How would human societies change after being confined on large interstellar transport ships for several generations?

I want to build a world populated by humans descended from colonists from Earth who have traveled a long distance and time to arrive (say, 80 years.) They come to this new Earth-like planet in dozens of different ships from different parts of Earth, but they all took more or less the same time to travel the distance. What I'm wondering is what kinds of changes human society might undergo if it's confined in a transport ship for such a long time that the generations that remember Earth die off, and that generations that only know life on a confined ship traveling through space colonize said planet.

Here are two ideas I had:

• Hedonism. Maybe this one is a little obvious, but traveling through space for decades, people would get bored. I'm also assuming here that the ships launched from the parts of Earth that were already relatively well off, and that the prospective colonists were people who had the means to escape a potentially disastrous situation on Earth. In the course of traveling to the new world, and knowing they wouldn't make it themselves, I imagine many of the first members of these colonist ships would indulge all kinds of hedonism. Since the whole point of the trip is transplanting humanity onto a new Earth, most of the inhabitants of these ships would be reasonably cared for and presumably encouraged to breed. The resulting system of values would probably be pretty different the one we follow on Earth today.

• Relative loss of privacy. Assuming a trip to a habitable planet would take a long time, the guys in charge would probably want to make sure conditions in the transport ship remained stable (i.e. people wouldn't be flipping out and killing each other) long enough that humanity would make it to the new Earth to settle it. I imagine this would involve a loss of privacy as a result of a perceived need for more surveillance and security.

What do you think? I'm not interested in the technical aspects of the question, just the probable effects on a society that's firmly established on a new Earth-like planet.

posted about 9 years ago

akaddoura‭

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