But the ship in Wall-E is so "luxurious", if we had that then we wouldn't want to stop living such a good life either but we don't have enough resources to make something like that so our primal instinct is to strive for survival and the only way to do that is to colonize a new planet.
If the ship gets wrecked, it means that we fail. The humans on Earth would already be dead because there would be lots of chaos and mayhem among the billions of humans that couldn't go on the ship.
> Implying you can't travel 42 light years at a rate slower than that of light
> Implying people who build a ship meant to travel 42 light years wouldn't have the foresight to bring some food and water with them
> Implying people don't live longer than 42 years in the first place
> Implying everyone on the ship would have to be related
> Implying there's no such thing as sperm/egg banks/in vitro etc
> Implying all kinds of crazy shit that make no sense.
Why not just travel there slower than the speed of light, use a closed system to maintain water, use a greenhouse to grow food and convert CO2 back to O2, bring enough fertiliser or use molecular nets to collect atoms along the way..?
See, that wasn't so hard since I decided to think instead of derp around.
The fastest manmade object ever made is the spacecraft Helios 2, which reaches a maximum speed of 150,000 mph. This was ONLY achieved through the use of the sun's gravity to slingshot to normally unattainable speeds.
The speed of light is 670,616,629 mph.
Even with speeds we can't actually reach traveling in a straight line, we can only achieve 1/4470 of the speed of light. It would take us 187772 years to travel a distance of 42 lightyears.
You expect a spacecraft and its inhabitants to endure over 3.5x longer than homo sapiens has even existed. Your calculations are off by so many orders of magnitude that I'm honestly shocked you believed them yourself.
Micro mediorites would do this wear and tear, the ISS had to install several plates just to be protected from the constant bombardment of these little tiny bits of space rock.