Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
=Since THS has canonical Space Colonies and asteriod settlements, even in the Deep Beyond, then there are plenty of people who'd be glad to get on a generation starship.
One, why wouldn't the third generation space colonists, if they thought it reasonably safe, treat it as a serious option?
Two, what technologies would be the key ones to start Star Travel in THS?
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A generation ship, as compared to a bunch of Deep Beyond ships and stations, has several disadvantages:
You can't replenish any resources. In the deep beyond, there are asteroids and comets that you can use. There aren't a lot of them, but they exist, and are on known trajectories. On a generation ship, Oort cloud objects are a collision hazard, rather than anything you can exploit, because you're going far too fast to pick them up - and dodging them is hard. So if you got anything wrong in your ecosystem setup and reserve supplies, you're stuck. You might be able to escape by uploading and lasering yourself back to Sol system, but will anybody be listening?
You're stuck with the same set of people, and their descendants, for the rest of your life. It's
dull, especially since light-lag to the rest of humanity is steadily increasing. You can't go anywhere else.
With THS engines, any interstellar journey will take many generations. Even if you're confident you and your companions will stick to the mission, how about your sixth-generation descendants? You can't stick around to supervise them: there is limited life-support capacity.