100-Year Starship some way off

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:57 PM, Al Globus wrote:
(...)
> Suppose you've been living in orbital colonies for 50 generations.
> How much does it matter if you are near Sol or not? Some, but not
> that much. You could live a perfectly wonderful life traveling
> between Sol and Alpha Centuri, even if you don't survive the whole
> journey. All your friends and family are with you, just as if you
> were orbiting Sol. It would probably be good to go in groups of space
> settlements, say 5 or 6, in case something goes wrong with one. You'd
> need some population controls until you get to Alpha Centuri. Once
> there, assuming there are some asteroids, population growth can be
> absorbed by new settlements.
(...)

Also, provided an adequate source of energy (either fusion or really,
really big pieces of reflexing fabric to catch distant sunlight) a
space settlement could live in interstellar space as well. It is not
exactly empty - there are comets (and, in much rarer occasions, even
rogue planets) here and there, which could be used as a source for
resupplying raw materials and building new settlements. So maybe space
colonists don't really need to go all the way to Alpha Centauri, they
can just slowly "diffuse", replicating habitats/increasing population
from interstellar object to insterstellar object, and eventually that
wave would reach other systems. In a poor analogy, it would be like
people colonizing islands in an ocean and eventually reaching other
continents...