Sublight Interstellar travel

Speculation of scientific and technological progress which will enable Interstellar travel, and fiction based upon this.

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in space travel. From Star Trek to Star Wars to Asimov to StarGate, it's seemed so fascinating...yet so frustratingly out of reach. We just don't have any warp drive or wormholes. So, I've thought, like many, that we just ought to posit travel at some fraction of the speed of light. This, of course, requires many years for a voyage to even our closest neighbors. There's been suggestions of suspended animation, but while there is more hope that this can be achieved than Faster-Than-Light travel, it is still a long way from being practical. I believe that we'll have generation ships - living communities, living for generations on the journey. In order for there to be a high likelihood of success, we can't limit our travelers to just a few dozen people. We'd need hundreds, in order to make a viable community. And while there's an amount of readjustment that can be made in the expectations of personal space and privacy, there is good reason to assume that we're going to need a lot of room. Our travelers will increase their numbers along the journey. We can try to enforce some responsibility in reproduction rates, but at least replacement numbers plus some fraction will be required, and children are not born in fractions.

We are not just transporting humans and machinery, but also life of other forms, in order to both maintain the nutritional needs of the community during the voyage but also to spread the wide variety of terran life into new places. We are the ultimate seed carriers. Our ships will be Noah's ark, in a fasion. We will need tools to expand and terraform the worlds we find. In summary, our ships will be HUGE. Millions of tons. That requires an enormous amount of energy. Certainly, we can save energy by not attempting to travel at 1G acceleration, but propulsion is key.

I am going to throw a concept on the table, that no doubt will get me some flack. And that is that the fuel should be antimatter. I reason this because it is the most compact energy source possible. Sure, we only have been able to 'manufacture' the smallest amounts of it, and we will need several orders of magnitude more of it, in order to achieve acceleration of one or two million tons. And yes, I realize that our current technology to create antimatters is dreadfully inefficient. But consider, that it may not be the ultimate efficiency that counts, when we have a relatively close energy source which provides more than we can hope to use, and that is our sun, Sol. If we design some antimatter factories that can operate in a tight orbit of the Sun, we can reap the immense power that the sun provides, much better than we get so far away from it. With the power that the first of these factories provide, we have the energy to create many more...hundreds of factories, thousands of factories, from which anitmatter is regularly harvestedand kept, a safe distance from Earth and other important and vulnerable objects. Of course, our interstellar spacecraft will have lots of antimatter inconviently close to them, so the missions will be very dangerous. We can do our best to minimize these risks, but there will no doubt be accidents which will totally destroy the craft and all life aboard.

I present these arguments as I design a solid background for a novel, or several, that I am writing. I want to make the level of technology and society in this beginning era of interstellar colonization believable, with as firm a basis in science as we know it and technology as we predict it. I intend to present a society that reflects human nature as we know it, with its beauty and ugliness together. I'll tell you more, later, on how I am engineering this novel. But for now, I'd like to hear responses that intelligently address what I have proposed. With numbers and logic, if you can.