[I spoil the entire story.]
So at this point we found a way to travel faster than light. We are going to try and colonize a planet in Alpha Centauri. The main character is a reporter who has become cynical. He wants to leave Earth just to get away from humanity.
The problems with faster-than-light travel is that it somehow causes time travel. Meaning that Earth will rapidly age within a very short time while you are traveling through space. I never fully understood why this happens, but I have always heard about it. It's a very common space problem.
In the story, the ship ends up going faster than they thought it would. They'll end up at their destination in a matter of days which means that Earth would be completely different when they returned. But something weird happens when they get to Alpha Centauri. They get a message from one of the planets, and it's in English.
As it turns out, Earth saw that their ship was doing okay and immediately made an even better one which basically outran them, bringing with them some barely-aged humans that formed a colony before they even got there. This was actually a very happy ending, since they did not really have to do any of the work themselves. The cake referenced in the title was real. The colonists make a giant cake to welcome them with when they landed on "New Columbia."
I liked this story, and I do recommend it. I expected something depressing and cynical but ended up with something that made me smile. And this, if you think on it, was the whole point of the story: not getting what you expect.
This blog was written on April 26, 2024.
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In a way, the people of New Columbia are living on a different spot on the time line than the people of Earth, because of the time difference. The past lives on in the far future, but for the better.
ReplyDeleteI still can't believe this story had such a happy ending.
DeleteThere is so much we do not know about space travel. The reality could be entirely different from what we expect. It is good to think about such things in preparation for experiencing them.
ReplyDeleteA lot of it is speculative, I think, but it's still cool.
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