Imagine the political implications of choosing who will go onto that ship, as well (assuming the intent is to colonize the world and fill it up with humans)
Would they actually want to go? If we are talking about a 1000 year voyage, and not assuming a major breakthrough in cryogenics or longevity, signing up for that trip means you are going to spend the rest of your life on that ship, mostly outside but near our solar system.
I don't see that being particularly enticing to rich elites.
I don't remember were I read this so cannot properly give credit, but I saw an interesting variation on the generation ship.
The conventional approach is to send a large crew, whose job is to operate the ship, reproduce, and raise their kids to take their place, generation after generation until the ship arrives and they become colonists.
The variation would be to start with a much smaller crew and large collection of frozen embryos. You make use of the embryos when you arrive to build up the population to full colony size.
The advantage of this approach is that since there are fewer people during the trip, you have more capacity for supplies. You can better equip the ship to deal with unforeseen problems.
For instance, suppose taking the embryo approach, you can get it down to a crew of 6. You'll have 12 when the crew is overlapping with their kids. Call it 18 if the crew's parents have not yet died when the crew has their kids.
Suppose each crew member needs 3000 calories per day. Then on a 1000 year voyage, you need 18 people x 3000 calories/person/day x 365.2422 days/year x 1000 years = 19.7 billion calories.
I have a protein bar by my desk at the moment. It is 190 calories, and is about 125 mm x 30m x 20mm = 75000 mm^3. So, 19.7 billion calories x 1 bar/190 calories x 75000 mm^3/bar gives a volume of 7.8 x 10^12 mm^3. Stored in a cubic storage container, this would require a container with an interior length, width, and height of 19.8 m.
The "small active crew, everyone else a frozen embryo" generation ship could start out with enough food on board to last the entire voyage, and so would not need to raise food onboard. That alone should greatly simplify things, and greatly improve the chances of making it. Of course they probably would still grow food, but now it would be for added variety and flavor, not a necessity.
(I'm not going to do the calculation to see if they could start with enough water for the whole trip. Water is very bulky and we use a lot of it, so my totally uneducated guess is that it would take too much space. However, I believe that efficient water recycling in a closed environment is something we know how to do very well, and so water should not be a problem).
The problem is that these people are going to be living out their entire lives on the ship. While you can maintain genetic viability by supplementing from frozen stock. Maintaining a viable culture and a society that the caretakers will actually want to live in is another thing. Forcing anyone to live a culturally and socially impoverished life is cruel.
I would suspect you would want to have at least 10-20 people in each 5 year age bracket. Then people will have a fighting chance at developing their own social lives and maybe even their own culture.
That's a lot of generations of inbreeding before the approx three descendant females of childbearing age get to unfreeze the embryos and start widening the gene pool though, assuming they're up for the task of being the surrogate mother for dozens of other people's kids...
tbh I think storing enough food for the journey is going to be the least of all problems
You could do a mix of crew replacement by breeding and crew replacement by reviving frozen embryos to keep the genetic diversity up.
Or maybe an all female crew that does crew replacement either using frozen sperm or frozen embryos, and selects for female replacements.
When the ship arrives and it is time to start the colony, I don't think you'd try to grow to thousands of people quickly. I think you'd want to go slow early to make sure you understand your new environment. Maybe 12 years out, the crew switches from 1:1 replacement to 3:1. Sticking with 6 as the main crew, plus possibly up to 6 of the crew's parents still alive, plus 18 kids. I think you'd want to spend a few years based on the ship studying the planet and conducting research expeditions to figure out if the planet really is suitable for colonization and figure out dangers that unmanned probes and study from Earth may have missed. When that is done, the kids should be 18 or so, and you can start the colony with them and with their grandparents, with the main crew staying with the ship to provide support. That would give 18-24 people on planet attempting to live there, but not needing to be self-supporting yet because of the ship.
In a few years, the colony population should start naturally growing. If the babies do OK, people can be encouraged to have bigger families, with one or two per family being from the frozen embryos and the rest produced the old fashioned way.
> tbh I think storing enough food for the journey is going to be the least of all problems
Yeah, there will be a lot of problems.
Many of the hard ones will not even be technical. For instance, you'd want to have some way to stop from happening something that happened to a colony in Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe. When the colony ship arrived the crew decided to set up the colony so that the crew was the ruling class and the colonists essentially serfs.
The ship in that Niven story wasn't a generation ship. Crew and colonists were cryogenically suspended for the trip, with the crew being automatically revived when the ship arrived. I supposed one advantage of the traditional generation ship is that it has some protection against that scenario because during the trip everyone is crew.
