I recall, long ago (before the age of mobile phones), driving a company pick-up truck that'd just been fitted with a newfangled immobiliser.
It just died completely on a country lane, where I coasted to a halt and used the last of my momentum to park it on a grass verge.
I then spent about 90 minutes walking back along the dark, rainy, country lane to the main road where, luckily, I was spotted by a colleague who picked me up.
My colleague, wanting to rub salt in the wound, decided it'd be funny to drive me back to the disabled pick-up truck, just to see where it was.
It took us about 5 minutes to drive the distance it'd taken me 90 minutes to walk.
Oh how I laughed.
That's kind of the big problem with Generation Ships, though.
They are still "in the parking lot" so finding them should never really be a big deal.
The stuff about them succumbng to various historic problems is kind of interesting in a pathetic sort of way - thousands of people dying alone out in deep space while modern ships have developed the ability to blink past them in a matter of seconds - but the idea of finding an operational Generation Ship in an inhabited system and neither the Gen' Ship or the system's inhabitants noticed each other for, presumably, hundreds of years seems a bit bizarre.
For me, the interest in Gen' Ships should come from the separate, parallel, evolution that's taken place aboard them.
Every time we find a Gen' Ship there should be something new and interesting that we discover from them.
It just died completely on a country lane, where I coasted to a halt and used the last of my momentum to park it on a grass verge.
I then spent about 90 minutes walking back along the dark, rainy, country lane to the main road where, luckily, I was spotted by a colleague who picked me up.
My colleague, wanting to rub salt in the wound, decided it'd be funny to drive me back to the disabled pick-up truck, just to see where it was.
It took us about 5 minutes to drive the distance it'd taken me 90 minutes to walk.
Oh how I laughed.
That's kind of the big problem with Generation Ships, though.
They are still "in the parking lot" so finding them should never really be a big deal.
The stuff about them succumbng to various historic problems is kind of interesting in a pathetic sort of way - thousands of people dying alone out in deep space while modern ships have developed the ability to blink past them in a matter of seconds - but the idea of finding an operational Generation Ship in an inhabited system and neither the Gen' Ship or the system's inhabitants noticed each other for, presumably, hundreds of years seems a bit bizarre.
For me, the interest in Gen' Ships should come from the separate, parallel, evolution that's taken place aboard them.
Every time we find a Gen' Ship there should be something new and interesting that we discover from them.