Relativistic time dilation and your pay rate

[Enola Straight]

Inspired by this thread over at the SDMB:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=523872

Suppose you are serving on the USS Einstein.

You're traveling a significant fraction of c.

Ship time, three years passes, but 20 years pass on Earth.



Should you be paid for the 20 years, or for only 3?

[Patrick Degan]

Joe Haldeman actually dealt with this question in The Forever War. When Cpl. William Mandella returns to Earth with Marygay Potter after their first campaign against the Taureans (two months for them, 25 years on Earth after they first signed up), they find their back-pay from their non-relativity adjusted compensation has made them millionaires, but the inflation and taxation imposed by Earth's war economy sucks up their cash after only a couple of months and they're forced to sign up for another hitch. Keeps the dollars circulating throughout the economy and the soldiers back into the service.

[General Zod]

Joe Haldeman actually dealt with this question in The Forever War. When Cpl. William Mandella returns to Earth with Marygay Potter after their first campaign against the Taureans (two months for them, 25 years on Earth after they first signed up), they find their back-pay from their non-relativity adjusted compensation has made them millionaires, but the inflation and taxation imposed by Earth's war economy sucks up their cash after only a couple of months and they're forced to sign up for another hitch. Keeps the dollars circulating throughout the economy and the soldiers back into the service.

Wouldn't an economy that inflated that much implode on itself?

[Bounty]

Considering that you are paid for work done, I'd say you should only be paid for actual time served on the ship - but adjusted for inflation to match the value of that sum at the end of the voyage.

Howevere, I would expect some sort of compensation or allowance for long-term storage of possessions (perhaps provided by the company?) and a tax exemption for the duration of the voyage. Imagine paying a decade of back taxes on two months' worth of salary...

[Lusankya]

You'd also have to consider the personal cost to the person going on the voyage. After 20 years, your friends would have progressed with their lives, your kids and grandkids would have grown up and society in general would have moved on without you. You'd have to have a pretty high wage to make up for that.

[Bounty]

You'd also have to consider the personal cost to the person going on the voyage. After 20 years, your friends would have progressed with their lives, your kids and grandkids would have grown up and society in general would have moved on without you. You'd have to have a pretty high wage to make up for that.

Obviously. However, there are professions today that have the same sort of personal sacrifices and they manage to both get filled and get paid well enough for people to consider them; just think of the people manning oil rigs or Arctic bases. It'll take a special sort of person to take a job on a relativistic ship, without a doubt, but it's not like you won't find people who either value the experience more than they value a life on Earth, or who can't wait to leave their current life behind.

Something that may also be a problem: technology advances, fast, and people coming back from a 25-year-in-planet-time voyage are going to be way behind the curve. Maybe contracts should include a paid-for retraining clause with a guarantee of a new posting? Else you'll do one tour and come back to a world where your skills are useless and nobody wants to hire you.

[erik_t]

You can quit an oil rig or Arctic gig. You can't decide three years into a 25-Earth-year mission that you've changed your mind about leaving your world to grow old without you.

[Bounty]

You can quit an oil rig or Arctic gig. You can't decide three years into a 25-Earth-year mission that you've changed your mind about leaving your world to grow old without you.

It's not as if, say, a sailor on a nuclear submarine can one day ask the captain to pull over because he's homesick, either. If the screening process before the mission doesn't at least try to weed out the ones who are likely to have second thoughts it's not doing its job.

[Alyrium Denryle]

You can quit an oil rig or Arctic gig. You can't decide three years into a 25-Earth-year mission that you've changed your mind about leaving your world to grow old without you.

It's not as if, say, a sailor on a nuclear submarine can one day ask the captain to pull over because he's homesick, either. If the screening process before the mission doesn't at least try to weed out the ones who are likely to have second thoughts it's not doing its job.

A six month tour is a far cry from 3 years With Time Dilation. Even if they do leave, it wont do them any good. They still lose a decade.

[Patrick Degan]

Joe Haldeman actually dealt with this question in The Forever War. When Cpl. William Mandella returns to Earth with Marygay Potter after their first campaign against the Taureans (two months for them, 25 years on Earth after they first signed up), they find their back-pay from their non-relativity adjusted compensation has made them millionaires, but the inflation and taxation imposed by Earth's war economy sucks up their cash after only a couple of months and they're forced to sign up for another hitch. Keeps the dollars circulating throughout the economy and the soldiers back into the service.

Wouldn't an economy that inflated that much implode on itself?

In the novel, Earth maintains war production to keep its forces in the field for 1100 years against the Taureans. The taxation rates were used as a counterbalance to the inflation rate. I also imagine the currency was periodically revalued but Haldeman didn't go into too much detail on this.

[Coyote]

Maybe accruing seniority but not pay while in stasis/transit would work-- so you'd be paid as a private with 20 years seniority, but only for the month or two you actually served.

Or, you have a '1/8th of base pay' clause for time in stasis/transit.

All of it would have to be prorated and adjusted for inflation, after all, if we had a situation like that here in Earth where, somehow, a soldier went to World War 1 and was frozen in stasis somehow, and released today, he wouldn't go very far on a 1917 salary.

[Memnon]

You can quit an oil rig or Arctic gig. You can't decide three years into a 25-Earth-year mission that you've changed your mind about leaving your world to grow old without you.

It's not as if, say, a sailor on a nuclear submarine can one day ask the captain to pull over because he's homesick, either. If the screening process before the mission doesn't at least try to weed out the ones who are likely to have second thoughts it's not doing its job.

A six month tour is a far cry from 3 years With Time Dilation. Even if they do leave, it wont do them any good. They still lose a decade.

Yeah, but you're thinking about the wrong navy. Ecuador's submarines submerge and never come up

[Simon_Jester]

You can quit an oil rig or Arctic gig. You can't decide three years into a 25-Earth-year mission that you've changed your mind about leaving your world to grow old without you.

It's not as if, say, a sailor on a nuclear submarine can one day ask the captain to pull over because he's homesick, either. If the screening process before the mission doesn't at least try to weed out the ones who are likely to have second thoughts it's not doing its job.

Yeah, but the scale of the problem is very different. If you're on a nuclear submarine or an oil rig or an Antarctic base, you can go home again if you Just. Can't. Stand it. It's possible. So there's a safety net backing up the screening process, which is a good thing: screening processes are not magic wands. It may take several months for the opportunity to arise, but, and this is important, your world is still there for you to go back to.

On even a short relativistic trip, that isn't true: once you've left the solar system, whether or not you decide to quit, the world isn't going to be anything like the same when you come back. On long relativistic trips, you're effectively coming back to an alien planet.

You can find people who are OK with that. You can even find psychologically stable people who are OK with that. But they're not going to do it for cheap, or even for a typical middle-class salary.

[fgalkin]

So, they get paid enough for those years so that they return to a life of luxury, enough so they never have to work again- essentially, they earn as in those three years as others do in decades.

The details of them having second thoughts in the middle of the mission are not really relevant- that is what pre-mission screening is for. What's important is that a significant sacrifice is asked from them, and they are likely to be compensated accordingly.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[PeZook]

On a lower scale, we were already over that question: in the age of sail, a cruise by a whaler or merchant ship could easily take three years. Not the same exact thing, sure, but people could easily come back to find their former life in shambles.

The solution, of course, was an incentive of gaining enough wealth to live several years on land with what you earned on that one trip. Just multiply it by sheer scale of the problem, and you will quickly come to a conclusion that the people should be paid enough to actually have a shot at life on Earth: so I'd be compelled to say the standard would be closer to receiving several years worth of salaries than the two months worth. Perhaps enough so that the crewmember would be able to start a family and raise children before having to go out again?

On the other hand, I have serious doubts there are women out there who would be willing to wait 25 years for their husband to return home, so we may have to recruit only the kind of crewed who doesn't want a family.

[Lusankya]

On the other hand, I have serious doubts there are women out there who would be willing to wait 25 years for their husband to return home, so we may have to recruit only the kind of crewed who doesn't want a family.

Unless you have super fertility technology, you won't be able to find a woman who would be able to wait 25 years for their husband to come home unless either they'd already had children (and good luck getting someone with kids to go off for 25 years of their kids' lives who isn't a complete jerkwad) or they didn't want children. By the time the guy came back, the woman would have reached menopause.

[PeZook]

Well, if you have the tech to travel with relativistic speeds and actually come back, super-fertility and genetic engineering is probably everywhere, but it's a good point

[Tolya]

First of all, such missions are planned to the minute, so I doubt that a question of by which time salaries should be calculated wouldn't even appear. This isn't a job paid by the hour, so a more feasible form of agreement would be a mission-time contract.

Hordes of lawyers would deliberate on details (including time dilation) but the final question should be: how much to pay them? In such missions, which require massive amount of training and experience, a sort of contract would be required: you have to do this for this amount of money and the mission will last X years Earth-wise which translates to Y years spent on the ship.

Jobs like that exist even today. Think about secluded research stations in Antarctica and Arctica, where crews interchange every 3-6 months. Of course it doesn't compare to a 3 year mission during which 20 years passes on earth, but I guess legal guidelines for such contracts are already there.

[Gil Hamilton]

In the novel, Earth maintains war production to keep its forces in the field for 1100 years against the Taureans. The taxation rates were used as a counterbalance to the inflation rate. I also imagine the currency was periodically revalued but Haldeman didn't go into too much detail on this.

I also believe that they uses calories to determine the value of things. How many calories did it take to produce, how many calories do you get from it, that sort of thing.

[Coyote]

Huh, I foresee a situation where Farmboy Joe is 18, has a girlfriend, she gets knocked up and he joins the Army, to be deployed on some nether-world mission full of time dilation. He comes home and finds that his kid is now his age, or maybe even a few years older... yeah, that'd mess with perception of normalcy and family.

Or if some poor shlub come home after deployements and finds that he's accidentally taken up a relationship with his granddaughter or something. After all, they might both appear to be about 25 or so-- her age is normal, his is after a few deployments as is "virtually" 25 but actually 60+.

[Gil Hamilton]

I wonder if deep space missions that involve large amounts of time dilation would be simply volunteer only with a ton of psychological pre-screening. As in, they simply don't join the Army and WHOOPS you've been deployed to some theatre on Tau Ceti VI, see back in 33 years plus the time you spend on the ground!

[Darmalus]

Unless it is some sort of dystopia, a volunteer only force seems likely. I could imagine they would aim for people who are single, have minimal or no commitments on Earth, and have "timeless" hobbies. By that, I mean things like reading, chess, and other things that will most likely be the same in 10 years or 100.

[open_sketchbook]

Finding enough volunteers is unlikely. This is the perfect service to employ old-style press-ganging for; they sure as hell can't leave in transit and when you get back to port and everything has changed, what are the crewmen to do? If they desert, you've basically left them with no useful skills in a futuristic world. They'd be forced to stay for another tour, and another, and another...

[Samuel]

Unless it is some sort of dystopia, a volunteer only force seems likely. I could imagine they would aim for people who are single, have minimal or no commitments on Earth, and have "timeless" hobbies. By that, I mean things like reading, chess, and other things that will most likely be the same in 10 years or 100.

Competant dystopias would use volunteers as well- you don't want the crew of your warships having more in common with the enemy than the folks back home.

Finding enough volunteers is unlikely. This is the perfect service to employ old-style press-ganging for; they sure as hell can't leave in transit and when you get back to port and everything has changed, what are the crewmen to do? If they desert, you've basically left them with no useful skills in a futuristic world. They'd be forced to stay for another tour, and another, and another...

Relativistic vessels, if they don't stop, can obliterate billions. You do not want people piloting it to hold a grudge against you. Not to mention the crew is going to need some very specialized skills- unless nuclear physics is a common minor you will need volunteers.

[Simon_Jester]

Finding enough volunteers is unlikely. This is the perfect service to employ old-style press-ganging for; they sure as hell can't leave in transit and when you get back to port and everything has changed, what are the crewmen to do? If they desert, you've basically left them with no useful skills in a futuristic world. They'd be forced to stay for another tour, and another, and another...

What Samuel said; anything worth building and launching a relativistic starship is too important to entrust to people you've press-ganged. That goes double if they have actual physical control over the ship's movements, or the chance to gain control by mutiny.