Would you travel into the future?

If you had the money and the wherewithal to do it, and if was possible to do, would you climb into a rocket ship, enter into a cryogenic sleep and be propelled to say 90% the speed of light using a fission drive or some such thing with a return date, after a few years of slowing down, of say 10,000 years from now, with no guarantee that there would even be anyone around to retrieve you and great you (so let's assume that you can also land)?

If you made it back in one piece, well rested and ready to pick up your new life, what do you think you'd find and discover about our world and what's changed in the last 10,000 years?

What makes this an interesting question is that it's scientifically sound and in the realm of possible, maybe within our lifetime, to get on board such a ship maybe launched by some eccentric billionaire who might like to cheat death, allowing you to buy a ticket or at least reserve a place in the lottery, and "win".

The craft would need to be well shielded at that speed to handle any space dust or cosmic debris, and would follow a long trajectory in orbit around the sun.

It could be the death of you of course, but the payoff would be quite literally, the opportunity to travel far into the future by many many generations.

So that's the premise of the story, if anyone would like to pick it up from here....

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Into the Future, by AnkhMorpork


A red light was blinking on and off to the sound of his heartbeat, while a visual of his brainwave pattern revealed a steady climb from the delta pattern of deep sleep through theta, to alpha and then the beta rythms of wakefulness. It was like being resurrected into a high tech coffin.

Bob looked around and attempted to deduce his true circunstamce. "Where am I?" he croaked, as if he hadn't used his own vocal chords for millennia (although by his own clock, 980 years would be more precise), and then it all came flooding in like an epiphany of the newly resurrected. "Oh, my, God!" he said.

"Oh my God! I'm back!" he exclaimed, more forcefully, and proceeded to press the appropriate release button on his coffin-capsule, liberating himself into, "into what?" he again whispered to himself (he'd always had a habit of talking to himself when unsure of his true bearing and circumstance) - "well here goes nothing!" croaked Bob as he prepared to step out (not an easy task when you've been in hibernation for almost 1000 years) into the 'domain' of 31st century Earth, as that little red light began to blink in rapid succession to signal the sudden spike in his heart rate, and the brain-wave pattern on the screen signalled that he was in a state of near-panic, and/or absolute exhilaration at his newfound circumstance on the far side of "the deep sleep". Both, it was both. He was both freaked right out, Bob was, and yet more excited that he'd ever been as a young child on Christmas morning. This was it! He made it! "I made it!" he said, as if to no one in particular, or as to any other person as might exist, or not. None of that mattered to him at this point however, as much as the curiosity of it impinged on his state of mind almost like a tickling sensation at the back of his mind. He was ALIVE!

Oh what will I find? he thought to himself, gingerly placing first one leg and then the other on the floor, and then, with a shaking hand on the rail of his sleep-pod, Bob slowly stood up to face the future.

...?



to be cont'd..

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

Everyone travels into the future, just at different rates.

It's going back that is the issue.

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

Can I come back afterwards? when I have swagged the Iphone 320, lots of nanobots and cyber stuff in my body?.
If I can I will then become a super villain.

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

In a heart beat as long as my husband got to come with me. I'd hope there would be more peace, cures for all sorts of things, better health all around. Then again it could be just recovering from an Apocolypse in which case we might be able to help.
It'd be a hell of a trip though huh?

a reply to: M00nStar

Too scary, imho. I don't think I could summon the courage to go. So I guess I'll write the story but someone else will have to live it..

Some day someone's going to do this with a fission drive, so that you can get up to such high speed for relativistic effects, and that's why we have the actual trip only lasting 980 years, with 10,000 years having elapsed on Earth. It's going to happen some day, some crazed lunatic will do it, and off he'll go, in a state of suspended animation, accelerating up to 90% the speed of light, then slowing down at the end of the journey using a solar sail laser setup, since much energy would be required to slow the mass from such a speed. That would be the only guarantee of the journey, that that laser is powered for the duration and ready to activate at the appropriate time for the deceleration process, and eventual landing back on Earth. Time travel according to E=MC2.

It's not outside the realm of possible, that's the freakiest part about it. That tech will be with us in a 100 years from now, and there would be test flights, so the outcome might not be as dicey as I'm making it out to be, like a wuss. No, people will be jetting off to the future by the 100's eventually. There'll be a list of them, in a time capsule. They'd be famous, out there, sleeping, frozen. It would make people think about the future that we're all living into..

It will change things when that first ship is launched with our first time-traveller into the future, and it will happen. What mankind can do, they will do, and this one is doable.

originally posted by: TheKnightofDoom
a reply to: AnkhMorpork

Can I come back afterwards? when I have swagged the Iphone 320, lots of nanobots and cyber stuff in my body?.
If I can I will then become a super villain.

A perhaps more interesting twist to the story, is if Bob has such ideas and visions of grandeur about his role and position in society as a world famous time traveller, only to have somehow been forgotten and ending up in the futuristic version of a high-tech mental ward!

"Yes, Bob, you've stated that before. You're from the year 2029 and you flew with Mark Zuckerberg. But do you know why you are here, in the hospital?"

Mind you If I could not come back I would just announce it to the future world that I'm from 2016 (they can carbon date me or something) and I will just write a book go on future Opera and make a mint on the talk show circuit plus I bet future girls would find it cool.

Yeah why not ? I sure would

I think the biggest event, in hindsight, from 10,000 years from now looking back, will be the quantum computing strong AI age that began in the year 2112 (to the music of Rush, "2112", that some geek rock and roller historian felt would add a nice touch for the inaugural ceremony).

In other words, one main idea and motivational driver of the time-traveller, is to arrive on the other side of the technological singularity, with humanity hopefully still intact.

It would be an intelligent machine world, so everything would be automated and computer-aided.

Contact will have occurred and as a result, people will be travelling to other words without the need of cryogenics.

So it might not be just Earth any more but Earth as just a part of some sort of intergalactic society that the time-traveller might find himself thrust into.

I think he would find that the culture shock of it would go on and on, there'd be just so much to get caught up on. Nothing would be like it was, and at some level, at least from Bob's own perspective, it might just be a whole lot worse and not so much fun at all..

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

Chances are we wouldn't be recognisably human in 10000 years. We'd land in 12016 looking like the plague-carrying transitional apes we are and promptly be quarantined. Tossed in the clink like a filthy diaper dangling from the end of a very long pole.

I'm not even sure humans in 12016 will be structurally like us either. There'll be prosthetics like we can hardly imagine and physical bodies could be as optional as choosing a clothes style. Eyes will likely be augmented or completely biomechanical. I imagine what we think of as 'race' will be long gone and replaced by some other socio-economic distinctions. Maybe skin colour will be something we choose each day?

Nowadays we have android technology measuring sleep patterns and heart rates and by then the technology will be controlling them instead.

If the climate changes continue, humanity will have adapted to a planet with more land and crazy weather patterns. Equatorial populations might have moved out to the 'temperate' zones and they could even have crept to more northerly climes. Siberia could be all greenery and agriculture. I imagine we'll be recycling everything and will have quarried the landfill sites of the present for everything of value. Who knows?

Hopefully, democracy and politics will be dead. I'd like a Multi-Vac type of sentient AI to be like a benevolent/benign dictator who tweaks everything to endure the greatest good for the greatest number. Yes. I said it. I want 12016 to be under the sway of a robot overlord!!

I would come back to see the statue of liberty half buried in the sand.

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

I'm getting too damn old,the future for me may take me to a time I'm already dead,and wouldn't that be fun,I'll leave it to the yougsters

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

Hell no! Then I'll really feel old!!

No. I have a feeling it would register as a very big mistake the moment I came back.

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

I wouldn't travel into the future. I don't like the direction the human race is going and to follow that to its inevitable conclusion is actually very scary to me.

I WOULD travel into the past... back to 1969 and then, about 25 years later (1994) I would go back to 1969 again. Repeat as necessary.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

I wouldn't travel into the future. I don't like the direction the human race is going and to follow that to its inevitable conclusion is actually very scary to me.

Same here and it was my first thought on reading the OP.

Then I thought of Genghis Khan's rampages and the Black Death that killed even more than the Mongols. Those couple of centuries would have looked like the end of the world and yet humanity muddled on and enjoyed the Renaissance.

In the end I let optimism be the guide and hope be the path. 10 thousand years might be as long as humanity needs to stop fighting against each other.

Once full-on contact is made, then eventually the Earth becomes the longgg-Earth because the terrestrial sphere would no longer bind us to this one world, so it would be like the lifting of a veil to reveal a bejewelled splendor with many places and many different and varied civilizations who are up to all kinds of different things, things that we cannot even begin to imagine.

The culture shock would be overwhelming if that kind of eventuality were to come to pass in the next 10,000 years.

A human time capsule. Somebody's going to do it. What a strange way to "die" by just getting in your rocketship and hitting the hay for 980 years..

I think I'd rather be reincarnated on God's terms if it were meant to be, than try to go my own way.