Time for the Stars

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1. curtisNov 2017
   I love just about every one of Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile science fiction novels [1] and still love them as an adult. When I was a teenager, Time for the Stars [2] was probably my favorite, but as an adult, I've come to appreciate Citizen of the Galaxy [3] more.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein_juveniles

   [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

   [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_of_the_Galaxy

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2. dctoedtSep 2010
   And Robert A. Heinlein's 1956 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars, one of his "juveniles" that I liked as a teenager.
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3. eesmithJan 2024
   > Better to be lazy and wait for technology to improve before ever setting out into the stars.

   SF literature gives a couple of counter-examples of why you might do it anyway.

   In van Vogt's "Far Centaurus" (1952) at https://archive.org/details/destinationunive0000aeva/page/8/... the protagonists take 500 years to get to Alpha Centauri. The interstellar drive was created less than 140 years after departure. By the time the explorers arrive, the trip from Earth takes 3 hours.

   The protagonists are met as heroes, with their local mentor and guide having been trained since childhood to work with them. But the future is not a good place for them - for one, they emit what our future descendants consider to be a foul smell.

   Luckily, there's a solution - a time jump which puts them back to a year an a half after they left. Just like the cited "Wait Calculation" paper posits "Scientific progress .. may even solve the riddle of travel at light speeds or beyond", we must also posit posit that scientific progress may solve the riddle of time travel.

   In Heinlein's "Time for the Stars" (1956) at https://archive.org/details/timeforstars0000unse/page/230/mo... the relativistic sublight ships are eventually met by FTL ships after about 63 years of Earth time, while only a few years of shipboard time have passed. The crew of the sublight ship are irked that their mission is canceled because the new ships are so much more capable:

   > Uncle Alfred McNeil leaned forward and said in a soft, tragic voice that spoke for all of us, “Just a moment, sir. Are you telling us that what we did . . . wasn’t necessary?”

   > Mr. Whipple looked startled. “No, no, no! I’m terribly sorry if I gave that impression. What you did was utterly necessary, or there would not be any null ships today. Why, that’s like saying that what Columbus did wasn’t necessary, simply because we jump across oceans as if they were mud puddles nowadays.”

   In this universe, telepathy exists, and experiments carried out between telepaths light years apart provided information used to develop FTL. The suggestion is that if they not gone, development of FTL would not (yet) have occurred.

   That's the reason Heinlein made the coat of arms of the Long Range Foundation be “Bread Cast Upon the Waters”.

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4. eesmithAug 2021
   ... what? It's been part of SF for decades.

   The first three that come to mind are: Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", Haldeman's "The Forever War", and Anderson's "Tau Zero".

   From those titles, a DDG search finds http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/relativity listing more, also containing the line "Very many sf stories use relativistic time dilation for one-way Time Travel into the future."

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5. akvadrakoAug 2021
   There are very few sci-fi movies or books where relativity is important and they treat it seriously. Tau Zero is one, I'm not sure about Time for the Stars, but Forever War does have FTL.

   I created a list of all these works I could find a few years ago. Here is one link:

   https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=l6q90mvssgscsj...

   I think this is a complete list of the films and tv series:

     - The Star Lost
     - Pandorum
     - Passengers (2016)

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6. eesmithAug 2021
   Time for the Stars has FTL at the end. (Physical FTL, that is. Telepathic FTL exists at the beginning.) But it's otherwise it's deliberately structured around the twin paradox - the main character is even a twin.

   Indeed, while I remembered the importance of time dialation in Forever War , I didn't remember the FTL travel between collapsars.

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