About an hour-and-a-half of pretty decent hard sci fi, then a right turn into What The Fuckville.

Trying to remember a story I read years ago. This was probably a short story, not a novel. It was the classic "Earth is dying, we need to find a new home" trope. They put together a group of the world's best and brightest and sent them toward a target system on a ship that would approach light speed.

The hook was that the group on the ship figured out a couple of months into the mission that the target system data was faked. The real plan was to strand the smartest people in the world in a situation where they could only save themselves by inventing FTL travel. Really, really similar setup.

The other thing I'm thinking is I'm even more disappointed in the ending. Grant the whole "we came back from our own future and taught ourselves how to manipulate time and gravity" thing. So now we've got this huge space station. With an artificial habitat that can spare a damn baseball diamond.

If you can do that artificial environment in a space station, why not just build a fucking dome on the ground?

I went looking to see if other people thought the same as I did about the dome, and a bunch did. One good answer was that if you couldn't take the whole population - or couldn't take them all at once - you'd have a major security problem.