The new human race meets the old one

Here's a sci-fi idea:

Humanity ventures into the stars but there's a clear divide between the haves and the have nots. The rich stay inn Earth in cryo pods, occasionally waking up for a bit but otherwise resting for for decades at a time while the rest are slowly making their way to habitable planets, making gates along the way that will allow faster than light transport for those who stayed behind.

The idea was that the rich would be woken up a few millennia later and sent to enjoy the fruits of a new planet while the humans who went would clear the path for them in exchange for some land (the AIs on the ships were supposed to assist with pacifying the humans who went and making them obedient)

The final gate gets built and the rich are woken up to go on their journey...only thing is, humanity, due to being in space for centuries, have undergone some changes. Whether it's mutated super strong individuals, ones that were altered for living in zero gravity, cross breeds with compatible alien life, or beings that were altered through too much exposure to cosmic radiation, the human race has changed...and they have little interest in obeying some old humans who stayed on Earth.

The rich humans are now going to have to find something they can offer them and every job has already been filled.

It's an interesting question as to whether the human race has evolved.

There are several scenarios as to how human can meet other (evolved) humans but most involved far fetched physics or ridiculous sci-fi.

Of course there's always the alien invasion thread but I think it's largely accepted that mankind will never travel beyond out own solar system.

If anyone has read or seen the books/movies 2001 A Space Odyssey or 2010 The year we make contact you'll know that the obelisk is really god.


At the end Jupiter becomes a dwarf star turning out solar system into a bindery one and the former moon or Europe become a planet around the new star.

The people of the Earth hear simultaneously in every language that all the worlds are theirs except Europe...but the narrator says that one day the people of the old world will meet the people of the new...maybe a few thousand years from now.



The song "Year 2525" has a nihilistic theme that man will be all used up but I'd like to think we will continue to get better...so how will humans look in say 2,000 years ?

A larger brain/head ?
More sensitive sense of touch ?
ESP?

Will reproduction be no longer a natural act but rather one done in a lab and highly controlled ?
Might a child of the new world or a man from today be regrded as we would regard a caveman ?

Think of Alvin in Against the Fall of Night.

GrandTeton said:

Think of Alvin in Against the Fall of Night.

Click to expand...

I'm thinking of the Vernor Vinge (who invented cyberspace and the Singularity) novella MAROONED IN REALTIME. Shoot into the future via costly stasis gear, or be Left Behind to obsolescence and irrelevance. Here, rich folk who went into stasis and emerged after the Singularity find the rest of humanity has vanished, maybe emigrated, or mutated into a group mind, who knows. Besides the ricos, others emerging from stasis bubbles are mostly groups of prisoners or troops. The tale could have some tense sexual dynamics.

There was a movie about an astronaut who got hurtled far into the future, and when he returned to Earth it was virtually unrecognizable. He didn't even realize that he was ON the Earth! That is, until he found the Statue of Liberty at the end and realized where he was.......

Seems this thread was worth making just for all the books I need to add to my reading list

I like the ideas suggested. The original idea was that the former elites now have to trade sex with the new humanity for food and shelter (new humanity either wants to try creating hybrids for the versions that have difficulty making planetfall or just see the experience as a novelty) while the descendants of the people they flung into space are now the new elites.

However, I like the idea of them all getting waking up from their cryo pods only to find that the warm welcome they were expecting is gone as the gates don't open. They then have to try and appease the army they paid to stay with them, who were also expecting positions of power in the new world order.
...meanwhile the new humanity just watches and waits as things play out. Maybe Earth is now a zoo, maybe they just want to see what their ancestors will do, who knows?