(ii) Poul Anderson's "The Troublemakers" (1953): psychotechnic social engineering counteracts mutiny in a generation ship. (An Asimovian idea applied to a Heinleinian idea.)
(iii) An idea that I had had by 1970: someone might time travel within a generation ship. (A Wellsian idea applied to a Heinleinian idea.)
(iv) Anderson's There Will Be Time (1973):
"'A ship can go slower than light if people like us are the crew. You follow me? Her voyage might last centuries. But to us, moving uptime while she moves across space, it's hours or minutes.'" (XVI, p. 174)
Time travelers would also be able to return and report the outcome of an interstellar expedition before its departure.
My idea was "The Haunted Spaceship": the crew see apparitions before they learn that later generations are time traveling.
Havig thinks that, in the distant future on Earth or on an extra-solar planet, the mathematical FTL-time travel equivalence might lead to real FTL. It would be good to read a novel set in that remote future.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I do have one objection to your point (iv): in THERE WILL BE TIME, the mutant time travelers were unable to have children, except with each other, and these children did not inherit the ability to time travel. Which means, in STL generation ships, the children of time travelers and their descendants would have to live for decades or generations in them. I can easily see anger and frustration building up as normal crew members/passengers watched Grandpa time hopping back and forth while THEY continued to be stuck in that ship!
I don't think Jack Havig thought thru carefully enough the possibilities, good AND bad alike, of his idea.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But Havig suggests only time travelers as crew. The ship would run automatically most of the time.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But would there be ENOUGH of those quite few time traveling mutants to crew a STL generation ship? And would they ALL be qualified to be ambassadors or explorers? And would they all refrain from having children? No, I still think it's likely non-time traveling children would be born on such a ship. So, I argue the caveats I raised in my first comment would apply.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Children would be born after arrival. You have to imagine the time travelers as spending only minutes or at most hours of their own time in the ship to check that its systems were working properly or to make scientific observations.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't know, and obviously I can't know, either way. But it seems to make sense that some crew should be permanently posted on such a thing. Something MIGHT happen to go wrong when none of the mutant time travelers happened to show up. Men on the spot could respond right away to unexpected problems/dangers.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
A lot of machinery can be left to run automatically with occasional supervision like the weather stations on Vixen. There are automatic space probes. Suppose the time travelers travel while standing in front of a screen that will flash red at the first hint of danger or malfunction.
Paul.
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