Moral Debate ahead!

"victoriatangoman" wrote:
> The unmanned missions may have DNA that is
computer encoded and the DNA may be constituted
when planetfall... is achieved.
> Then the sperm and eggs are combined, the fetuses
artificially gestated, birthed, reared by robots until they
reach maturity and can continue the lifecycle in a more
traditional manner.

Doesn't sound impossible, just unlikely. Every colonization effort
in the past has had benefit for those investing their money/effort
and time into it. Even if they didn't directly benefit from it, they
could see that they were opening up a new frontier for their
descendents. The organizers of this type of mission may
intellectually "see" such an opening, but I have to wonder why
they'd do it, besides an impulse to simply spread life across the
galaxy. Cultists or alternate society followers come to mind
(Beware strange memes in the children's education. I can't see
many other motivations behind this).

It doesn't seem like a colonization scheme to attract much
interest in the people back home, so there wouldn't be much
likelyhood of subsidization.

Far more likely is the interstellar nomad colonization. They're
assumed to be space dwellers, with generations of experience
in space habitats. They won't fret about long trip times -they're
not trying to get anywhere specific, and they're not going to fret
about the moral dilemma of raising children who will spend all
their lives on a voyage, only to birth a new generation who will
also know only the infinite dark between the stars.
The zen approach to interstellar migrations: "The destination
isn't important, just live the journey".
This type of migration also doesn't demand too juch of
technology: just standard space colony maintenance and _BIG_
mirrors to catch starlight while munching on interstellar cometary
bodies. No instant children, no contained/controlled fusion, no
nanotech or FTL necessary.
Macrolife to the extreme. They raise children en-route, and when
they're ready to bud off a new colony, they've got access to nice
tasty chunks of primordial matter to build it with.
They're simply raising children in the manner they know: eating
comets to repair and grow the colony. They're not forcing their
children into anything unconventional, just the same life their
ancestors knew, even if they were only a few light hours away
from the nearest humans, instead of light years.