' Wrote:I doubt they would have built sleeper ships if it were just a 5 year trip. Also I suck at physics, but the relativity implications make it safe to say that hundreds, perhaps thousands of years have passed to the observers (i.e Earth) since the colonists left.
You're not going out to explore - you're building big lifeboats. That's the point you missed. You physically can't carrry enough supplies to keep that number of people awake, breathing, and fed for 5 full years. So you cram as many people into as small of a space as you can, shove as much bulk supplies in as you can, stick a skin around it and call it a ship.
And the effects of time dilation may or may not actually matter. It appears that our ships weren't using conventional drives. They either had some kind of FTL drive, or they were using warp gates or something else. If they were limited to strictly lightspeed, then at best it would take 700 years to travel 700 light years. Since we have in Sirius jump holes and jump gates and a working FTL communication device,
I guessing that they started with something that required a huge amount of energy (say, the kind you'd get with a power plant in a ship that you couldn't build unless you were really hurting, because it uses too much unobtanium otherwise) and probably managed to get up to warp 4. Since warp 4 is 16xC, that puts it at 43.75 years to go 700ly. Call it an even 50 years by the time you get up to speed and get back down - with subjective time still around 5 years.
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
