[detritus]

The difference there being that at the end of your day, having spent it masoning, you could leave the cathedral and go back to your family and have a walk in the fields and drink and be merry with people loved and new. The project wasn't the entiriety of your existence, it was merely the means to pay for it.

Unless we have generational ships the size of small countries, I'm not sure the human brain - unaided and non-forcedly evolved to do so - would be able to handle essential incarceration in a series of metal tubes for its own and its descendents existences.

[allannienhuis]

Generational ships would of course need to be very large, but I doubt it would need to be as large as you think. And it doesn't need to look like metal tubes. Many northern cities have extensive underground or between-building pedestrian bridges and large shopping malls, etc that can provide quite a lot of variety and the feeling of open and green spaces that is pretty attractive during long cold winters. Whether that's 'enough' to avoid mental health issues in a permanent setting is of course a different story, but that's just one of thousands of problems that would need to be solved before that ever comes close to reality :)

[detritus]

Yeah, this is the problem though - ironically highlighted by my still-maintained love and hope for Starship: Beyond Earth orbit, the energy requirement to move even small tens of tons of useful life-sustaining mass is incredibly expensive.

Like, to get a useful amount of people to Mars would be... the wealth of a first world nation for tens of years. Even using nuclear engines.

A generational megaship travelling at some small percentage of c to a nearby useful star (not even the nearest ones, which are all a bit shit)?

There's just nothing within our current projected reality that could even begin to accomodate that possibility.

Never mind the fact you'd need redunancy, and at least a few hundred years of testing to ensure that whatever mega project you could ultimately send wouldn't simply get vaporised halfway through, from realities unknown.

[forgotaccount3]

Knowing the variety of lives lived on earth as we speak, I'm fairly certain the first space born generation would adapt to it.

Provided the Earthlings that were sent along don't let their incarceration induced insanity infect the youngin's.

[detritus]

Maybe I'm over-thinking things. It seems like a lot of people's existences essentially revolve around a pocket-sized glowing rectangle.

Future AI and a database of all of humanity's experience before launch might be enough to keep the generational populace amused and distracted for the entiriety of their meagre, trapped existence... .