> Perhaps, but it is horrifically long in terms of human stuff.

Not really, unless you're obsessed with the idea that great works need to happen within your lifetime. Europe is chock full of cathedrals that took 400-600 years to build, worked on by countless generations who would never live to see them completed.

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detritus 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

The difference there being that at the end of your day, having spent it masoning, you could leave the cathedral and go back to your family and have a walk in the fields and drink and be merry with people loved and new. The project wasn't the entiriety of your existence, it was merely the means to pay for it.

Unless we have generational ships the size of small countries, I'm not sure the human brain - unaided and non-forcedly evolved to do so - would be able to handle essential incarceration in a series of metal tubes for its own and its descendents existences.

	▲	allannienhuis 23 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Generational ships would of course need to be very large, but I doubt it would need to be as large as you think. And it doesn't need to look like metal tubes. Many northern cities have extensive underground or between-building pedestrian bridges and large shopping malls, etc that can provide quite a lot of variety and the feeling of open and green spaces that is pretty attractive during long cold winters. Whether that's 'enough' to avoid mental health issues in a permanent setting is of course a different story, but that's just one of thousands of problems that would need to be solved before that ever comes close to reality :)
	▲	forgotaccount3 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Knowing the variety of lives lived on earth as we speak, I'm fairly certain the first space born generation would adapt to it. Provided the Earthlings that were sent along don't let their incarceration induced insanity infect the youngin's.