automatic womb (Score 1)

Sending such huge ark does not make sense. Realistically (unless some magic drive gets invented) it cheaper and more reliable to send some ship filled with lots of sperm and eggs. When it arrives to its destination , some automated womb factory will start producing babies in batches of say 100. These newborns will be raised by robots that behave more or less like people. In addition babies can be fed with soap operas, movies etc so that are not complete weirdos. You need some gravity for raising kids but it can be achieved by either landing the factory on some planed or spinning it. In the later case you dont really need big volume of habitable space because there would be planets around where these first guys can travel to take a brake. The advantages of this approach is that you need much smaller ship and that during the coasting stage very few systems will be on (pretty much none, just a timer to fire an engine at the right moment). Eggs and sperm must be kept at subfreezing temperature anyway. So the only technical problem would be is awakening all systems after say 1000 years of inactivity. It is difficult but not impossible. The disadvantage is that the first batch of babies would have to grow without contacts with grownups. You can get around this by loading up ships with educational movies (carefully selected by scientist) and life like robots that would be able to emulate humans to some extent (AI is bad at the moment but i believe it will become better). More important is that later generations would become more and more normal. Of course the people of a new colony around some other star will be different but they will be humans to some extent anyway. It is not even clear who would be more different from us a society of people that lived in a closed space for 1000 years or a bunch of babies raised by machines but infused with our current culture. To select educational programs it is even possible to do experiments in solar system by starting baby factory on a moon and making experimental babies believe that they are alone. It is cruel but universe is not a nice place. There is no way humans can travel through space unchanged. I believe the guy who will colonize another planets are going to be very different from us psychologically and probably physically.