Why does everyone jump on the FTL bandwagon?
You don't need FTL to get to Earth. You do need advanced ships that have the capacity to have life support systems for hibernation sleep and storage of your crew, food, weapons, and stuff. But you don't need FTL.
Why do we always jump to this conclusion about these movies?
Let's say the ship goes just below light speed and the aliens are a good distance away... that would mean you would have to have self-repairing ship technology that would keep the ship running for hundreds of years while the crew was in hibernation.
Not to mention the massive amounts of fuel that would be needed. And they couldn't depend on solar power because they're so far out between stars so it would have to be some sort of super advanced batteries (that hold hundreds of years of juice), nuclear power (with cores that last hundreds of years and enough water/coolant to keep them from going critical for that length of time), or some sort of super-concentrated fuel that has enough power for hundreds of years but's also small enough that the fuel tanks aren't the size of a moon.
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All good points...
But we're basing them on our human understanding on things. Maybe alien technology is just that different we wouldn't understand it.
If they're that different then we're getting into Lovecraft territory. If the Great Old Ones ever decide to visit Earth we're pretty much boned. It'd make for an awesome movie though.
That or the aliens could be space wizards with ships that run on magic.
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Why even bring Lovecraft into this?
Why?
Maybe what we perceive as magic is technology..... For a society that has such technology that when it is used is indistinguishable from magic.
I brought Lovecraft into it because "things beyond human understanding" is his wheelhouse. Any technology so strange that it's beyond human understanding would have to be made by beings beyond our understanding. Any beings of this type would be eldrich to humans by their very otherness. It would be a fun movie to watch because such beings would also be beyond our human understanding of "good" and "evil" and would appear chaotic. And we would appear the same way to them.
I mostly meant the "magic" reference to be something Harry Potter-ish (can you imagine if they used magic to explore space, how incredible their 'ships' would be?), but I suppose even the wizards in Harry Potter are 'using an innate physical ability to manipulate reality on a quantum level' or whatever.
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They wouldn't need a huge amount of fuel for just traveling in space, just powering the life support - everything else can power down. You would only need large amounts of fuel of some sort for take off, landing, and some for changing course. With *almost* no atmosphere in space objects maintain their speed without the need to maintain powered flight. That's why shuttles going to the moon have huge booster engines to escape the atmosphere that drop away and very little for the space travel portion.
shareyeah, try keeping straight a->b line for hundreds of years.
shareNot necessarily, but minor course adjustments wouldn't require a lot of fuel... and if most/all of the crew are in hibernation then you would plot your course before going to sleep and then yes... would just keep going in a straight line.
shareThis whole problem kind of assumes nothing bad will happen between launch and arriving at your target planet. You might run into something in space, like rocks or what not, and then you'd need that self repairing ship as someone mentioned. Or worse, maybe you cross paths with some other armed race of spacefarers.
Guess what! I've got a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COWBELL! -Bruce Dickinson-
Did you miss the part where the alien ship repaired itself after being hit by a *beep* nuclear missile?
shareA matter-antimatter reactor would be far more efficient than a nuclear one, so they wouldn't need vast stores of fuel. Also, what if they could somehow harvest dark energy? Isn't it everywhere, even in deep space? Or they could maybe find some way to generate energy from dark matter, as long as they're travelling within the galactic plane.
share