Wouldn’t it be easier to send an artificial womb and the necessary freeze-dried ingredients on a thousand-year journey to the stars, instead of grown humans who you’d need to keep fed, watered, and happy?
The real trick then becomes raising babies entirely through automation. Of course, any automatic system up to the task may be smart enough to just colonize the planet itself.
There will be no thousand year journies. You’d be overtaken by the generation after which left in faster ships and arrived in half the time. Make the trip in a few decades or don’t bother making it at all.
Going faster means expending more energy. At some point it won't make economic sense to go faster, even if technically you could. Freeze dried wombs don't care whether the journey takes a thousand years or five hundred, but the costs are very different.
At the same time, you could send information, compressed, enough to accurately reconstitute the travelers in spacetime. That would take some raw materials and a plenty of energy. However, the required devices might be much more resilient to acceleration and radiation than any possible human body.
It takes the same amount of energy to accelerate at any speed in space. The limit is our determination really, it is possible to visit our nearby star with ~200 hydrogen bombs
No it doesn't. Your mass increases the faster you go, so that more and more energy needs to be expended to accelerate more. At 50% light speed, you're 15% heavier. At 90% light speed, you're 129% heavier. At 99% light speed, you're 608% heavier. Your mass goes to infinity as you approach the speed of light, which is why the speed of light is unattainable for objects that have mass.
What if we did send a ship on a thousand year journey, and learn more about building fast ships than if we hadn't? Such that the second ship we send, would be quicker than the first ship we'd have sent if we waited a few decades?
Do you put off buying electronics knowing that next year's product will be faster than this year's? At some point you just got to say, screw it, I'd rather do this now instead of waiting for some hypothetical future where the cost-benefit ratio is at its highest.
the point is to create self-sustaining colonies that will travel into the unknown for probably hundreds of years before finding appropriate planets to colonize.
The real trick then becomes raising babies entirely through automation. Of course, any automatic system up to the task may be smart enough to just colonize the planet itself.