Rikki Tikki Traveller said:
Not sure why you need people "in their dying years".
Old people are not very physically capable in an exploration setting.
Let me explain, the process of being frozen for 1000 years involves dying, and these are not only old people, but also young people who are terminally ill, for which the technology does not yet exist to save them, all we can do is freeze them after they die. You are not going to get a young healthy person to volunteer to freeze himself, that would be technically suicide, as we don't have the technology yet to revive people who are frozen, but think of this, we also don't yet have the technology to build a starship. There is a real world organization that specializes in freezing dead people for later revival called the Alcore Institute.
Rikki Tikki Traveller said:
Standard Traveller characters (30-38 years old) make much more sense, or even a mixture.
Volunteers for such a mission would likely fill a spaceship (see the recent applications for a one-way mission to Mars). Couples would be common as would families (perhaps).
Maybe not. Imagine a future where there is a starship, but its fusion engines can only reach a maximum of 1% of the speed of light, and this only after a long slow acceleration with a fusion powered ion drive. Chemical rockets boost the starship to Solar escape velocity, and once on an escape trajectory, the slow but highly efficient ion engines accelerate the starship gradually over 440 years to 3,000 kilometers per second, and over another 440 years those same engines slow the ship down to match the velocity of Alpha Centauri. The ship is not a generation ship, that would be too expensive, all the organization can afford is a modest sized starship, not a worldship. Lets suppose they also have the technology to revive frozen dead people, the technique is not 100%, and its not even certain that they could be revived after 880 years. Anyone living volunteering for such a mission in the future can not be certain of ever being revived, they might be volunteering for an early death, but if a person is dying anyway, it might be a lot easier to get him or her to volunteer, if you give him or her hope that he might live again and explore another planet perhaps. Old Age is one cause of death, but there are many others like cancer, heart disease and so forth. Say an organization such as Alcore approaches a dying patient and offers to freeze them after death on the condition that they volunteer for a future interstellar mission which may occur when the technology develops. There is no guarantee that any such patient will be successfully revived, but since they are dying anyway, they have nothing to lose.
Rikki Tikki Traveller said:
Overall, nothing wrong with your concept. You could make it really interesting and have TWO habitable planets (one around the yellow star and one around the orange star). Different habitability levels (the one around the orange star is likely tidally locked). Other worlds to explore, pretty cool idea for a hard-science type of setting.
Some of the revived people will be digital persons, that is their frozen bodies are sliced and scanned one microscopic layer at a time and the information fed into a computer, there a computer constructs a 3 dimensional model of the deceased person down to the cellular level, and within the simulation it replaces each frozen cell with a simulated living cell, and then runs a simulation of a living person with the deceased's memories and personality, the simulation begins on the first day of the mission, when it launches from Earth orbit, the simulation is run at 1/1000th of real time, so for every 1000 seconds, one second of time is simulated within the computer, so the 1000 year journey only seems to take 1 year for the digital people in the simulation. Again most people don't want to be frozen and taken apart cell by cell to be scanned into the computer, because there is the question of whether it will actually be them or only a copy that thinks its them, most people are not willing to do this if there is the option that they can go on living in their current bodies without this uncertainty. Being already dead or going to die removes this problem. If you know you are going to die and there is no cure, wouldn't you be ore willing to volunteer for this that if you were perfectly healthy and can go on living, but if you choose this, you would first have to die, because freezing you kills you. After all if you are frozen, your heat stops beating and there is no brain activity, that means you would be technically dead!
You may have noticed the trip only takes 880 years, not the full 1000. The other 120 years are used to terraform the planet so that its habitable for humans. The atmosphere needs to be modified a little so humans can breath it, forests are grown and other revived animals and plants from Earth are placed on the planet's surface. During the 880 years outbound the Digital Crew continually receives downloads from Earth updating on various technological advances that occur during the outbound mission. Upon arrival the starship prints out the various devices and equipment using 3-d printers and utilizing native resources such as asteroids to get the materials that aren't brought from the Solar System. For the digital crew, 1000 years seems to take only one year. Also using organic printers human cells are printed to form new bodies for the digital crew when they arrive in-system and the planet is ready for their habitation.
