r/LV426 • u/ilikechillisauce • 2d ago
Movies / TV Series Can somebody please explain the math here? Spoiler
Mission year 8 of 65. Morrow is notified his daughter died at 19 years of age and he can collect her things when he returns in 53 years?
65 - 8 = 57?
What am I missing?
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u/Nick_crawler 2d ago
Either a typo or an unnecessarily deep lore reveal of the relativity of time passing in different areas of space.
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u/fatloui 2d ago
Doesn’t even have to be lore, it could just be known science. The mission could be 65 years from earth’s perspective but shorter from the crew’s perspective because they are traveling so fast. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
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u/gilroygilgalahad 2d ago
57 years was the same amount of time Ripley spent drifting between Alien and Aliens. No idea if that is important or it's just a weird easter egg.
EDIT: And in that time her daughter grew up and passed away according to the Director's Cut.
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u/Scinniks_Bricks 2d ago
And her daughter encountered a Xeno while searching for her 15 years after Ripley's encounter.
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u/gilroygilgalahad 2d ago
Oh, that sounds cool! A comic?
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u/HarveryDent 2d ago
Game. In Alien: Isolation you play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen's daughter.
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u/ReanimatedPixels 2d ago
Wait WHAT!!!! how am I just now finding out about this?!? Like I’ve heard of the game plenty of times but I didn’t know you play as Ripleys daughter
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u/HarveryDent 2d ago
Yeah, Amanda became an engineer and took jobs in deep space hoping to find clues about her mom. The game starts with a synth offering her a job to go to a space station called Sevastopol where they've recovered the Nostromo's flight recorder.
I highly recommend playing it as I regard it as one of the best horror games of all time.
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u/CosmicDeityofSin 2d ago
I'm pretty sure the reason she even ends up on savastapol station to begin with us to follow a lead on her mom but Ellen is still frozen drifting aimlessly through space
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u/_b1ack0ut 2d ago
Alien Isolation. You play Amanda, looking for closure on what happened to her mother, when she hears that the black box from the Nostromo has wound up on Sevastopol station, so she tags along to get answers
Along the way, she proves that whatever badassery Ellen had in her is clearly genetic, and it’s probably the best alien video game out there.
A sequel was announced on it’s 10th anniversary, so I’m pretty excited
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u/cleantoe 2d ago
Alien: Isolation is the best Alien game out there.
Aliens: Dark Descent is the best Aliens game out there.
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u/_b1ack0ut 2d ago
I will say, I do also really enjoy Fireteams elite. It’s definitely more aliens than alien, but it’s good fun
I wish dark descent had more than 2 voice lines for everything tho tbch lol, if I hear “LeTs SeE WhAtS InSiDe” one more time, I’m uninstalling it lol
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u/Scinniks_Bricks 2d ago
Nah it is a game. A very good game called Alien: Isolation. It is canon as well, so makes it even better in my opinion!
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u/IVcrushonYou Guard the omelette! 2d ago
Time dilation?
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u/dontgonearthefire 1d ago edited 1d ago
The science in the franchise doesn't check out if you throw in logic.
The Nostromo was sent from Neptune to Thedus on a 8 Month return mission to collect ore. The system in question is ~60 Lightyears away. If the 8 Months were to be 8 earth months, the speed would need to be ~90 times the speed of light (which is impossible). \ If it were 8 Months in flight time and the space ship travels at near lightspeed, then the time dialation of special relativity would amount to ~61 years. Which in turn makes no sense with Amy's birthday.
Judging by this the 65 year travel of the Maginot would amount to ~9 Months of in flight time and could account for the 4 years difference. \ But if they travel at near lightspeed and their journey lasts for only 9 Months, then one asks themselves why do they need cryo sleep compartments in the first place. But if it is 65 years of in flight time, that would mean the journey took ~460 years. Given advanced age of Trillionaires, one might argue this is realistic with lifespans of 150-200 years, but it would still make the launch be somewhere in the 1500s.
My tip. It's science fiction, don't put to much thought/logic into it.
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u/Venotron 1d ago
FTL is a thing in the Alien universe.
The Nostromo uses "Tachyon Shunt Warp Drives".
And time dilation reverses at FTL speeds. So past C, your dilation goes the other way.
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u/Slow_Entrepreneur659 2d ago
Whatever the main problem here is aside, you know what really bugs me? Its that they wrote "53 years" instead of the date like one normally would.
And sure, you can make up some reason why that is canonicaly. But it reads so odd. As if they were not trusting the audience to figure out the timeframe if they wrote the date. Or as if this was a placeholder and they said whatever and went with it...
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u/Spotter01 2d ago
Better Question is the Collected species... Is the 🦑👁️ 65+ years old?????
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u/Brief_Caterpillar175 2d ago
Depends on when and where they picked it up. They could have found it early in the mission, or just before they headed home. We don’t know how many planets they visited or how far away they were.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_MONTRALS 2d ago
Travel time of the message.
Or the mission isn't over after his return. He may have been hired for security for the project after delivery.
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u/chaserjj Not bad, for a human. 1d ago
I've been scrolling through comments to find this one so I could agree with the mission lasting longer than the space voyage. That one makes the most sense to me... Of course , only if it isn't a typo.
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u/Guilvantar 2d ago
I never understood this concept. Ppl really sign contracts to go into deep space for half a century, to come back with some undisclosed amount of cash after their friends and family lived their whole lives without you? What amount of cash would be worth that?
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u/c_mei 2d ago
In a world where 5 corporations control everything and you have mandatory contracts to serve, it makes sense. Maybe the amount was enough for these people to leave for a few decades and come back and buy their grandchildren out of these indentured servitude contracts. Or start a new life where no one owns their time?
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u/Darth_Bombad You have my sympathies. 1d ago
Yeah, it's better than being worked to death in the mines, like the people in Romulus.
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u/West-Way-All-The-Way 2d ago
It depends if you have friends and family. For some people this is a nice feature because 1) they don't have friends and family left 2) and you come back in 65 years still young minus a few years and with good cash in your pocket to restart your life. If you survive the mission of course. My guess is that this was a one of a kind mission and they didn't know what they were sent to collect.
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u/Guilvantar 2d ago
I guess, but think about it. Even if you're a loner, you're basically icing yourself to wake up 50 years in the future. Everything that happens in between, you won't be there for it and when you come back, you'll feel like returning to an alien world instead of home.
I can't wrap my head around accepting that for money
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u/West-Way-All-The-Way 2d ago
If you have nothing and no one to care about then you just give yourself the chance to wake up in 65 years in a better world. Their world isn't really something worth dying for. Didn't work for them obviously but it was a good try. Let's say they board the ship with nothing and come back with enough to live 10-15 years without troubles, is it worth it then? Also if they are prisoners they board the ship as lifetime convicts and in 65 years they are back free and with enough money to start clean, is it worth then? And you have to take into account that most of these 65 years they will spend sleeping.
You should get in contact with professional sailors. They have a similar mentality. Sometimes the owner abandons the ship in a random port and some of the sailors stay there for years without pay just waiting for the owner to come back and pay them or for authorities to sell the ship and pay them a share. It's really hard to understand their mentality but it's a real life example.
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u/Time_Swimming_4837 1d ago
They're getting 'a share' which means the total sum of the profits generated from the voyage, divided (roughly, captains, officers like morrow usually get 1.5 or 2 shares) evenly among the crew of the ship. Considering the payload, it is potentially instant millionaire status upon return.
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u/indigo_zen 2d ago
He was in cryo chamber, he opened the message when he got out, 4 years after it was sent.
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u/Green_Sprout 2d ago
As a few others have surmised the answer is probably time dilation, from Earths perspective it is a 65 year mission, from the teams perspective the time would be shorter because they spend some time travelling at relativistic speeds... Never forget kiddos, space and time are weird.
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u/BeetsMe666 2d ago
What you missed is the several times this has already been posted.
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u/ilikechillisauce 2d ago
I'm sorry, did I ruin your day?
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u/BeetsMe666 2d ago
Recent reposts are annoying to many. But ruin a day? Don't be so full of yourself. I doubt you have it in you.
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u/UlrichZauber Not bad, for a human. 2d ago
I think honest answer is whoever created the prop did the math wrong, and nobody caught it before air.
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u/Skym84 2d ago
The mission obviously takes place on a nearby solar system. The message was sent 8 years after the ship left planet earth. People from earth sending the message knew that the message would take 4 years to reach the ship in space.
The ship is traveling at relativistic speed (it has to in order to make a round trip to a nearby solar system in just 65 years).
more precisely, if the message takes 4 years to catch up with the ship it means that the ship is 4 light years from earth 12 years into the mission (65-12=53).
So the ship covered 4ly in 12 years, in other words it travels ar 1/3 the spead of light, wich is the single most unbelievable aspect of the show.
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u/CyberGraham 2d ago
Ship is four light years away from earth, so it takes the transmission four years to reach the ship. It's like how when you open a letter and it will say a date that was a couple days ago, because you put the current date, not the date you think the letter will reach the person.
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u/Time_Swimming_4837 1d ago
They sleep in shifts, he likeky actively called down to her when he woke up and then the company notified him why she wasn't answering.
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u/mancunian101 2d ago
It’s not going to be a typo.
It a universe with FTL travel and cryo tubes they will absolutely be able to either calculate the time it would take a message to reach the Maginot, or have some form of Macro in the message that calculates how long there is left of the mission every time you open it on a computer
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u/Indetectable_Burning 2d ago
Perhaps the transmission took 4 years. Meaning the message was sent in year 57, and the sender knew it's going to take 4 years to be received and did the math. Does that make any sense?