What would it be like to spend 15 years in space and find that 86,985 years had passed when you returned home. This happens to the people in my newest novel, Returning. If we're trying to be realistic about interstellar travel, it's likely to be how it works out in real life.
I think space travel is going to be one of those no-free-lunch deals. Returning employs a literary technique to allow deep space exploration. It simply presumes that a technology will be discovered that allows travel at, or just under, the speed of light. Most likely this would involve some sort of artificial wormhole, or the warping of the space-time continuum to bring distant points together and allow the ship to jump between them. The designation of the propulsion system as a "jump drive" suggests the warp system, though references to an Arkgaizim Passageway may suggest the wormhole. Perhaps it's both.
No matter how the system works, no one is coming back to the time they departed. Thousands of years later, the earth has changed in significant ways. The current population (in 2126) has no knowledge of the Gehunite Empire that despatched the ship. When they left there were two moons. When they return there is only one. The missing moon explains why civilisation had to restart itself a few hundred years after the starship departed.
The Gehunites are on the radio from the moment they emerged from jumpspace, but they don't expect an answer. Even their own colony worlds are visited so infrequently that languages evolve into something unintelligible between visits. They know how long they've been gone. They don't expect their language to still be spoken. That everyone thinks humanity first ventured into space no more than 160-odd years earlier, however, is a bit of a surprise.
They departed with thriving colonies on the Moon and Mars, and planetary exploration routine. They expect to return to a world where space travel at near light speed has made colonising nearby star systems the norm. Instead, they find a single space platform, a few spaceships barely able to manage a few hundred kilometres per second, and the largest country on the North American continent ruled by a former TV evangelist whose only reaction to a returning starship is to call it a hoax because its existence disagrees with Genesis. There's a UK colony on Mars, but its people live in complete ignorance anyone was there before them.
What are these people to do? Most of them were born on this planet, even if they've been gone for millennia. Act like tourists, mostly. They're not planning to stay, though a few may consider it. Retirement, after all, is likely more enjoyable on a planet than on a starship.
There's the obvious problem of the United States. A lot of the returnees, including the captain, were born where that country is now, and it won't let them in, even to visit. When a 15-year-old Denver girl who became the first person to respond to the starship's radio messages—by telling them to shut up, they were on a CW-only Ham band—is invited to visit the ship, she has to be smuggled out of the country by British Intelligence, then has to get the Gehunites to rescue her parents, who found themselves tossed into a relocation camp when the government realised what happened.
Never elect a President who thinks the ideal model of a national leader is John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell. It's unlikely to turn out well.
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