this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
190 points (99.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43853 readers
1699 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That might not even happen, though. Space isn't like an ocean where you can move around arbitrarily; craft mostly follow ballistic trajectories. As it is, it's actually more like artillery with human cargo than like aviation, let alone a boat that can go anywhere anytime.
The exceptions are craft with slow-burn engines like ion drives, which allow enough delta-V for a craft to hit more than one destination. Those still need energy, though, so they need to be near something like the sun to operate indefinitely. Over interstellar distances, a 20-year boost at millinewtons is still relatively short, and we're back to ballistic trajectories. On such a mission, if the crew is human and awake it would be more a matter of keeping everything operating as intended than deciding anything. I expect any culture that develops would be more about the off-time.
Speaking of boosts, burns and delta-V, you can see a bit of space's own culture growing already. My best guess is that the structure of a future interstellar mission would be a bit familiar to today's ISS astronauts.
Sci-fi spaceships often have the ability to dump solar-system levels of energy into propulsion, so they really only follow orbital mechanics when they're parked at a planet. Consider if you could get from Earth to Mars in a few seconds, you'd pretty much just point yourself at it and go.
Yeah, we were segueing into hard sci-fi and the real future here, so I'd thought I'd bring that up. OP was about this tendency in general.
In soft sci-fi you can just handwave stuff, with the basic way frames of reference work being a frequent casualty (via FTL travel). If traveling by starship is like traveling by boat, it makes sense day-to-day life would be a bit boat-like, and so that's where many writers have gone.