Armagon

Episode Suggestion: Festivals, celebrations, and holidays

I was contemplating a science-fiction play, and smiling at the incongruousness of the captain being summoned from the bridge to join in the annual harvest festival, complete with square dancing. And on a generational ship, why not?

It seems like holidays on earth are typically related to:
- the harvest, planting, or agrarian cycle
- remembering the end of wars of births of nations
- holidays commemorating religious events
- the arbitrary start of a year

Similarly, we celebrate birthdays, marriages and anniversaries, and people graduating from school, or retiring from work. It's a bit of a stretch, but I suppose funerals could be considered a celebration too, if only in that it is something more important than day-to-day events that people will pause to honour.

What sort of things would civilizations celebrate in the future, and how might they do it? Almost all of our holidays are based on a solar year (with a few odd ones based on a lunar year, and fewer still that happen in larger periods like 7, 50, or 100 years). Does a harvest festival make sense if you live in an asteroid? If you are on a generational ship, do you choose to have seasons (perhaps for some sort of psychological benefit, or maybe to keep the flora and fauna happy?)

Episode idea: Communication.

How do you send a message to a colony ship 10 light years away? Do you send it directionally (assuming we're using EM radiation, instead of, say, quantum entanglement), or omni-directionally (with a lot of power)? Do you aim the signal at where you hope the ship will be in 10 year's time? If it is a small ship, can it even reply back?

How about farther out? Imagine a mission asked for help from the home world. Do you reply, "It has been 500 years since your ancestors sent this question, and we hope you resolved the problem centuries ago, but we, long dead now ourselves, advise course of action X. We hope that was a detailed enough explanation so that you don't have to ask for further information"

From a technical point of view, since an acknowledgement/negative acknowledgement message is impractical, do you send a message multiple times? Do you put some sort of redundancy into the information so that if large parts of it are lost, the rest can be reconstructed?

If you were to try to send a message to an observer travelling relative to you at relativistic speeds [towards or away from you], what sort of complications does that add? Do they need to record in, say, microwave frequencies, and shift the signal? Or do you need to do, I don't know, modulate the signal at the source?

Would we envision a network of satellites to facilitate long-distance communication (perhaps in the way e-mails used to be buffered and resent every few days)?

How about synchronous communication over links with latency. Talking to someone on Mars would mean minutes between sending information and receiving it back; presumably asynchronous communication would be the way to go. How close does someone need to be to have a viable synchronous communication? (How about to the moon from earth?)

It'd be interesting, too, to hear about some of the proposals for an interplanetary internet (or, heck, why not think big -- this is SFIA -- what of an interstellar or intergalactic internet?) I can't image how that'd be useful without, well, heavily caching outdated information or people having an experiencing an altered flow of time.

If a crew was in stasis, is there computer supposed to record thousands of years worth of messages? (Talk about getting back to your e-mail to find a full inbox!) Should it wake people up under specified conditions?

Is there such a thing as 'secured channels'? [Yes, we have encryption, but surely it becomes an arm's race -- more advanced systems can decode the messages, but more advanced systems can encode messages better -- and, oh, I hope a solar flare didn't prevent you from receiving the latest protocol update so you can decode our future messages!]

Cheers!