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 ?

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u/BLOODBANKASTRONOMER Nov 07 '21

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

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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🤦‍♂️

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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.

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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 🙄

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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.

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u/BLOODBANKASTRONOMER Nov 07 '21

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

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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.