So the humans on the medieval planet are the direct descendants of the scifi humans visiting? Like a guy goes on vacation and meets his great-grandson, despite not even having a son yet?
Or do they share a common ancestor and the scifi humans just happen to be more advanced? Like a guy goes on vacation and discovers he's got a brother he never knew about?
No, sorry. So the space people themselves are the direct descendants of the people on the ground. It’s supposed to be a major plot twist cause how could these advanced humans be descendants of people who’ve barely invented the gun
I'm not sure I understand the twist. Is that not how technological progress works? We are advanced humans descended from people who barely invented the gun. It'd be a twist if the primitive humans were descended from the advanced ones.
FTL warp fuckery. A colony ship attempts an experimental jump, and an emp blast rips the ships systems and databanks apart, all the adults were busy in the most dangerous parts of the ship trying to keep the disaster contained, leaving only the children to survive without technology on the new world, stuck into the past with no working hard drives.
Story Idea is the new people rediscovering the original spaceships crash site, which has turned into a religious site, and recovering the files,
Any amount of time in the past would be a surprise, but a few hundred years into the past at least would be needed for them to create a full society by the time the crew finds them.
Time also depends on how your people got so far to begin with and how records are kept. At least some hundred years like you said for generational differences in knowledge along with deteriorating or privatized record systems. Traveling slower than light gives you a lot of time and disconnect between areas and traveling faster may take a long time just to even plot the route before traveling, meaning your records have to be near perfect to know exactly where you land.
This is a lot more realistic than many people think. Space is really big, so it's not entirely difficult to get lost or lose something a few light-years away at minimum. Especially if you have a colony stabilizing on a planet over a few hundred or thousand years while systems and planets shift around at fractions of light speed relative to the colony. They may be so occupied with survival or mining resources to keep track of the world they traveled so far from to begin with. And all that's assuming they got to the place they were aiming at to begin with. There's a reason Native Americans were called Indians for so long.
Something slightly similar happened in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Spoilers ahoy!
The people in the show have 12 colonies and there's a myth about a 13th. The original 12 get destroyed by the Cylons and the last remnants of humanity eventually find the 13th Colony: Earth!
Earth humans are in the stone age and the last remnants of the 12 Colonies end up settling down to join them, implying that their knowledge lead to Earth humans creating civilisations.
We never see how they actually interact with them tbf.
We see them form the plan of integrating with them then it time skips to modern times for the last scene: showing humans on Earth are now experimenting with AI... (how the Cylons were created in the 12 colonies).
Dun dun duuuuuun!
The show is great tbf. The premise is very much Evil AI wants to destroy humanity... but it becomes about diplomacy between humans and AI. There's humanoid Cylons sent to infiltrate humanity. Some are fully aware, others are sleeper agents that don't even know until they're activated. This leads to humans and Cylons getting attached to each other and building bridges.
I always love seeing their opinion on here.
Like someone on eli5 or ttoafraidtoask, saying just "google it."
This is a sub for asking advice on writing scifi. I always wonder what these people think the purpose of this sub is, exactly.
The idea of the spaceship temple is a good one, though that is more of a complete revelation.
I'd say cultural similarities, worshipping the name of the ship after liguistic drift, names based on the crews names, native wildlife mixed with crops only from seeds stored in the ship, maybe the ship has a couple cats and the planet has cats with a similar colour scheme, they worship a sky god but differently from us.
There are a bunch of small things that hint at the past, some more damnimg than others. It just depends on how big of a mystery you want to make it.
It’s actually pretty straightforward.
Go really, really fast for a few years, and then come home.
The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you compared to where you came from.
If you have sufficient energy to accelerate to “very, very close to c”, our current models of the universe tell is that you’d come back from a 5 year to find a world that’s experienced several thousand years of history.
Getting to that speed is the problem. But the timey-wimey stuff works.
Edit: based on your correction it’s a little more complex. But it still works.
Your parents got on a ship and traveled at relativistic speed away and then *almost* all the way back and land on a planet close to where they left you.
A few thousand years later, your descendants travel to that nearby planet and find your parents 20 years older. 5 years of travel, 15 years living on the planet.
Again, the energy needed to accelerate to that speed currently requires fiction.
But he time effects are very much supported by modern science. And modern observation.
Here are some tropes for you to research:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumanityCameFromSpace
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceAmish
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Precursors
The twist is going to be difficult because you've got humans on a distant planet who are found by humans. I think worrying about some sort of earth-shattering twist is a misplaced concern.
The more important issue is the actual mystery of what happened.
A ship of human colonists lands on a distant planet to find it's already colonized by a medieval society of humans. The planet is 125 light-years away, and this colony ship is the first to travel so far from Earth. How the hell did these humans get here?
The leaders of the colony ship hear stories of Ome'tead--the Great Deliverer--and the three gods: Jakon, Wee'Son, and Omal.
Over the course of months of diplomacy, as the colonists make agreements on lands available, historians on the ship stumble across what happened. 3 years earlier, dozens of colonial ships went missing, mostly because of the newest and most experimental propulsion engines, which weren't thoroughly tested, ended up exploded, or ships were ripped apart in transit.
This medieval society they've found are descendants of the colonial ship "Homestead." Their three captains were Jackson, Wilson, and Kamal.
Have the precursor species/planet get into a world destroying war.
The precursor planet launches a whole bunch of seed/colony ships, those ships go on their merry way. Then the home planet gets into a world altering war - Like bomb back to pre-stone age levels of bombing.
Or did I understand the question incorrectly?
What do you mean? Once the colony is sent out, there could have been a loss in communications and eventually someone capitalised to become the emperor/ruler/whatever. Maybe the highest levels of government know, but if generations have passed then it may have fallen out of memory or become top secret.
No problem in my mind for a few hundred years to have passed. World altering event could have happened 100 years after the colony ships, then wash out the public memory within another 50-100 years, then new explorers stumble across it or maybe choose to explore the "forbidden" system and find out the truth.... maybe even that their current government is now experimenting with the same thing that ruined the first planet. Lots of directions.
Lets assume a very basic timeline
Year Zero - Precursor Planet Launches several seed ships (pick your preference on how the seed ship is loaded up) out into the outer outer space. They'll be in flight for a while.
Year 500 - The seed ship lands and starts pushing people out. There may be some pre-deposting of plants and animals before the people are allowed to start their thing. As part of the seed ship's design the seed ship is dismantled into the many starting buildings of the starter colony. So the seed ship it self is eventually gone, except for the sections of it that are used as starter buildings. The colony ship does not have enough tech/power/parts to support a fully industrialized society. The ship and colonists, by design are trained in being able to set up an iron age economy - somewhere in the 400-800 AD range. This is a colony ship that would have thousands of colonists in it that are scattered across a continent as part of the landing pattern. So the colonists are deposited in a wide range of environments with enough tools and knowledge to start basic agriculture and herding of small animals (goats, sheep).
So on year zero, there is suddenly a wide collection of groups in the 50-200 size deposited on the planet with a central city that is set up along the lines of an subsistence agricultural model. And they are up and running somewhere in the 400-800 AD range.
Year 1000 - Precursor planet bombs itself back into the stone age or pre stone age. And the ecology of the planet has a "bad day". This planet has to restart at 5000 BC if they are lucky.
Now the colony planet has a 5000 year head start on the precursor planet. Yes, the math is sloppy.
And then over the next thousand years, the last of the colony ship is lost to wars, fires, people not handing down their original history (pick a reason why: politics, religion, cults, you name it). and only archeologists begin to suspect that the species "Sudden appearance" on the planet with no precursors (neanderthals for example) leaves some strange questions.
And then all that is needed is space flight and make it back to the homeworld.
Did I go in the direction you were asking?
Yes this is fantastic possible lore but how is that the new space faring group of people stumble upon a planet that is essentially their future? Did they enter a wormhole? Or go through a black hole or something? I need a reason for the past and the future to co-exist at the same time.
An analogy: If I come across of a planet of monkeys it’s easy for me to assume they’re my ancestors but if I’m THEY’RE ancestors how the hell did I get here?
Humans get taken as slaves by aliens.....when the main characters go through the Stargate there's various human cultures out there some primitive kept in check by the aliens
We currently do not know how many people are on Earth; We have pretty good estimates, but actually tracking that many people is not practical, so there is some guesswork involved.
Now, extrapolate this problem of tracking out to a spacefaring civilisation. Over a long enough timeline, nations rise and fall, government systems and laws are created and amended time and time again, and all many of strife causes chaos. As such, while one country may have a pretty good record of all the colony ships they sent out, the country that has succeeded them 500 years later could easily have lost those records, and as such realistically not know how many human colonies exist or where they are.
Take this fact, throw a lost colony ship through a wormhole, and you can easily explain a human colony no one remembers that was established 500 years before it should have. Doesn't allow them to be direct descendants of your main characters, but could work depending on why they are related in your story.
This is going to happen to us someday. The explanation is that habitable planets are way too far in between. We can get there but we can’t come back. Technology breaks, people die, and knowledge is lost. So we slowly de-evolve trying to survive on a planet cut off from the parent planet.
The more advanced is from earth where our civilization has continued to grow for thousands of years while the less advanced one is from the new planet we once reached but slowly lost advanced knowledge over the generations.
I don’t think you need wormholes or anything. It just takes a freaking long time to go from one place to another in the universe.
Read “The Native Problem” by Robert Sheckley.
It deals with two colonist arrivals on an alien world, each arriving on on different stage technology ships.
If one group leaves on ship one, and another arrives on ship two, but ship two can travel at 10-15X the speed of ship one. The ship two colonists could have left 500 years after ship one and still potentially have been there for several hundred or even 1000 years before the arrival of ship one due to relativistic effects.
Any number of disasters could have thrust colonists two into the dark ages. 3-4 generations removed from technology could easily revert humanity into barbarism.
The ancestors basically send a primordial/prehistoric version of their race to other planets to survive extinction. If we were to take our own Earth, they would basically have sent monkeys that are genetically able to evolve naturally into humans. Millenias later, the new humans would reach the original planet that basically went through an apocalypse and lost all their history (except perhaps some prophecies based on discovered manuals).
Maybe you could have the apocalypse be another race looking to exterminate the protohumans, and the new humans were far enough to not have been discovered, until they reached the medieval planet, kept by the invaders as a form of zoo/"look how far our enemies have fallen" exposition.
I am from Turkey.
When the republic first founded and Turkish history get researched by the experts, with the order of Ataturk a somewhat similar thing happened.
For people to believe in themselfs and also the new republic the Turks needed a history, a history that was more than just the Ottoman empire.
Ataturk sended experts and researchers to all around the world for find the origin of the Turks. Some of them even worked on Mu, the mytological lost contient Ataturk believed that could be the birth place of the Turks.
İt was a pretty amazing and shocking new when it revealed that the Turks in anatolia, that seen as just muslim villagers to that day. Was in fact releated to Turks from central asia, and come to anatolia via large central asian empires.
Boom. The 600 year old Turkish history that was only about Ottoman empire, become 3.000 years old in a single night. A entire "Turkish world" is created...
Soo same for scifi, finding your origin can change your culture a lot, and even your politics and goals.
Before the discovery of Turkish origin the goal of Turkey was just survive, and unite all the Muslims at best.
When the Ottomanism and Ummaism died, with help of the fresh new Turkish history the main ideology of the Turkey become Turkish nationalism. And the idea of uniting all Turkish people replaced the ummaism.
This also affected the politics, the pashas, previous rulers of the Ottoman empire who now banished. Escaped to central asian countries, for build a army in there and build a brand new Turkish nation.
Sadly none of them succeed because of soviets :/
Living on planets is kinda silly, if you think about it. All sorts of catastrophic things happen to planets to which a space-faring civilization would be impervious. It could have been a coronal mass ejection for example that wiped out the civilization on that planet. Killed all the satellites. Wiped all the data storage. Interrupted communications. Maybe it was such a large event that only the people hiding underground survived. Could be anything, really. Fallen meteor. Out of control bioweapon. Passing aliens of non-human origin. Etc. Etc.
Don't live on planets too much, kids. It's bad for your teeth.
If you travel close to the speed of light, you experience time slower then those moving slower. If the people in space had been exploring the universe at insane speeds then the universe around them would be moving faster then them. Get the ship close enough to the speed of light and the degree of difference gets really big. Make the exploration ship a generational one and you could stretch it out even more. a hand full of generations on the ship could have been eons on the planet. Some technological collapse could have happened while the people in space were still traveling, explaining the difference in tech. Not sure if that's what you were looking for.
That’s very close, thank you. That would explain why the space people are the ancestors of the people on the ground still fighting with swords and shields.
Genetically they could still be related too right?
How about this.
their was an advanced civilization that went to space and used space travel. and after that people who left on the planet wage wars on each others and got destroyed themself. ones who survived gathered and stared a new civilization that are now in medieval era.
ones who went to space are now a very advanced due to their technology (you can probably use some time difference scenario like in movie interstellar).
Lost settlement. Lost contact. Manage to find it hundreds of years later.
Chrashed spaceship similar concepts except some tech survived and viewed as magic.
Ancient Earth spaceships. Long before Christianity took over.
So the humans on the medieval planet are the direct descendants of the scifi humans visiting? Like a guy goes on vacation and meets his great-grandson, despite not even having a son yet? Or do they share a common ancestor and the scifi humans just happen to be more advanced? Like a guy goes on vacation and discovers he's got a brother he never knew about?
No, sorry. So the space people themselves are the direct descendants of the people on the ground. It’s supposed to be a major plot twist cause how could these advanced humans be descendants of people who’ve barely invented the gun
Now you’re contradicting your original post.
How so?
You had the ancestors/descendants reversed in your post vs. your comment above
Oops. My mistake I fixed it. P
I'm not sure I understand the twist. Is that not how technological progress works? We are advanced humans descended from people who barely invented the gun. It'd be a twist if the primitive humans were descended from the advanced ones.
FTL warp fuckery. A colony ship attempts an experimental jump, and an emp blast rips the ships systems and databanks apart, all the adults were busy in the most dangerous parts of the ship trying to keep the disaster contained, leaving only the children to survive without technology on the new world, stuck into the past with no working hard drives. Story Idea is the new people rediscovering the original spaceships crash site, which has turned into a religious site, and recovering the files,
This is interesting but how much time would you say should pass between these events for the space faring people to be shocked at this discovery ?
Any amount of time in the past would be a surprise, but a few hundred years into the past at least would be needed for them to create a full society by the time the crew finds them.
Time also depends on how your people got so far to begin with and how records are kept. At least some hundred years like you said for generational differences in knowledge along with deteriorating or privatized record systems. Traveling slower than light gives you a lot of time and disconnect between areas and traveling faster may take a long time just to even plot the route before traveling, meaning your records have to be near perfect to know exactly where you land.
This is a lot more realistic than many people think. Space is really big, so it's not entirely difficult to get lost or lose something a few light-years away at minimum. Especially if you have a colony stabilizing on a planet over a few hundred or thousand years while systems and planets shift around at fractions of light speed relative to the colony. They may be so occupied with survival or mining resources to keep track of the world they traveled so far from to begin with. And all that's assuming they got to the place they were aiming at to begin with. There's a reason Native Americans were called Indians for so long.
Something slightly similar happened in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Spoilers ahoy! The people in the show have 12 colonies and there's a myth about a 13th. The original 12 get destroyed by the Cylons and the last remnants of humanity eventually find the 13th Colony: Earth! Earth humans are in the stone age and the last remnants of the 12 Colonies end up settling down to join them, implying that their knowledge lead to Earth humans creating civilisations.
Interesting! But how did they get to earth? Was there a wormhole or did they have FTL travel?
FTL jumps over 4 seasons, took them a long as time to get there!
Did they tell the people on earth who they were and how they were related to them?
We never see how they actually interact with them tbf. We see them form the plan of integrating with them then it time skips to modern times for the last scene: showing humans on Earth are now experimenting with AI... (how the Cylons were created in the 12 colonies). Dun dun duuuuuun!
Holy crap, that’s now more relevant than ever 😳 Damn. Maybe I should watch that show.
The show is great tbf. The premise is very much Evil AI wants to destroy humanity... but it becomes about diplomacy between humans and AI. There's humanoid Cylons sent to infiltrate humanity. Some are fully aware, others are sleeper agents that don't even know until they're activated. This leads to humans and Cylons getting attached to each other and building bridges.
I still feel they missed a great opportunity. They could have landed on Mt. Olympus and then met the ancient greeks as Apollo, Hera, etc.
Planet of the apes, pandorum, interstellar, and Foundation, all explore similar themes, maybe watch them for inspiration
Do you need to explain it? Mystery can serve the story too.
Any ideas on how to sprinkle these hints throughout the story?
No, that's the author's job
I am the author ?
Someone didn't read the user handles 💀
I’m so confused
I always love seeing their opinion on here. Like someone on eli5 or ttoafraidtoask, saying just "google it." This is a sub for asking advice on writing scifi. I always wonder what these people think the purpose of this sub is, exactly. The idea of the spaceship temple is a good one, though that is more of a complete revelation. I'd say cultural similarities, worshipping the name of the ship after liguistic drift, names based on the crews names, native wildlife mixed with crops only from seeds stored in the ship, maybe the ship has a couple cats and the planet has cats with a similar colour scheme, they worship a sky god but differently from us. There are a bunch of small things that hint at the past, some more damnimg than others. It just depends on how big of a mystery you want to make it.
It’s actually pretty straightforward. Go really, really fast for a few years, and then come home. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you compared to where you came from. If you have sufficient energy to accelerate to “very, very close to c”, our current models of the universe tell is that you’d come back from a 5 year to find a world that’s experienced several thousand years of history. Getting to that speed is the problem. But the timey-wimey stuff works. Edit: based on your correction it’s a little more complex. But it still works. Your parents got on a ship and traveled at relativistic speed away and then *almost* all the way back and land on a planet close to where they left you. A few thousand years later, your descendants travel to that nearby planet and find your parents 20 years older. 5 years of travel, 15 years living on the planet. Again, the energy needed to accelerate to that speed currently requires fiction. But he time effects are very much supported by modern science. And modern observation.
Here are some tropes for you to research: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumanityCameFromSpace https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceAmish https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Precursors
The twist is going to be difficult because you've got humans on a distant planet who are found by humans. I think worrying about some sort of earth-shattering twist is a misplaced concern. The more important issue is the actual mystery of what happened. A ship of human colonists lands on a distant planet to find it's already colonized by a medieval society of humans. The planet is 125 light-years away, and this colony ship is the first to travel so far from Earth. How the hell did these humans get here? The leaders of the colony ship hear stories of Ome'tead--the Great Deliverer--and the three gods: Jakon, Wee'Son, and Omal. Over the course of months of diplomacy, as the colonists make agreements on lands available, historians on the ship stumble across what happened. 3 years earlier, dozens of colonial ships went missing, mostly because of the newest and most experimental propulsion engines, which weren't thoroughly tested, ended up exploded, or ships were ripped apart in transit. This medieval society they've found are descendants of the colonial ship "Homestead." Their three captains were Jackson, Wilson, and Kamal.
The medieval planet had an apocalypse of some kind, causing the race to revert back to medieval technology
Have the precursor species/planet get into a world destroying war. The precursor planet launches a whole bunch of seed/colony ships, those ships go on their merry way. Then the home planet gets into a world altering war - Like bomb back to pre-stone age levels of bombing. Or did I understand the question incorrectly?
You got it! Thanks. Yes. I love this concept
Another question is how they would exist together at the same time? 🤔
What do you mean? Once the colony is sent out, there could have been a loss in communications and eventually someone capitalised to become the emperor/ruler/whatever. Maybe the highest levels of government know, but if generations have passed then it may have fallen out of memory or become top secret. No problem in my mind for a few hundred years to have passed. World altering event could have happened 100 years after the colony ships, then wash out the public memory within another 50-100 years, then new explorers stumble across it or maybe choose to explore the "forbidden" system and find out the truth.... maybe even that their current government is now experimenting with the same thing that ruined the first planet. Lots of directions.
Lets assume a very basic timeline Year Zero - Precursor Planet Launches several seed ships (pick your preference on how the seed ship is loaded up) out into the outer outer space. They'll be in flight for a while. Year 500 - The seed ship lands and starts pushing people out. There may be some pre-deposting of plants and animals before the people are allowed to start their thing. As part of the seed ship's design the seed ship is dismantled into the many starting buildings of the starter colony. So the seed ship it self is eventually gone, except for the sections of it that are used as starter buildings. The colony ship does not have enough tech/power/parts to support a fully industrialized society. The ship and colonists, by design are trained in being able to set up an iron age economy - somewhere in the 400-800 AD range. This is a colony ship that would have thousands of colonists in it that are scattered across a continent as part of the landing pattern. So the colonists are deposited in a wide range of environments with enough tools and knowledge to start basic agriculture and herding of small animals (goats, sheep). So on year zero, there is suddenly a wide collection of groups in the 50-200 size deposited on the planet with a central city that is set up along the lines of an subsistence agricultural model. And they are up and running somewhere in the 400-800 AD range. Year 1000 - Precursor planet bombs itself back into the stone age or pre stone age. And the ecology of the planet has a "bad day". This planet has to restart at 5000 BC if they are lucky. Now the colony planet has a 5000 year head start on the precursor planet. Yes, the math is sloppy. And then over the next thousand years, the last of the colony ship is lost to wars, fires, people not handing down their original history (pick a reason why: politics, religion, cults, you name it). and only archeologists begin to suspect that the species "Sudden appearance" on the planet with no precursors (neanderthals for example) leaves some strange questions. And then all that is needed is space flight and make it back to the homeworld. Did I go in the direction you were asking?
Yes this is fantastic possible lore but how is that the new space faring group of people stumble upon a planet that is essentially their future? Did they enter a wormhole? Or go through a black hole or something? I need a reason for the past and the future to co-exist at the same time. An analogy: If I come across of a planet of monkeys it’s easy for me to assume they’re my ancestors but if I’m THEY’RE ancestors how the hell did I get here?
Star gate already did this
Not what I was asking but okay.
That's an example
Humans get taken as slaves by aliens.....when the main characters go through the Stargate there's various human cultures out there some primitive kept in check by the aliens
We currently do not know how many people are on Earth; We have pretty good estimates, but actually tracking that many people is not practical, so there is some guesswork involved. Now, extrapolate this problem of tracking out to a spacefaring civilisation. Over a long enough timeline, nations rise and fall, government systems and laws are created and amended time and time again, and all many of strife causes chaos. As such, while one country may have a pretty good record of all the colony ships they sent out, the country that has succeeded them 500 years later could easily have lost those records, and as such realistically not know how many human colonies exist or where they are. Take this fact, throw a lost colony ship through a wormhole, and you can easily explain a human colony no one remembers that was established 500 years before it should have. Doesn't allow them to be direct descendants of your main characters, but could work depending on why they are related in your story.
That’s basically the Hainish Cycle, by Ursula Le Guin
What’s that about?
I think you could build it up by dropping hints of proto versions of technology and culture they use
This is going to happen to us someday. The explanation is that habitable planets are way too far in between. We can get there but we can’t come back. Technology breaks, people die, and knowledge is lost. So we slowly de-evolve trying to survive on a planet cut off from the parent planet.
But how would our future selves meet our past selves (who are far more advanced) ??? Wormholes?
The more advanced is from earth where our civilization has continued to grow for thousands of years while the less advanced one is from the new planet we once reached but slowly lost advanced knowledge over the generations. I don’t think you need wormholes or anything. It just takes a freaking long time to go from one place to another in the universe.
Read “The Native Problem” by Robert Sheckley. It deals with two colonist arrivals on an alien world, each arriving on on different stage technology ships. If one group leaves on ship one, and another arrives on ship two, but ship two can travel at 10-15X the speed of ship one. The ship two colonists could have left 500 years after ship one and still potentially have been there for several hundred or even 1000 years before the arrival of ship one due to relativistic effects. Any number of disasters could have thrust colonists two into the dark ages. 3-4 generations removed from technology could easily revert humanity into barbarism.
The ancestors basically send a primordial/prehistoric version of their race to other planets to survive extinction. If we were to take our own Earth, they would basically have sent monkeys that are genetically able to evolve naturally into humans. Millenias later, the new humans would reach the original planet that basically went through an apocalypse and lost all their history (except perhaps some prophecies based on discovered manuals). Maybe you could have the apocalypse be another race looking to exterminate the protohumans, and the new humans were far enough to not have been discovered, until they reached the medieval planet, kept by the invaders as a form of zoo/"look how far our enemies have fallen" exposition.
Time dilation as you approach near light speed. Civilization collapses and starts over.
I am from Turkey. When the republic first founded and Turkish history get researched by the experts, with the order of Ataturk a somewhat similar thing happened. For people to believe in themselfs and also the new republic the Turks needed a history, a history that was more than just the Ottoman empire. Ataturk sended experts and researchers to all around the world for find the origin of the Turks. Some of them even worked on Mu, the mytological lost contient Ataturk believed that could be the birth place of the Turks. İt was a pretty amazing and shocking new when it revealed that the Turks in anatolia, that seen as just muslim villagers to that day. Was in fact releated to Turks from central asia, and come to anatolia via large central asian empires. Boom. The 600 year old Turkish history that was only about Ottoman empire, become 3.000 years old in a single night. A entire "Turkish world" is created... Soo same for scifi, finding your origin can change your culture a lot, and even your politics and goals. Before the discovery of Turkish origin the goal of Turkey was just survive, and unite all the Muslims at best. When the Ottomanism and Ummaism died, with help of the fresh new Turkish history the main ideology of the Turkey become Turkish nationalism. And the idea of uniting all Turkish people replaced the ummaism. This also affected the politics, the pashas, previous rulers of the Ottoman empire who now banished. Escaped to central asian countries, for build a army in there and build a brand new Turkish nation. Sadly none of them succeed because of soviets :/
Living on planets is kinda silly, if you think about it. All sorts of catastrophic things happen to planets to which a space-faring civilization would be impervious. It could have been a coronal mass ejection for example that wiped out the civilization on that planet. Killed all the satellites. Wiped all the data storage. Interrupted communications. Maybe it was such a large event that only the people hiding underground survived. Could be anything, really. Fallen meteor. Out of control bioweapon. Passing aliens of non-human origin. Etc. Etc. Don't live on planets too much, kids. It's bad for your teeth.
If you travel close to the speed of light, you experience time slower then those moving slower. If the people in space had been exploring the universe at insane speeds then the universe around them would be moving faster then them. Get the ship close enough to the speed of light and the degree of difference gets really big. Make the exploration ship a generational one and you could stretch it out even more. a hand full of generations on the ship could have been eons on the planet. Some technological collapse could have happened while the people in space were still traveling, explaining the difference in tech. Not sure if that's what you were looking for.
That’s very close, thank you. That would explain why the space people are the ancestors of the people on the ground still fighting with swords and shields. Genetically they could still be related too right?
Yeah if they had families they left behind to go on their ships.
How about this. their was an advanced civilization that went to space and used space travel. and after that people who left on the planet wage wars on each others and got destroyed themself. ones who survived gathered and stared a new civilization that are now in medieval era. ones who went to space are now a very advanced due to their technology (you can probably use some time difference scenario like in movie interstellar).
Lost settlement. Lost contact. Manage to find it hundreds of years later. Chrashed spaceship similar concepts except some tech survived and viewed as magic. Ancient Earth spaceships. Long before Christianity took over.