Food For Thought: Colony Ships
I’ve been thinking about colony ships lately, in no small part because I’ve been playing an excessive amount of “I Was A Teenage Exocolonist” and in no small part because I’m making a character that is the descendant of an interplanetary colonization effort. There are plenty of examples of sleeper ships and colony ships of all kinds, from video games to television to that one really creepy movie. So trying to munch on all of this, a thought came to me.
Assume the following are all true:
Mankind has the society and technology to build a colony ship
Mankind has the technology to equip this ship with some sort of stasis/sleep technology
Mankind has discovered a world that can sustain human life
Mankind has the ability and determination to send ten thousand people
Mankind builds the ship, puts ten thousand people to sleep, and launches it to this planet.
Assuming all of that, here’s my question: should children be included among the passengers? Is it necessary or even feasible to start a colony by having some percentage of the population be children, where the alternative is that only “healthy” adults constitute the entire manifest?
I know children would be an essential requirement for a generational ship, but specific to the case of sleeper ships...would children be an asset or a liability?
