Bill mentioned in Stratosphere Lounge 258 that he plans for his story to take place in 200 years. He had previously mentioned that he wanted to tell the story as happening in more than one generation of time. I wanted to post this figure* that shows the travel time vs technology to various interplanetary and interstellar destinations, and point out that he can do both. The idea of an early interstellar mission arriving at its destination to find people from a later launching but faster mission were already there is an old sci-fi trope but it is a good one. For example, 100 years from now some of the characters are U.S. Space Force officers whose careers were sidelined after they deliberately failed in a mission to disarm some colonists that were being harrassed by SpaceAntifa. With their careers practically over anyway and upset about the direction the country and Space Force are going they volunteer for a 100 year manned sleeper mission to another star using the new gravitically enabled fusion rocket (why do they need to send people? maybe robots still aren’t advanced enough… maybe for legal claim reasons… maybe there has to be an actual observer for some quantum-based sensor that is being sent there to work. They arrive to find that after their 100 years in hibernation to find that there is a fledgling colony there of people that arrived at high sub-C by Mach Thruster ships. But the colony is mostly belters, introverts, and religious people who wanted to get away from the Old Worlds (to borrow a term, ahem) but have no military experience to deal with the new aggressive Kafer aliens that they’ve run into. Just an example, but the point is that either relativistic velocities or slow hibernation would allow characters from radically different time periods to be together at the destination.
* from Frisbee’s Evaluation of Propulsion Options for Interstellar Missions. A couple of other primers on interstellar propulsion options are Forward’s Ad Astra, and the initial report from the USAF’s Project Outgrowth. They might make good primers for anyone interested in this topic or these series of posts. Note: They do NOT include the Mach Thruster mentioned above that may actually be the best candidate for eventual interstellar drives because progress on it has been very recent.
3 replies on “Interstellar Travel w/o Magic: Stratosphere 258 Comment”
Reminds me of the realities of spaceflight in the Enderverse, except that they have the Ansibles for FTL Communication. The story starts out no more than a few hundred years in the future, but even after 3,000 years there’s no method for FTL travel until the last book (Children of the Mind), but even then it’s extremely limited to the ability of one individual being. Despite no FTL travel they manage to colonize more than 100 worlds by traveling at a good fraction of light speed, but with Relativistic effects.
Great book. I haven’t read the sequels or seen the movie though.
With the addition of the prequels which cover the 1st and 2nd Formec Wars along with the early life of Mazer Rackham, it’s become a solid and expansive scifi universe beyond the two most well known books (Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead). Orson Scott Card did a good job of setting the stage for how things came to be by Ender’s time, including how the Battle School came into existence. I’m still waiting for the final book of the 2nd Formec War.