Re: Generation Ships
 

If old farts try to become kings or something, and refuse to let go of their "power", the generation ship's mission is doomed.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Well not necessarily. A society could survive to it's destination under those conditions.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The "younger" people would probably be greatly outnumbered (given that life extension combined with the need to maintain zero population growth produces very few children per generation). But of course cryogenics isn't available at TL 8 so that's a moot point.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The ship will still arrive somewhere with some people alive onboard. They can decide if the ironfist government will still rule planetside. I'm curious if a "mission" is still on their mind.

If there were too many revolts on the ship, I don't know if their mission would be a success.

Re: Generation Ships
 

A generation ship's mission is getting to it's destination with people on board.

Ironfist governments seem as likely to follow other aims of the original colonists as any other. Especially if it is a gerontocracy.

Re: Generation Ships
 

If you freeze a corpse, of course you've already failed. However, it might be possible to treat a living mammal in such a way that they are not fatally damaged by the cooling process or the re-warming process.

As for accommodations in general, if it is a near-c craft it may be practical to gradually extend living space backward in the shelter of the ship's wake.

Other useful preoccupations may leverage the generation ship application's plentiful resources of vacuum, radiation, and isolation with its unique ones including its position in space, its exact personnel, and its relative velocity. I'd say various kinds of instruments for astronomical observations would have a high priority, including long-term studies of the solar system's neighborhood at high and low energies augmented by the doppler shift.

Aha! Maintaining some sort of communications with other generation ships directly or by earth relay, to exchange problems encountered and solutions tried.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yes, I mentioned that. However, a fleet of ships gives you several different types of redundency. This would make for a better safety margin in a score of different ways. Any group of planners building a generation starship is going to be very focused on having a nice wide safety margin because they'll never know how wide a safety margin they need.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It matter not wheather or not it is possible, we don't know how to do it now. Moreover, we have no proof that, if FTL travel is possible, humans will figure out how to do it in the next thousand years. So it is of marginal interest to this thread.

However read Far Centaurus by A.E. van Vogt.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Recipes for cheez Whiz are trivial. Fine wines and cheeses, exotic honeys, Brazil nuts, those are far harder.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The definition of "Younger" would change. If it became normal to live to the age of 180 years, then 70 year olds would be young whipper snappers. People would be required to attend school until they at least 45.