onboard supplies of rare alloys, it might be possible to retrofit a generation ship with new engines to go faster. You probably do need something that big to colonize another star system to begin with since it reduces the odds you'll turn society into inbred cousin fuckers who forget how to use their technology halfway through the journey.

Until the engine they develop requires some kind of completely exotic fuel source or process because the principles and way it interfaces with the ship is totally alien to what anyone before had conceived of.

Maybe if the process is exactly like we know it the physical structure of the ship won't be a problem, but they start meddling with physics in different ways and it might be a different story.
Your standard ship that uses a fuel propulsion system isn't going to be able to handle a new system that taps some kind of internal energy source to bend space itself, which you'd almost need to get anywhere worthwhile in a reasonable span of time.

And even just addressing the social/human challenges with one of these earth-shaking colony ships would be almost as difficult as addressing the engine, that could be its own massive essay, then there's an undefined level of computer/AI involvement...

Basically it comes down to "That's too far in the future with too many variables to even speculate", the foundations of humanity itself and our relationship to technology would probably be foreign to us in modern day.