• D61 [any]
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    157 months ago

    I have yet to stumble across a sci-fi short story about space travelers finding an entire civilization’s worth of dead bodies floating round in space only to realize that they were all time travelers who only got part of the time traveling math correct. They figured out how to get through time but couldn’t figure out how to get through space, but since all their volunteers died, they never figured it out and just kept sending people to their doom.

    • @tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      57 months ago

      There is a sci-fi short story whose name escapes me of a spaceship using some new FTL drive, but has largely been untested due to an impending doom. The math is said to be solid, however.

      Anyway the drive powers up, and the spaceship jumps, and… all the crew and passengers are left behind, choking in space.

      • D61 [any]
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        37 months ago

        Sounds like one of the asides from “The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy”.

    • Alien Nathan Edward
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      27 months ago

      something an awful lot like this happens with interdimensional travel in Pratchett and Baxter’s ‘The Long Earth’. The basic plot driver is humans discovering a way to travel to the different timelines predicted by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and every once in a while as you’re bopping across dimensions from Earth to Earth you end up in a dimension or even a series of dimensions where, due to some sort of historical happenstance, Earthn’t.

    • @ulterno
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      27 months ago

      I feel like this could be a scene in Rick and Morty, with someone commenting, “Guess their Math was off”