#yes the trillionaires will wash the dishes if it means not sharing their limited oxygen with their nanny who could mutiny any day now

[liesmyth]

by the way. there's no conceivable universe in which the FTL fleet that left Earth in NtN didn't have it incredibly rough.

I've said this before, but it bears reminding: they jumped blind, using untested technology, with NO supply lines back to earth and no concrete plans for a colony. they took ships that were supposed to stack 11 billion people canned in like sardines and nothing else and stocked them full with enough resources to live on for generations and somehow found a settlement, and that was before they had to rush the schedule because John was making noise about transparency and mask their actual launch as a trial run.

it wasn't a comfortable journey. I'd be very, very surprised if the total passenger count was higher than 10k people, for space/resources allocation reasons as well as for secrecy reasons. Every person on board was a mouth to feed, and their descendants, and their descendants. I've seen some people in fandom say stuff like "Of course they'd bring along servants! Rich wouldn't do chores!" and IMO that fundamentally misses the point.

This wasn't the space equivalent of a cruise liner, or the Titanic crossing the Atlantic with first-class quarters and third-class decks. This is the space equivalent of climate refugees crammed in 500 in a tiny fishboat crossing the sea with a non-insignificant chance of dying en route, after emptying their savings to pay for the trip. The fact that the people on board the FTL ships were once insanely rich doesn't mean they travelled in comfort.

This was a desperate last-chance trip, destination "anywhere but here", chances of survival unknown. Their privilege got them on the ships, but the moment they left Earth, that privilege ceased to exist; there was no way to enforce an existing social structure. This is why, again, I think there were no luxuries on board and absolutely definitely no servants - if you're about to willingly enter into complete social collapse, you don't WANT to bring people you regard as less than yourself, knowing that they will be your equals tomorrow.

I'm still convinced that half the fleet at least didn't make it out, and those who managed to found settlements were nearly wiped out multiple times at different points in history.

#this was brought to you bc of that post this morning about whether there would be pets on the ship. my answer is: not for long #anyway. john calls them soon to be impoverished trillionaires. giving away cash bc it wasn't worth anything anymore in their eyes #we know 200 people on those ships were randomly selected as a smokescreen after john started making noise #we KNOW M- said that absolutely everyone else on the ship had bought a ticket or been useful to the project #you cannot conduct a large scale migration and mask it as a random test. #you can't keep that level of secrecy if you involve people who aren't in your exclusive circle #living people + supplies take up SO MUCH more space than canned bodies people #I'm putting the whole fleet estimate as 10k-12k MAX people and absolutely no menial workers lol #yes the trillionaires will wash the dishes if it means not sharing their limited oxygen with their nanny who could mutiny any day now #ftl fleet #nona reread #sort of i HAVENìT officially started but #tlt thoughts #elle tlt posting #tlt