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Originally Posted by johndallman
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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?
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The Solar System's Oort Cloud is known to extend halfway to Alpha Centauri, and at the point you'd meet their Oort Cloud. If it's a hazard, then it must have useful supplies of matter.
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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.
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One reason why Isaac Asimov thought that the descendants of Space Habitat settlers would be the ones to do interstellar journeys, they already live that way. And groups of ideologically focused people often want to hang in like minded crowds.
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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.
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I asked about innovations that would make starflight more likely. Still, the Atlantic was crossed before it was economically practical.