The problem comes when it’s time to decelerate the ship. If my great-great-grandfather told me to push this mystical button that’ll change my entire world for my grandchildren ... would I even want to push it? Would my grandchildren even understand what was happening?
Leaving aside the question of automation (does HAL 9000 get to push the button?), there really isn't any alternative. The mission as a whole is fighting the Poisson distribution of encountering random objects in space. The probability of hitting one is very low but not zero. Unless the system is magnetic-ramjet powered, the fuel is finite. Ultimately the choice is between stopping at your predetermined destination or waiting until a rock turns your entire world into a sparse cloud of floating debris. It's like the "what do we do if Earth gets hit by a meteor" question but much, much more acute.
We trivialy understand the concept by reading a vague sci-fi scenario of it in the gp post. Wouldn't the travellers have movies, books and stuff and understand the concept of planet life too?
It would have to be relatable? So instead of talking about planets, it might call it a giant spaceship orbiting a single star for billions of years. One so big you can’t even walk in a single lifetime with water reservoirs so big you can’t see the other side of them. Even with pictures and movies, it would be like looking at pictures and movies of the 18:00s today. It’s cool to see, but the people in them are dressed weird, their problems so foreign to us, and their speech barely makes sense. Instead, they’ll be watching “Wives In Corridor 84” and all with slang we can’t even begin to predict. Add another thousand years to that, and there’ll have to be translators who can convey the original text/voices of the originals. They’ll even have to translate how to do survival, which nobody will have actual experience with, so they might even view it as religious acts that few people will believe. Like, why would you need to learn how to build a shelter when youve had one passed down through generations? When we stop at this spacecraft orbiting a star, and transfer to it, surely there would be shelter on a spacecraft?
Sure I think I agree with you but I believe that the travel itself is the main issue not like figuring out how to make a fishing rod and setup an anarchist commune when you arrive (assuming habitable planet).
I.e. some 'Lord of the Flies' bottleneck where there are no wise adults to convey culture etc on the ship.
