People aren’t always smart, but they’re often clever in their perversity. History demonstrates that pretty effectively, and the news demonstrates that it doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon.
Would this affect the speed of the ship? I imagine it's travelling under inertia so it wouldnt.... but if there's propulsion and it gets progressively lighter.... then whoops?
@@itisALWAYSR.A. I mean, the sacrifice itself would provide a small measure of propulsion. But I assume the computer was designed to handle course corrections, and this should have a very minor effect either way.
"Central command to colony, do you copy? We are sending a second colony ship your way. It'll take way shorter as technology has improved, but we need for you to tell us the coordinates" "Oh, its easy, just follow the trail of child corpses" "...the *what* "
I'm sorry to say it would more go *arrive at planet * *get out of space ship, take ship down * *some time later * "mommy why are there the freeze dried bodies of children floating in orbit?" "because the colony ship was moving at a constant velocity and our ancestors were stupid to waste resources on human sacrifices."
This is fascinating. I like how the people on the ship anthropomorphize everything they need to survive and how they believe that they need to take care of their gods.
@@________-by2px most civilizations believed that nature itself was a deity, like the japanese, 90% of everything in feudal japan could be explained as a spirit, and when the mongols invaded japan *they got atacked by a tornado nearly every time they tried* if you were a "primitive" japanese, you would probably say nature protect "us" because whe protect/respect nature
i'm thinking about the inevitable occasions where a sacrificial child is miscarried or dies before before the age of 5. what would the people of the ship think of this? the anger of the gods of the ship? a bad omen? a sign that the parents who carried this sacrificial child are disliked by the gods? certainly it would be a terrifying situation for the people... to have a "year" cut short like that, or to have to go through two periods of Inbetween Time in a row.
I don't think the final sacrifice would see the ship blink away into the distance. While it is true that the ship itself will likely be accelerating that close to the end of the journey, it will actually be \*decelerating*, to an approach velocity which is much lower than the traversal velocity it was holding for the majority of the journey. Additionally, with known technology, the deceleration would likely be tiny, less than a single gravity. So, the girl, the ship would appear to be *slowly* falling behind her, as she continued to speed away at whatever velocity it was going at when she was released. She might not even be out of sight of the hatch door by the time she passes out.
Sodalite Sabre i dont think she’ll see anything at all, as she’ll simply explode from the oxygen rupturing her lungs and ribcage from the difference in pressure
Human body should be sturdy enough to hold a lung full of air. The muscle holding the windpipe shut is the weak spot in the system, so the gas leaves the lung via the normal route.
Imagine all the kids sacrificed during the journey arriving at the destination shortly before the ship itself, with incredible kinetic energy, and raining down on the planet like a stream of nukes. (Yeah, I know in reality planets are small so they all would most likely miss and just continue on their way out the galaxy.)
It would be interesting to explore the in-between time! Presumably, the first generations on the ship didn't have this form of worship, and it evolved naturally over many generations. What residual beliefs carried over from the religions or philosophies the first colonists held? How would they understand the terraforming they're supposed to do when they get to their destination? Would they be halfway between worlds, using advanced technology to make the world inhabitable for them, but then returning to a pre-industrial way of life because they've forgotten the information necessary to do anything else? For that matter, given that human sacrifice is not particularly common in Earth's industrialized societies, did these people lose access to their libraries somehow? Do they actually understand what they're doing with genetic testing, etc, or are they performing things by rote, as in part of Asimov's Foundation stories?
Wow, so many of these can be answered or helped to be be answered by 2:36 to 20:36 of *Isaac Arthur* | _A Million Year Ark_ ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-25ODAzr6Bbw.html. He discusses how culture may evolve in relation to life on generation ships. Use the video subtitles.
@@kzeriar25 I only know of it because it's linked on the right side of Reddit's WorldBuilding form. Here's an invite link. discord.gg/worldbuilding encase your interested.
This sci-fi world building is a nice change from the usual fantasy-type world building. All too many sci-fi world builders do not consider religion and instead go along the “ scientific atheist “ type society an completely ignore the religious side of things. Good Job Ewa 👍
These videos are like a guided meditation to me. The worldbuilding is always fascinating, and it always has such a fantastic, sipirtual feel to it, and the art and tone of voice are so soothing. It lets me day dream while still being focused on something, and it's such a free and unique feeling, I don't think I realize just how cathartic these are to me. But then a little girl was murdered by space and I
Those more philosophically-minded on the ship (especially as the voyage reaches its latter days) might put forward the idea that even though the ship's journey has come to an end, the god itself will still have relevance in their post-landfall existance - after all, terraforming an entire planet would require lots of machines pumping out the requisite chemicals over a wider area than just the environs of the colony itself. Maybe the God of the Journey could be invoked when expeditions leave to set up the terraforming devices, and the God of Arrival praised when those expeditions return home. Perhaps a romantic relationship between Journey and Arrival could arise, with Journey's wanderlust pushing them to leave, and Arrival patiently waiting their paramour's return.
This idea is both amazing and extremely melancholic. Everybody is happy having pleased their god and pleased the child but then killing the child by pushing it out of the airlock? And then immediately destroying all the child's toys? This makes me sad beyond measure.
5:58 A person tossed out of a ship would still be moving with the ship. Unless the ships engines are accelerating the ship it would appear still to the child, her only movement relative to the ship being from the shove that pushed her out the airlock. She would see the ship slowly drift away, hanging still in the sky, the only indication of their vast speed being the imperceptibly slow shifting of the stars.
From what I understand of generation ships, one accelerates for one half of the journey, and then spends the second half decelerating. There aren't any stop-overs until the destination is reached. But maybe I'm missing something?
@@WorldbuildingNotes If it's the last child it'll actually fly in front lf the ship towards the destination because the child will be moving the same speed and the ship will be slowing down
@@WorldbuildingNotes That can be true, but usually the acceleration is very slow, a tiny fraction of a gee. Such a ship is just so massive it isn't feasible to push it around so nimbly. It would be like watching a great ocean liner pulling out of port, gaining speed yes, but very slowly. The gee force needed to push a ship out of sight in a blink of an eye is also more than just nimble, that's enough to crush people. The change in speed needed to go from "stationary relative to the kid" to "so fast they are already out of sight" is a lot. That would be like a ship pulling out of port and then being beyond the horizon in an eye blink. Not even a fighter jet can accelerate that quickly.
@@WorldbuildingNotes Yeah that can be a funny thing to think about. I just remember what its like when you are flying in an airplane. Even if the plane is flying at 700 miles per hour you don't have to worry about dropping your drink and having it go flying at lighting speed to the back of the craft. You can walk and jump about inside the plane like you were on still ground. Both you and the plane are moving at the same speed so to you it seems like the plane is still. Now if you tried walking out of the plane you would get blown back by the wind, but in space there is no wind to slow you down so you carry on moving with the plane just like you did when inside it. When astronauts step out of the International Space Station they don't have to worry about being thrown backwards at thousands of miles per hour, because although they are orbiting the Earth with great speed, there is no air or anything else slowing them down so they continue to move with the station, and so to them the station looks like it is still.
This one gave me chills because the tale is told so well. ---- I have 1 sci-fi ship that roams space until it finds planets and abducts random species in order to drain their blood into it's vast ocean. Once full it's able to use fathoms of blood so it can travel at FTL speeds. Every now and than some of those animals wind up in a section of the ship that has oxygen and water and stuff. Where there's a tribe of humans living there, Who have no idea that their world is a space ship. All they know is random animals will show up from time to time. Occasionally when these animals poop the seeds in the poo will bring new plants to their world. Side note: The ship is controlled by an Artificial Intelligence who's main goal is to "eat and travel."
What if they start running out of sufficient nutrients to produce both a sacrificial child and keep their genomes sufficiently diverse? What if they decide to sacrifice the only children of a certain bloodline, which would appear to solve both problems at once but would doom their population once they arrive at their destination? What if they decide to sacrifice the god of the journey instead, appeasing the god of the genome instead and giving up on ever arriving?
The next colony ship arrived, launched 10 years after the first one, and the first question the new colonist have for their comrad is: What the hell was this trail of dead children ? Nonetheless, great video !
This had a bit of everything. It was at once believable, whimsical, and disturbing. This may be one of the best settings you've ever come up with and now I want to read a story set in it.
Your idea has given me flashbacks of Space Colonization ideas in the 50's onward, where the ship is the home besides the future planet. But MY GOD those ideas about space deities ensuring their safe journey and well-being, and sacrificial children??? A Cosmic Horror Fantasy that actually makes me nervous!
You could also do a Snow White and Huntsman bit. E.g. the person who was supposed to take the child into the airlock instead does some slight of hand and hides the living child somewhere on the ship. Somebody notices that the ship's ecology is slightly off from what it should be because of the extra person, just in time for the next sacrifice...
I like to imagine if there was a generational ship like the one you describe, the first generation of colonists would follow conventional religions of our own world. However, as they mingle with the rest of the passengers and they pass what they know about their respective religions to their descendants, parts of their religion get forgotten and those holes are filled with parts of a different religion. This happens until you end up with a generation of colonists who have their own religion based off of ones from earth, but also incorporate parts of life of the generational ship. They could have a mis-mash of holidays followed by multiple religions on earth, like Yom Kippur or Christmas. Though the names are probably half-forgotten by time and those gaps are filled in with their imagination. Same goes for the purpose of those holidays. I would imagine it would be a polytheistic religion, that worships gods like Jesus and Vishnu, though like I said above, they probably forgot those names, like in a game of telephone, so they get changed up with time. But that’s just how I imagine things would be.
Ok, this is probably my favourite work of yours I've ever had the blessing of witnessing. Everything fits in perfectly! Now, I wonder what would happen if a sacrifice child decides to break their dreaded fate... This could be a really good story!
Damn I really want a book of that last child not wanting to be sacrificed. Such nice and dark world building. I could not explain to you the visceral feeling I had when you mentioned dropping the child out of the hatch- yikes!
I just wanted to say that I love your videos and that they literally make my day every time. I wish there where more things out there like your channel because I think it’s just SO interesting.
This video is a wonderful argument for the steady development of orbital habitats so we can gain experience in creating closed ecosystems. Of course, the ironic thing about generation ships is that once you can build a closed habitat with the capability of voyages of effectively unlimited duration, you've eliminated the need for another planet because you've just built your own. Now THAT would be an interesting premise for a SF story: residents of a generation ship discover that the voyage was a lie and they never left the solar system... Anyway, wonderfully whimsical video!
Woo, a sci-fi world! Oh well then, that's pretty grim, but not much different from what some Earth cultures did. A very interesting take on the Generation ship =). Although I personally would reckon that, if they're descendants from Earth specifically, that this religion would likely be one that morphed out of an existing religion, or several, with a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of superstition added in, which eventually forms fully fledged beliefs. Also, you mentioned that the generation ship would arrive, and there would likely be nobody there for a REALLY long time... But imagine that the people on Earth invented a form of significant FTL, and had actually already arrived on the planet many hundreds, or even thousands of years earlier, and were in regular contact with the homeworld... The arrival of such a culturally distinct people, with such a, brutal tradition would potentially cause a whole heap of problems! (Not to mention that the language could shift in that time, both of the homeworld people, and of the generation ship people. Oooh, lots to think about =D.
More than a little interesting, more than a little creepy. I'm glad my starships (mostly) use induced hibernation (4 degrees Centigrade) to reduce consumption, and and anti-matter engine to get up to 20% of light speed...
I think they should've had a peek at SFIA with Isaac Arthur before building a ship like that, maybe throw in a few self-replicating repair devices to manage some of the mayhem, and perhaps a fleet of ships would be a better idea.
THIS. I want a TV show in this world, following the ship on it's final years before arrival. The first scene could show the second-to-last child leaving the airlock, as seen from the person walking him there. Maybe the main conflict of the first season could be on whether to do the last sacrifice, that is scheduled only about 2 months before arrival, and later seasons could be about their arrival and the changes in the society because of that. Netflix get on this!
I watched a video about this saaame thing some days ago, and I can combine his technical knowledge with you're imaginative expertise and I h a v e m y i d e a !
*Isaac Arthur* | _A Million Year Ark_ From 2:36 to 20:36 he talks about Generation Ships and the ways civilisations may evolve cultures around the maintenance of their ships: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-25ODAzr6Bbw.html
Well, 40k did a variation of that. Not for the journey but the ship's long service (even warp-capable Warship) and technologically-stagnant nature, the latter played a role in God of Engineering--or the Machine Spirit--based on Techpriests' praying and performing rituals to appease it rather than logic (heavily hint that either it was due to instructions being mystified, assuming friendly AI as "Machine Spirit", or an actual machine spirit made from Mars' god). Thanks to said's priests' organization monopolizing technology as a whole, many ships resorted to manual labor (even using ropes to drag giant shells, using coal/corpses to "stoke" plasma cannons), which meant that the mixed-gender crews would build cities to sustain the population (also Cannibal tribes from isolated decks that caused the ship Captains to nerve gas all compartments every century they made port). Unlike the video, they do have access to new crews, or rather press-ganged denizens of city-planets.
@@1224chrisng Im pretty sure the people in the spaceship would be taught the basic physics of vacuums and how horrifyingly painful dying in the vacuum of space would be. And maybe they'd not want to put a child through that trauma
If you pushed someone out of the airlock of a spaceship, they wouldn't pull behind the ship because there's no drag in space. They'd just sort of float alongside it, right?
The ship would *NOT* "disappear in the distance in the blink of an eye"! Instead, the ship would only drift or fall away from the murdered girl very slowly. In fact, towards the end of the journey, the ship would need to be *slowing down* , so she would actually fall *forward* from the ship by default (ie, if she was pushed out sideways, perpendicular to the direction of travel). Think about it: the murdered girl was moving the same speed as the ship when she was thrown out, and there's no reason she would slow down (no air drag or whatever in space). There are only two reasons she would lose speed relative to the ship: (1) if the person murdering her threw her back *opposite* the direction the ship was moving (and a human can't throw another human that fast, and she won't keep accelerating after the throw) (2) if the ship was accelerating forward -- and it's *ridiculous* to imagine the ship could accelerate fast enough for it to "disappear in the blink of an eye". like, neverminding the amount of force it would take to accelerate it that fast, just think about how the people of the murder-civilization in the *ship* would experience it: from their point of view, if the ship was accelerating forward, then they'd be feeling a force from the ship pressing them forward. -- in other words, it would feel to them like gravity was pulling them down towards the back of the ship, like the back of the ship was the ground. Make sense? And the faster the ship is accelerating, the stronger the "gravity" they feel pulling down towards the back of the ship. For that gravity to not be *stronger* than Earth gravity, the ship must not be accelerating faster than 9.8 meters per second each second. (This is what they call "one G of acceleration".) That is, "one G" is the same rate you accelerate when you fall on Earth, and if you imagine the ship lying on the ground on Earth, and that you were falling towards it from a great height (like, jumping out of a plane or whatever), would you expect to reach the ship "in the blink of an eye"? No, not even close to that fast, right? And yeah, towards the *end* of the journey, the ship would need to be *decelerating* anyway, meaning that the murderer would feel gravity as pulling down towards the *front* of the ship. *That* would means that if the murderer threw the girl straight backwards from the ship, from their point of view, it would be like they were throwing the girl straight *upwards* -- and can you imagine throwing a five year old child straight up? So the murderer would have to throw the girl out *sideways* , and again, from their point of view, this would feel like *dropping* her off the side of a building, with the girl falling *down* past the front of the ship and towards the destination. Anyway, I hope all that helped you to get a better intuitive feel for the physics of this kind of situation. Other than that, all the worldbuilding in your vid here felt reasonably plausible, which just made me feel depressed about how terrible humans are ...well, even more so than I usually feel, I mean. At least "feels reasonably plausible" is not the same thing as "definitely among the most likely possibilities in the situation as given", but... yeah :/
Would the sacrifices, as they're only 5-year-old children, be lightweight enough to be able to orbit or gravitationally cling to the generation ship? I mean, a ship capable of carrying enough humans to shoot through several lightyears of space has to have enough mass that a tiny mass that a measly 200lb/90kg at most would have to be light enough to not achieve escape velocity from a simple push. Or maybe gravity is a lot weaker than I thought.
No, it wouldn't cling unless the ship has at least the mass of a dwarf planet. If it was that massive, If the child is ejected at an acceleration not close to the ship's, the ship would quickly outpace the child, as their gravity is way too small to keep up.
This practice is potentially dangerous. If enough sacrifices are made to the God of the Journey, a signifficant amount of resources will be removed from the closed system of the ship.
All this talk of gods and whatnot makes me think of Warhammer 40K. The god of engineering is obviously a machine spirit, and the god of the journey is just Tzeentch being a dick. His sweet promises of guiding you through the warp for the exchange of child-sacrifices is just him fucking with you. He knows he doesn't need them, and he'll never let you exit the warp either. This could all have been avoided if you weren't too cheap to get a psycher and a gellar field generator!
...do people not realize that you can be pushed away from the ship in a perpendicular as well as parallel fashion? You would still absolutely see the ship going away into the distance even if you both had the same forward velocity.
What if the sacrificed women are given a certain drug to not-suffer when they leave the ship? Some sort of ceremonial psychedelic to provide them a divine experience. I'll stop smoking, I swear.
This level of religion in such an advanced setting seems pretty out of place. Like, there reaches a certain point where science has been instituted, and the more people get from the pursuit of objective knowledge, the less they tolerate making something up like this. At best, there would be a continuation of an existing religion, which may change minimally to accommodate their new situation, but at this level of development, a completely new and documentedly arbitrary belief system just doesnt make sense. All that aside, this is still incredibly rich and compelling, and I thank you for sharing it. Your imagination is something special.
From 2:36 to 20:36 of *Isaac Arthur* | _A Million Year Ark_ ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-25ODAzr6Bbw.html, he discusses how cultural practices would evolve in relation to living on a generation ship. This is a very scientific video.
The flip side is that science is about investigation and change. In a setting where change and prodding stuff to see what happens is very very dangerous and could easily kill everyone, science isn't a great ideology. Which is not to say that they would or would want to forget all the facts that science has produced, just that they might not use the scientific method or scientific ideology. In fact you'd want an ideology which holds the status quo in high regard and emphasises duties to the ship/journey as the most important thing. A religion that worships aspects of the ships systems seems like a decent fit for that. One can even imagine that the designers of the ships social system would design a system much like this. The first generation wouldn't believe in Ship-ism much but they'd teach their children and over the generations it would be a real religion. I'm not sure that the original designers of the social system would do the human sacrifice thing, but religions do change over time.
Why a sacrifice? It's an interesting concept, but I kept wondering how this space-civilization jumped toward giving up a child's life, rather than the much more earth-normal things such as 'sacrificing' their time in the form of devotion. Or what kind of impact giving up that level of resources every 5-6 years would have on the balance of their ecology? Interesting anyway
For my own kinds of worlds I could see my travelers doing daring, and potentially dangerous, space-walks to wrangle asteroids for resources. A journey within a journey
