If the colony was in the same star system, traveling there at sublight would take months. If it’s in a different but close-by system, you could maybe get there in a couple of years if you could travel at close to lightspeed, but a) getting close to lightspeed without some major physics trickery like a warp drive is ridiculously hard and b) at that speed, you’d run into relativistic effects, making the time go much slower from your perspective than everyone else’s.
Light takes 5 and a half hours to reach Pluto, even going just half of light speed it wouldn’t take months to get around a solar system. A run around Pluto in a few hours is literally how Generations opened.
No one said the coloky was far away.
If the colony was in the same star system, traveling there at sublight would take months. If it’s in a different but close-by system, you could maybe get there in a couple of years if you could travel at close to lightspeed, but a) getting close to lightspeed without some major physics trickery like a warp drive is ridiculously hard and b) at that speed, you’d run into relativistic effects, making the time go much slower from your perspective than everyone else’s.
Light takes 5 and a half hours to reach Pluto, even going just half of light speed it wouldn’t take months to get around a solar system. A run around Pluto in a few hours is literally how Generations opened.