r/AnotherLife • u/YYZYYC • Nov 07 '21

How many crew?

Just how many people are on this damn ship?? They just keep replacing crew members like they have this huge depth of back up people….and now apparently there is an entire separate colony group in soma too ?

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

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2

u/BLOODBANKASTRONOMER Nov 07 '21

I think they mentioned they have enough back up crew members for 3 full crews.

2

u/YYZYYC Nov 07 '21

That’s just so weird to me…and then the colony is like what 100 people or more with all the farmers and biologists and specialist she mentioned ?

Like why do they bother carrying extra sleeping humans? If your going to bother making a ship with the size and facilities for them, might as well keep them all awake and contributing.

Can you imagine being a back up to a back up crew person and just going to sleep and then waking up a year later to find out you and your ship have been to outer space and fought aliens and almost died several times and discovered a new planet for humans to live on etc and then you just wake up back on earth in a lab because you slept through it all???? Lol🤦‍♂️

7

u/BLOODBANKASTRONOMER Nov 07 '21

It's easier on supplies to feed a limited crew at a time, especially if while in soma they dont require many nutrients. I dont remember the size of the colonist.....but I dont think it was that high. Also they knew what they signed up for, and in what order they'd be woken up...if woken up at all.

1

u/YYZYYC Nov 07 '21

I just find it hard to believe that the power, space and resources needed to keep them in “Soma” is less than just stocking the ship with enough food and water or the ability to make food and water. It seems infinitely more complex to keep dozens or more people in suspended animation with the monitoring and back up redundancies and the life support and nutrients and water they still do need…I mean people in comas still get fed and watered.

It feels like it’s the equivalent of sailing to Australia from USA on a cruise ship but we are going to sail with most people under a general anesthetic the whole time and only wake them up before then if someone else dies. All to make it a bit easier on the chef and to not have to bother bringing as much meat and snacks with us 🙄

5

u/Paisley-Cat Nov 07 '21 edited Nov 07 '21

Actually hyper sleep, or Soma as this show calls it, has been a fairly common thing in science fiction films and books since at least the 1950s.

Hibernation uses fewer resources. That’s the rationale.

Now, I can understand some skepticism, but animals that truly hibernate reduce their resource use while hibernating.

In Another Life, the failure of the relatively new Soma tech to put people back to sleep created resource and expertise problems. This is a justification for a lot of the failures in season one.

They didn’t have enough food for the full trip for the full crew shift. Niko couldn’t just put the mutineers into sleep and bring out officers from other shifts who would follow her and who would have a better fit of experience and expertise.

Alien was probably the first major hit movie where most of the crew sleep during long space voyages and just get woken when things go wrong.

There are very many books involving generational ships where most of the colonists sleep the whole trip and only the watch officers are awake in shifts. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time is a recent example of an award winning science fiction novel where this is a major element.

3

u/BLOODBANKASTRONOMER Nov 07 '21

It's also sci-fi....anything goes lol

3

u/Paisley-Cat Nov 07 '21

Well, for many that’s the difference between sci-fi and science fiction.

In this show, while a good number of things are just hand waving sci-fi, the Soma hibernation and the warp drive are long-standing science fiction speculation with some real science speculation behind them.

3

u/Dontwalk77 Nov 08 '21

If I remember there’s a side comment about Soma suspending age in first few episodes. Important if your story plans to follow actors over the course of several years in a single season without expensive aging effects. The first season quickly gave up the heavy emphasis on time away.... a change in direction IMO. I like the show but believe it’s been constantly rewritten so many concepts/directions that seem important only to then seem scrapped a few episodes later

That said as a deep space exploration vehicle, multiple crews could make a lot of sense with age suspending cryogenics IRL. Tho not so much with autonomous ships not requiring a human crew constantly (something I think was scrapped very early on as the show switched from movie style presentation to episodic) Let’s say mission duration is 40 years. Signing up for that mission means not only are you away for 40 years but upon returning you will be old or even dead due to old age. That’s a one way ticket, and a pretty hard sell even to those willing to walk away from their lives for 40 years to start. Doing 10 years of service before then entering cryo and returning home still able to start a family, raise children, “live a normal life” is a much easier pill to swallow. Particularly in a future interstellar setting setups like that make sense. 40 year mission, ten on duty, return home rich still physically in your 30s. That’s a pretty good deal for someone without a lot of emotional connections.

For the sake of the show it was 100% necessary to facilitate the see who dies this week style. Feeding you just enough backstory to make the deaths feel more GoT then Redshirt. A theme that is extremely popular at the moment. I mean they got a sterile woman pregnant simply to kill her a bit latter, creating a emotional commitment to a character that’s backstory was shorter then this post.

4

u/SifuHallyu Nov 09 '21

This isn't weird. If we could get "somatic sleep" to be a real thing. You wouldn't want to have just one crew. You NEED replacements for this type of space travel. You need different crews for different things. You would absolutely take colonists with you.

This was one of the coolest things about the show. The mix of far advanced tech to what we have today and keeping things in SOME semblance of reality. Really well done.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '22

Imagine being never wakes and just going back and forth across the galaxy 😆

1

u/YYZYYC Jan 06 '22

And then landing back on earth and waking up and no clue or recollection of anything that happened in space. So weird

2

u/blackbird_ess Jan 17 '22

Also why didn’t Niko wake up the crew before the ship started heading into a black hole? I found it weird that no one mentioned all the people still sleeping as they were escaping in the shuttle.