The dawn star and relativity

I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

Tararoys wrote:I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

It's been suggested numerous times. And it's not a bad hypothesis. As I recall, it was a contending theory for a while. Unfortunately, David knocked that theory down by telling us the Federation could not reach relativistic speeds. See: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3485&p=79909&hilit=dilation#p79909

SWM wrote:

Tararoys wrote:I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

It's been suggested numerous times. And it's not a bad hypothesis. As I recall, it was a contending theory for a while. Unfortunately, David knocked that theory down by telling us the Federation could not reach relativistic speeds. See: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3485&p=79909&hilit=dilation#p79909

<drops mike>

Tararoys wrote:I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

Even if TF ships could reach relativistic speeds, no stealth system could ever hope to hide that sort of signature from Gbaba sensors. It's unlikely that the surviving Archangels would be willing to setup what amounts to a giant blinking sign for the Gbaba (or, hell, another alien species in the region that might come stumbling into the Safehold system*).

*As an aside, given that humanity was already bitten once by genocidal little monsters, I'm surprised this possibility wasn't more of a concern for the Operation Ark mission planners. They'd already discovered evidence of multiple civilizations in Earth's backyard, so wouldn't that suggest the likelihood of technic civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy?

Potential allies! The Gbaba are everyone's enemy.

We can forgive the shell-shocked humans at the end of the Terran Federation for not seeing things that way.

SWM wrote:

Tararoys wrote:I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

It's been suggested numerous times. And it's not a bad hypothesis. As I recall, it was a contending theory for a while. Unfortunately, David knocked that theory down by telling us the Federation could not reach relativistic speeds. See: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3485&p=79909&hilit=dilation#p79909

Another theory shot down by Word of God! Yay!

Tararoys wrote:I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

Consider that "fanfic" post of David's--The bogeymen show up and the Fifth Imperium rescues them in the nick of time. Before he knows the Fifth Imperium planetoids are friendly he is dismayed to learn that even his missiles have no hope of catching them.

They were only at about t/t' of 2.

It would surprise me a bit if no thought was given to the possibility in the original planning, and there may have been some contingency instructions that come down to 'remember how porcupines make love!' The TF may have had enough information about the Gbabas' previous victims to be confident that they weren't contemporary with each other - which would suggest that Op Ark wasn't likely to run into anyone else with a technic civilisation within the limited volume it was going to explore. I would imagine that the Peis were on the look-out for signs of one anyway, but under the circumstances I would bet that their orders were 'locate and avoid for now'. Similarly, I'd guess they wouldn't have been allowed to move in with any non-technic aliens they tripped over, since that situation would make erasing all memory of high tech problematic at best. How to proceed once the hiding period was over was probably left up to the refugees, assuming that the original orders were even as detailed as I'm suggesting.

How the possibility of the non-tech phase being found by someone else's explorers was planned for is another matter. One gets the impression that decent real estate isn't that hard to come by, so if there was a 'locate and avoid' clause in the plan, setting up in the middle of a quiet area could reasonably be expected to provide a cushion of several centuries before anyone would wander by, and the colony would be back in space or just about ready to go back anyway. In any case, alien contact would be no big deal for the original planners, who doubtless figured that whatever happened, it couldn't be worse than the Gbaba [an assumption I would question, since there are things worse than death]. After Langhorne's little revision, though, it becomes a serious issue. In fact, it represents yet another of the many stitches he dropped. Most likely because he was convinced that there's no such thing as a 'friendly alien' so if anybody found Safehold they'd wipe it out as a matter of course, not poke at it to try and figure out what the heck was going on. While the current COGA would try to dismiss any visitors as Shan-wei's Demons, of course, the current church isn't all that close to what he originally intended. It would be interesting to know how that original Church, without the Fall and demonology inserted, would have handled living proof of the Writ's inaccuracy.

Bluestrike2 wrote:

Tararoys wrote:I had the following thought about the archangels millennial visit. When Schueler and Chihiro "departed in glory," what if they took the dawn star on a relativistic trip around space for a while? That way they could still be alive without any fancy cryogenics, picas, or stored personalities.

Taralynn

Even if TF ships could reach relativistic speeds, no stealth system could ever hope to hide that sort of signature from Gbaba sensors. It's unlikely that the surviving Archangels would be willing to setup what amounts to a giant blinking sign for the Gbaba (or, hell, another alien species in the region that might come stumbling into the Safehold system*).

*As an aside, given that humanity was already bitten once by genocidal little monsters, I'm surprised this possibility wasn't more of a concern for the Operation Ark mission planners. They'd already discovered evidence of multiple civilizations in Earth's backyard, so wouldn't that suggest the likelihood of technic civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy?

If there was a contingency plan for meeting non-Gbaba aliens, it would almost have to involve booting up TF-level technology, if nothing else to be sure of being successful trading partners.

Maybe the thing under the Temple is benign??