Scifi Question: Is Governing An Interstellar Empire From The Past Feasible?
Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2024 8:54 pm
I wanna say yes... since every government known is based on laws made in the past that still govern us today. It's not the dead people governing so much as their laws and aspirations are.
I was pondering on how to create scifi space opera without violating the lightspeed limit and came up with the following below.
Here is a scifi scenario:
Transpace Warp drive: Translates space past starship at the max speed of light speed.
Timeporter: All starships carry them onboard. Seems like a teleporter pad but actually transports you forward through time instantly on the same spot on the teleporter pad. That is how crew can travel years at lightspeed without aging. You can also travel back in time, but not further back than the date of timeporter's activation.
A fun trick is that it helps the ship avoid fatal collisions by foretelling the future, since if you cannot timeport to a future date it means the ship must have been destroyed by colliding with something huge while warping at lightspeed or in some other way. So you adjust ship's heading until you can make successful timeports with random items, and then send crew after.
Empire Control: Using timeporters aboard starships is how they keep control over a vast interstellar empire.
Of course, the past governs the future, and it is not everyday that a starship bothers to travel home to see the future. Especially because they wish to live in their own timeline... usually.
Main Questions:
1. How feasible is running an interstellar empire like this?
2. What would be the main challenges to doing so?
3. What common sense laws on time travel would exist, provided basic human morality/immorality is still in play?
I would expect crew families back on the home planet to get fast response on how things are going 50 or more LY out, since timeporting future crew back in time to when the starship was still docked on the planet or in low orbit of it is all future crew have to do.
Basically you will know in minutes if the mission a starship was sent on was succesful or not.
I was pondering on how to create scifi space opera without violating the lightspeed limit and came up with the following below.
Here is a scifi scenario:
Transpace Warp drive: Translates space past starship at the max speed of light speed.
Timeporter: All starships carry them onboard. Seems like a teleporter pad but actually transports you forward through time instantly on the same spot on the teleporter pad. That is how crew can travel years at lightspeed without aging. You can also travel back in time, but not further back than the date of timeporter's activation.
A fun trick is that it helps the ship avoid fatal collisions by foretelling the future, since if you cannot timeport to a future date it means the ship must have been destroyed by colliding with something huge while warping at lightspeed or in some other way. So you adjust ship's heading until you can make successful timeports with random items, and then send crew after.
Empire Control: Using timeporters aboard starships is how they keep control over a vast interstellar empire.
Of course, the past governs the future, and it is not everyday that a starship bothers to travel home to see the future. Especially because they wish to live in their own timeline... usually.
Main Questions:
1. How feasible is running an interstellar empire like this?
2. What would be the main challenges to doing so?
3. What common sense laws on time travel would exist, provided basic human morality/immorality is still in play?
I would expect crew families back on the home planet to get fast response on how things are going 50 or more LY out, since timeporting future crew back in time to when the starship was still docked on the planet or in low orbit of it is all future crew have to do.
Basically you will know in minutes if the mission a starship was sent on was succesful or not.