The general consensus is NO FTL. This also means NO FTL communications

• Faster than light travel is too non-scientific at this time. Also is is unimportant to the story. If FTL is near instanteous then the whole story premis falls apart. If it is simply faster than light but only by a few tens of times it simply moves the location of the colony planet farther out in the galaxy. Also no FTL communications. The use of FTL communications has been requested to be reviewed. There is some physics that may allow it. --DaveK - 04 Aug 2004

• This is still my biggest concern with the idea. Probes or telescopes, the data needed to push evolution into a certain direction maynot be accurate because it will be old. When we look out into the universe now, we don't see what the universe looks like now. We have a very skewed image of what things really look like. If we launch our ship based on telescopic evidence of a star and its planet, and try to slowly introduce environment changes to spark evolution toward being able to live on that world, we are sure to run into the fact that here now does not equate with here then. The same is true with probes. Any signal from the probes will take time to reach the ship, and it will take time for the probes to reach their destination. I offer this compromise: Use probes that are connected to the ship through quantum entanglememt. We would have to fudge the science abit to allow entanglement to pass information. However, regadless of how long the probes took, once in place, all data recieved would be real time. Said probes could be nothing more than fist sized packets of sophisticated instruments and light enough to be able to be accelerated to near light speeds and able to cross distances in shorter times. See Dave's excellent numbers on relativity and near light travel. We can also make use of telescopes, et. along the way. -- EmptyKube - 27 Jul 2004

• One of our first decisions was no FTL travel or communications. We can revisit that decision but I would rather not. I think we canwork around that easy enough. If the destination is 200 LYs away the colony ship could take tens of thousands of years, but a probe, which does not have to slow down can travel much faster and the data would not be too old. Plus a lot of data could have been gathered from earth before the probe is launched. My problem with a ten thousand year trip to a star 200 LYs away is that in a few hundred years another earth ship would easily pass the first. That is not a problem to the story. Earth could be facing an event that could doom earth, sort of a "When Worlds Collide" senario. They launch the ship, earth suffers a disaster, and then it dies or recovers. If it recovers they send out ships to find the colony ship. We just have to decide!! -- DaveK - 27 Jul 2004

• I Think you are right. We need to decide. The no FTL I understand. FTL-like communication I don't. Perhaps I'm just stuborn. I have this story idea regarding launch. Somewhere in the Solar System humans discover an alien probe. The probe is ancient, but quantumly entangled to other probes. Investigation of how the probes works leads to cataloging potential colony wolrds since there are similar probes strewn through out the galaxy. No one knows who built the probes, but everyone wants to make use of them. They are coined "Watchers" since their only purpose seems to be to transmit data about where they are. The probe humans find inspires space enthusiasts, but also inspires some folks to believe they are the tools of angels or God, others that they are the tools of demons. Controversy rages, but ultimately some organization finances and launches a mission to one of the "promising" worlds catalogued. They do so with as low tech a vessle as possible for a very long trip. Later, as technology on Earth advances other ships are launched. The various "generations" will cross paths, not always with good tidings. I haven't fleshed everything out yet, but the core of this variation to our project is the probes. Humans themselves will not have FTL-like communications, but the alien technology will. I think I could justify this because we don't know a way to get information to be passed through entanglement. Maybe the alien technology is too alien for humans to decipher. Also, war could break out over the probes, with various factions fighting to gain exclusive access to the technology. Even if they never figure out how to work the FTL communications, just studying the engineering involved could accelerate the technology of whoever has access. As I said, I haven't fleshed everything out yet, and am trying to work up an outline (something I'm terrible at) and several stories that show these events. Ultimately, by the way, I envision the probes as having been built by an advanced branch of the Human species and sent back in time as a way of gaining knowledge about where they came from.-- EmptyKube - 28 Jul 2004

• Unfortunately, I hadn't done much reading about quantum entanglement when we first made the decision regarding FTL communications. Since then, I have. Theoretically, at least, if you can get entanglement to persist over long distances/time, then I don't believe translating that technology to communications is far removed. Given the current direction of research and the latest discoveries, I am changing my vote, sort of, to supporting some form of FTL communications (but not travel). On the other hand, I do believe that natural evolution requires a high degree of isolation and I am bothered by what effects FTL communication would have on that. Hmmm, maybe another line of stories? -- AnnelieseFox - 30 Jul 2004