After Doomsday
The Long Way Home
Earth has been sterilized.
Six thousand years have elapsed.
Thus, in neither case is the crew able to return "home," to the Earth that they had left.
Several works of sf address two questions: not only what will interstellar explorers find out there but also what will have happened on Earth and in the Solar System in their absence? See also A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven. Not only natural events but also large scale technology can play a role, e.g., Earth moved into orbit around Jupiter.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I like THE LONG WAY HOME, it's one of my favorites among Anderson's earlier novels, even if he was later not quite satisfied with it.
Ad astra! Sean
I would like there to be more SF with some sort of light-speed drive. It's the fastest travel that doesn't get into time travel paradoxes.
It creates a situation where interstellar settlement is relatively easy, but no interstellar organization can be more than the loosest of confederations. It seems like a very interesting situation with lots of cultural divergence.
Of course, in THE LONG WAY HOME they -thought- it was a FTL drive...
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: I'm skeptical that any kind of STL interstellar space traveling would make even the loosest kinds of federations workable. Not if it took years or decades to travel between stars. That, to me, makes me think the largest practical political entity possible would be single solar systems.
Mr. Stirling: Langley and his companions could have avoided stranding themselves in the distant future if they had first taken their still experimental "FTL" ship halfway to Barnard's Star or Alpha Centauri and then back to Earth in a test journey. They would have lost only a few years away from friends and families--and discovered they did not have a true FTL drive.
Ad astra! Sean
The sort of 'loosest of federations' I'm thinking of, is some sort of rules for interstellar trade. If the government of one solar system (or part of a solar system) starts violating long established rules they don't get traders bringing anything they might want from other systems.
It's hard to see any point to having interstellar rules for anything else.
Kaor, Jim!
That I can see and agree with, esp. if we think of such arrangements as not federations but as treaties between independent states arranging how they would handle matters of trade and finance.
Ad astra! Sean
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