How come nobody has done the Insect Overlords line?
I chose “other”.
I’d like to be back in 5 yrs if possible. But I don’t want to come back when everyone is old/dying. So either get me back in a few years, or keep me long enough so everyone I ever knew is dead.
I for one welcome our insect overlords
If I didn’t have a daughter I’d go in a heartbeat.
I’d love to go, but not while my mom is alive, so I’d turn them down.
If the alien females are as sexy as this specimen, sign me up! I’m getting ants in my pants just thinking about it.
I’d go in a heartbeat, for as long as it would take … provided my husband can go too.
And provided these ants don’t sound like either Gilbert Gottfried or Sheldon Cooper.
My heart says go, but my brain says no. My pulse quickens even going up elevators.
If my husband and I could both go - I would go in a heartbeat, even though I would be leaving friends and family behind.
I’d go.
If not for my wife, I’d definitely go (at least, based on the idea specified in the OP that I trust and am not repulsed by the aliens). As others have said, the chance to see the “future” of the world is too appealing to pass up.
The only question in my mind is whether I’d do the 50 year option. 5 or even 10 years is a definite yes, no questions asked. At 50 years, though, there’d be no coming home: I’d leave one alien planet, and return to another one. Any timescale longer than that, it wouldn’t make any further difference: Unrecognizable is unrecognizable.
Even then, the main reason I’d be reluctant to take the 50 year trip is because of family, but none of them are my immediate dependents, and I suspect that all of them would urge me to take the opportunity.
This is almost exactly what I was going to post. My biggest concern with the 90-year trip in the post is that technology and other events would leave me so far behind that returning to Earth might be worse than explaining computers to my grandparents. I should just happily trek through the galaxy for the rest of my life, because after a certain amount of time, Earth won’t really be my home anymore.
That’s a feature not a bug. Sign me up!
Thanks for the answers everyone! Personally I think the curiosity of getting to experience true space-travel and seeing the aliens home planet etc would be too strong and I would go with them, also it would be fascinating to come back to Earth to see how things have changed (I’m optimistic, I think overall things are going to continue getting better) but wow it would be a wrench leaving family and friends behind knowing you will never see them again.
This thread was actually inspired by a throw-away line I read in a science-fiction book once which mentioned the members of a Terran space-navy of the future and that on each journey out they knew everyone they know on Earth would be dead and gone by the time they returned, that their only family left would be other members of the service. I tried to imagine what that would be like and it was a very unsettling thought.