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Grrl Power #1370 - Definitely no but maybe
🕑 Added 2025-07-03 10:00:09 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!
"But..." You have a spaceship and we want to continue to have access to a spaceship, so...
That's the real subtext of whatever Faulk is going to say on the next page. "Please let us continue to use your stuff which would take Earth 200 years* of concerted effort otherwise. Also your incredible medical technology and space pornography." Like I said, subtext.
It's still a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Throwing Sydney into the mix does offer a solution to the biggest problem, but still adds to the list of bad things that can go badly if something bad happens.
The first time Sydney found herself out amongst the general galactic population, nobody knew her orbs were significant. On a station where you can buy holographic wings, floating glowy things hardly stand out. But now it's known that her orbs are known about. Sure, people claim to find Nth tech all the time, but the payoff if it's real is enough for alien governments and other organizations to take interest in rumors and potential scams.
* Predicting what technology will look like in the future is something that most people are really bad at. I hate it when movies show some futuristic cityscape with flying cars and the info-text pops up and says "In the amazing year 2019!" Seriously, Blade Runner with humanoid... bioroids (?) and flying cars and pyramidal buildings 16 square blocks at the base, takes place in 2019. I mean, the movie was made in 1982, but that's still only 37 years to transform entire city skylines, invent flying cars, and oh, Roy said something about seeing "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion..." If he was being literal, then the stars that form the constellation Orion's shoulders are Bellatrix, which is 250 light years away, or Betelgeuse, which is... uh... hard to measure for reasons, and is between 400 and 550 light years away. Which means within 37 years of the movie coming out, when the pinnacle of home computing power was the Commodore 64 or the Apple IIe, (both of which had CPUs that ran at 1.023 MHz, BTW) the writers thought we'd invent some pretty fucking impressive warp travel.
Unless they wanted someone who was alive when the movie came out to appear as an older person in the movie, like some expository news cast saying "Bill Gates turned 73 today..." or something like that, there is NO REASON not to say that movie takes place in 2119. No one seeing that movie in the theater would be alive in 2119 to complain about it like I am now.
My point here is, could Earth make a warp capable spaceship in 200 years? Who the hell knows? Obviously it depends on if warp travel is even possible and what is required to achieve it. If you need to set up an orbital facility in low orbit of a neutron star in order to produce FTL-onium, then it might take us 4,000 years to make the first one, because it'll take a long ass time to build that first factory. (Apparently the closest neutron star is 400 light years away, so it would actually probably take closer to 40,000 years to get there with conventional propulsion.) On the other hand, if you just need a shitload of energy to throw at the problem and that lets you Alcubierre the problem, then... maybe? Honestly, the rest of the ship isn't so challenging. Once you have enough energy to not have to worry about barely being able to lift your own fuel into space with you, then you could make something that looked like a cool space ship covered in armor instead of all of our space stuff now, which looks like tinker toys covered in foil and quilted blankets.
So in the Grrl-verse, with Earth's supers, yeah, you could probably build everything but the warp drive on Earth and have someone like Maxima carry it into space. Or have her carry a bunch of shit into space to be assembled as a factory, which would put together components or whatever. The superpowers will give Earth a massive timetable advantage when it comes to spacetravel. Getting warp engines will probably still be expensive though.
Comments
Hugh Eckert
True that. One big example is in The Mote In God's Eye, where one of the SF "this is the future" markers was that everyone has personal computers that are essentially smartphones. About the only fantastic element in them was that they had a handwriting interface that actually worked and that people were willing to use. ;-)
Eric Loken
"There is however a big 'but' here. A huge, Roseanne Barr sized 'but'." Me to my manager about 20 years back when explaining whether we could do something. It was possible, BUT... The other thing that I always find interesting is not just what they predict will happen, and get wrong, but what they *don't* predict, and it happens. For example back in the days of Asimov and Heinlein, they never saw the microchip coming, it was a total surprise to them, so their far future computers were still huge. Additionally, the smart phone, no one saw that coming, so you had near future cyberpunk stories with cyberdecks and cybernetics... and people still used pay phones, or had plain old cell phones.
Scott Brown
It's like how fusion power has been '20 years away' for a good long while now...We keep running into roadblocks we didn't even know *could* exist, until we got to them.
