One Thousand Years
A joint effort between NASA and ESA just succeeded in discovering an earth-like planet deep in space and it would require a space vehicle traveling for about 1000 years to reach there.
Of all the nearby earth-like planets available, this is the most researched as having the highest probability of hosting life from earth in the most comfortable environment possible, with minimal challenges from local flora and fauna.
A nearer earth-like planet was discovered and a team sent there to observe the conditions earlier on, the team landed successfully after traveling for about 24 years to and fro. After proper observation, the team settled on the planet, and continued observation of nearby systems in their vicinity. It was from here that they could observe the planet that had already been seen faintly from the earth, much properly. They saw from their data that it had better conditions and they sent the corresponding data back to earth as promptly as they could.
But shortly after the triumph of the new discovery, they started getting sick from some unknown atmospheric substance. Sooner had they started falling, some of them started dying despite desperate attempts by their machines to restore their health
After most of the team had died or rushed back to their ship to continue sleep awaiting rescue, one brave couple out of a team of ten, the crew members were arranged in pairs decided to risk it out and place themselves under observation directly with external hostile conditions so they could observe much closely. This effort paid out, because they discovered the cause of the problem.
Due to the strong magnetic field of the planet, a relatively harmful atmospheric pathogen, similar to one found on earth was gaining new effects on their biology, which from the what they could see was not beneficial. With this discovery, the couple already weak from exhaustion of the infection, proceeded to their sleeping pod to freeze out themselves in cryogenic mode, in the hope that when they were rescued and placed in better conditions their immunity would do its work. Before they locked themselves in, they compiled their data and sent it back to earth.
In a show of courage very unlike human beings, the financiers of the former project, PROJECT HOPE, decided to fund an expedition to the further reaching planet, the 1000 year journey.
THE PROJECT
This new project was called PROJECT SLEEP, it was a full sleep mission. There was going to be no human awake for the entire duration of the journey. Since NASA had perfected hibernation technology, there was really no difficulty in the idea at all. It was as simple as putting the participants of the journey in a long deep sleep, till the journey was over. Robots would make sure that navigation and all the other necessities of maintaining the human bodies was in order. The only problem with the whole idea was this. Scientist have been experimenting with the idea of extended hibernation in humans with mixed results. They noticed that during simulated sleep for shorter periods of time from 1 to a 100 years, the humans could rest completely without waking. But the problem was when you start to cross the 150 year line, near the life expectancy of the average human being at the time, the human subject would become unstable and try to wake up. If allowed to wake up the human being would survive it but become blank without a single memory of anything. If forced to sleep despite the strong desire to wake up, the human subject would die. This was a serious limiting factor preventing longer space sleep.
Another option was waking the subjects every 100 years and putting them to sleep afterward. This was a successful method except for the fact that the metabolic needs of humans waking up on such a journey would require a much larger space ship and thus would increase the cost of the journey.
Fuel on such a journey was not a problem, because orbital course were plotted that would enable the spaceship hitch a free ride using the gravitational pull of planets and solar systems and even the center of the galaxy itself to ride on orbit. So propulsion would carry the ship to an orbit where it would travel for as long as is necessary until there is a need to jump orbits, then it would propel out in search for the next orbit on the course. They were also very careful not to choose orbits with two strong a pull that they could not jump out of with minimal use of resources.
The solution to the sleep problem came from a team of neuroscientists and virtual reality application developers. To cross the sleep barrier, the consciousness of the people had to be plugged into an immersive virtual reality experience directly at their medulla oblongata, this chip would interface with a bigger server on the space ship that would host the virtual world. In this virtual world, the human beings would be awake to an earthly life very similar to the one they left at home. In simulations, this method was able to increase the sleep time to about 10,000 years, which was the maximum limit for current hibernation technology.
The main space ship was too big to be built on earth because it was supposed to carry 1000 humans aboard. These humans would be selected from all the participating countries and a few non-participating countries with healthy human specimens to serve as sources of genetic variation. There were going to be 200 males and 800 females aboard, and an extra 1 million embryos to seed life in this distant world.
The giant space ship would be built by robots there in space with materials either shot up from earth by rockets and space elevators. While other materials would be 3D printed from liquified metal from asteroids.
With more than 2 trillion dollars in budget, the project proceeded swiftly, with earth based teams doing their own part of the work, loading rockets, designing chips and programming robots, the space robot team were working constantly and tirelessly putting the outer hull together and receiving supplies from the earth.
Well, this was not a totally humanitarian effort. There were real fears behind the project. As we all the know the rotation of the earth has been slowing down for a while in imperceptible patterns, but suddenly the slowing increased rapidly making the earth climate very strange from what human beings have being used to. With life expectancy going up, especially in the higher echelons of society, there was a need to do something about this whole slowing down phenomenon. Since we cannot go out there and stop the earth from slowing by pushing on it and also most of the solutions proffered by the smartest men of science were expensive or improbable in the nearest future, the only way forward was sending a bunch of humans out there.
A first plan was drafted to send a smaller group of highly trained men of science, but this was not feasible because of the long time involved. The richest of the earth planned that with such a large scale mission already successful with a second to be in development once the first leaves, they would get themselves tickets to follow the first ship from behind, since the risky orbital jumps had not been done before on very long trips, the success of the first team would guarantee their safety. But before they left the earth they would hang out just long enough awaiting the destruction of the earth. While in the meantime the fully fitted sleep-ships as they were called would hang out in orbit around earth just like the space stations.
Large numbers of young volunteers would be sent out on the first sleep-ships as a humanitarian effort for the rest of humanity. Well this is the cover story, the true intent of this rich people who are the secret backers of the project was to clear the road so they could follow.
EARTH 2.0
This is the name of the virtual reality project that housed the consciousness of the travelers while they slept. Very much like the earth itself and indistinguishable in many ways it would enable the travelers to live out their lives as if they never went on that spaceship in the first place.
The world was well edited and alternate history was created and fixed in the minds of the travelers. You could not know you were in that world, when you fell into it in your slumber, it would in no way be different from the world you left with memories as valid and without any sense of doubt about your reality. The full swing of the laws of nature were going to hold and if you got killed, your instance would be started afresh in another location with your memory wiped clean. The horror of your previous death would also be completely eliminated from your mind.
Everybody you knew before you died would simply forget about you the moment you died even if they watched you die in front of them. This fake earth was the best solution the scientist could come up with. As a safety precaution, deaths were prevented by all costs by constantly altering the program of your life in your memory so that actions that could lead to your demise are altered and you are redirected into alternate destinies.
One major idea that was altered in the life of the participants was that they could not grow old and die. In short the very idea of old age leading to death was not programmed into their minds in the first place, this was so that they could live constantly in this virtual world for thousands of years without knowing that it was a biological impossibility as current science of earth would have it. So they did not know death and were prevented from ever knowing it. And old age was wiped out of their minds so they saw themselves growing into adults and then paused there.
A nearer earth-like planet was discovered and a team sent there to observe the conditions earlier on, the team landed successfully after traveling for about 24 years to and fro. After proper observation, the team settled on the planet, and continued observation of nearby systems in their vicinity. It was from here that they could observe the planet that had already been seen faintly from the earth, much properly. They saw from their data that it had better conditions and they sent the corresponding data back to earth as promptly as they could.
But shortly after the triumph of the new discovery, they started getting sick from some unknown atmospheric substance. Sooner had they started falling, some of them started dying despite desperate attempts by their machines to restore their health
After most of the team had died or rushed back to their ship to continue sleep awaiting rescue, one brave couple out of a team of ten, the crew members were arranged in pairs decided to risk it out and place themselves under observation directly with external hostile conditions so they could observe much closely. This effort paid out, because they discovered the cause of the problem.
Due to the strong magnetic field of the planet, a relatively harmful atmospheric pathogen, similar to one found on earth was gaining new effects on their biology, which from the what they could see was not beneficial. With this discovery, the couple already weak from exhaustion of the infection, proceeded to their sleeping pod to freeze out themselves in cryogenic mode, in the hope that when they were rescued and placed in better conditions their immunity would do its work. Before they locked themselves in, they compiled their data and sent it back to earth.
In a show of courage very unlike human beings, the financiers of the former project, PROJECT HOPE, decided to fund an expedition to the further reaching planet, the 1000 year journey.
THE PROJECT
This new project was called PROJECT SLEEP, it was a full sleep mission. There was going to be no human awake for the entire duration of the journey. Since NASA had perfected hibernation technology, there was really no difficulty in the idea at all. It was as simple as putting the participants of the journey in a long deep sleep, till the journey was over. Robots would make sure that navigation and all the other necessities of maintaining the human bodies was in order. The only problem with the whole idea was this. Scientist have been experimenting with the idea of extended hibernation in humans with mixed results. They noticed that during simulated sleep for shorter periods of time from 1 to a 100 years, the humans could rest completely without waking. But the problem was when you start to cross the 150 year line, near the life expectancy of the average human being at the time, the human subject would become unstable and try to wake up. If allowed to wake up the human being would survive it but become blank without a single memory of anything. If forced to sleep despite the strong desire to wake up, the human subject would die. This was a serious limiting factor preventing longer space sleep.
Another option was waking the subjects every 100 years and putting them to sleep afterward. This was a successful method except for the fact that the metabolic needs of humans waking up on such a journey would require a much larger space ship and thus would increase the cost of the journey.
Fuel on such a journey was not a problem, because orbital course were plotted that would enable the spaceship hitch a free ride using the gravitational pull of planets and solar systems and even the center of the galaxy itself to ride on orbit. So propulsion would carry the ship to an orbit where it would travel for as long as is necessary until there is a need to jump orbits, then it would propel out in search for the next orbit on the course. They were also very careful not to choose orbits with two strong a pull that they could not jump out of with minimal use of resources.
The solution to the sleep problem came from a team of neuroscientists and virtual reality application developers. To cross the sleep barrier, the consciousness of the people had to be plugged into an immersive virtual reality experience directly at their medulla oblongata, this chip would interface with a bigger server on the space ship that would host the virtual world. In this virtual world, the human beings would be awake to an earthly life very similar to the one they left at home. In simulations, this method was able to increase the sleep time to about 10,000 years, which was the maximum limit for current hibernation technology.
The main space ship was too big to be built on earth because it was supposed to carry 1000 humans aboard. These humans would be selected from all the participating countries and a few non-participating countries with healthy human specimens to serve as sources of genetic variation. There were going to be 200 males and 800 females aboard, and an extra 1 million embryos to seed life in this distant world.
The giant space ship would be built by robots there in space with materials either shot up from earth by rockets and space elevators. While other materials would be 3D printed from liquified metal from asteroids.
With more than 2 trillion dollars in budget, the project proceeded swiftly, with earth based teams doing their own part of the work, loading rockets, designing chips and programming robots, the space robot team were working constantly and tirelessly putting the outer hull together and receiving supplies from the earth.
Well, this was not a totally humanitarian effort. There were real fears behind the project. As we all the know the rotation of the earth has been slowing down for a while in imperceptible patterns, but suddenly the slowing increased rapidly making the earth climate very strange from what human beings have being used to. With life expectancy going up, especially in the higher echelons of society, there was a need to do something about this whole slowing down phenomenon. Since we cannot go out there and stop the earth from slowing by pushing on it and also most of the solutions proffered by the smartest men of science were expensive or improbable in the nearest future, the only way forward was sending a bunch of humans out there.
A first plan was drafted to send a smaller group of highly trained men of science, but this was not feasible because of the long time involved. The richest of the earth planned that with such a large scale mission already successful with a second to be in development once the first leaves, they would get themselves tickets to follow the first ship from behind, since the risky orbital jumps had not been done before on very long trips, the success of the first team would guarantee their safety. But before they left the earth they would hang out just long enough awaiting the destruction of the earth. While in the meantime the fully fitted sleep-ships as they were called would hang out in orbit around earth just like the space stations.
Large numbers of young volunteers would be sent out on the first sleep-ships as a humanitarian effort for the rest of humanity. Well this is the cover story, the true intent of this rich people who are the secret backers of the project was to clear the road so they could follow.
EARTH 2.0
This is the name of the virtual reality project that housed the consciousness of the travelers while they slept. Very much like the earth itself and indistinguishable in many ways it would enable the travelers to live out their lives as if they never went on that spaceship in the first place.
The world was well edited and alternate history was created and fixed in the minds of the travelers. You could not know you were in that world, when you fell into it in your slumber, it would in no way be different from the world you left with memories as valid and without any sense of doubt about your reality. The full swing of the laws of nature were going to hold and if you got killed, your instance would be started afresh in another location with your memory wiped clean. The horror of your previous death would also be completely eliminated from your mind.
Everybody you knew before you died would simply forget about you the moment you died even if they watched you die in front of them. This fake earth was the best solution the scientist could come up with. As a safety precaution, deaths were prevented by all costs by constantly altering the program of your life in your memory so that actions that could lead to your demise are altered and you are redirected into alternate destinies.
One major idea that was altered in the life of the participants was that they could not grow old and die. In short the very idea of old age leading to death was not programmed into their minds in the first place, this was so that they could live constantly in this virtual world for thousands of years without knowing that it was a biological impossibility as current science of earth would have it. So they did not know death and were prevented from ever knowing it. And old age was wiped out of their minds so they saw themselves growing into adults and then paused there.
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