Recap
Pandorum is the state of space sickness that makes officers kill their crewmates as the emptiness of space erodes their sense of morality/humanity. It typically grows slowly, and is then triggered usually by some event/trauma/knowledge. It's main symptoms are trembling hands, nosebleeds, and paranoia.
The first known case of Pandorum happened aboard the ship Eden, in which a single officer killed and trapped his flight crew, overrode security measures, and ejected thousands of humans in their hibernation pods into empty space.
The second known case of Pandorum happens aboard the Elysium, in which another single officer kills his flight crew, and goes from pod to pod awakening and inducing Pandorum into as many people as he can. This, paired with the adaptation enzymes designed to help the humans adapt to their target planet, mutates them over successive generations to adapt to the ship instead and turns them murderous humanoid beasts.
The Pandorum event in the Elysium was triggered when the officers received news that Earth was no more and that the last of humanity was aboard the ship.
Theory #1: Earth knew of their extinction, but didn't tell anyone
Earth was said to be one day there, the next nothing, and from the inscriptions on the side of the giant crock pot it's thought that a large asteroid took it out. Small Near Earth Objects are hard to track in this day and age, but large ones even we can detect. The events of the movie took place in the late 2100s, so it's quite likely that Earth authorities saw the meteor coming for years and didn't tell anyone in order to not spread panic.
However, they did at least take precaution to start building spaceships, under the pretense of exploration.
Theory #2: Eden was the first attempt to seed other planets
The event aboard the Eden occurred at least 8 years before the Elysium launched, since knowledge of it among the crew seems to be quite common. It is quite likely that the Eden, like the Elysium, was the first ship they sent out into space in the desperate hope of seeding another planet, only it failed when a high ranking officer succumbed to Pandorum.
Given how the officers aboard the Elysium did not know the true purpose of the Eden mission, nor their own, it seems quite likely that Earth was playing it's cards close to its chest.
But why? We'll see below.
Theory #3: Eden was also told the truth
Pandorum occurs very slowly without input and is only manifest through external coercion or events. For the Elysium, the first case was triggered by the knowledge that the Earth was no more, and in the second case we see it was almost triggered when the first officer tried to induce it in someone else by appealing to their sense of depravity.
In the Eden, we have no idea what triggered it. Either the officer was left awake too long and the sickness just took hold in one final crescendo of thought, or... the officer received a message from Earth on the true nature of their mission and the true peril of Earth, i.e. the same knowledge that triggered Pandorum aboard the Elysium later.footnote1
Ultimately, the Eden event taught the Earth engineers to not take space sickness lightly, and that humans become weak in space and cannot be trusted with enormous responsibility for extended periods of time.
What did the Earth engineers do to prevent this in future travels?
Theory #4: The Elysium was secretly designed to combat Pandorum
Either through extensive sensory deprivation testing at home, or just a plain conservative mistrust in human nature, the Earth engineers came to the conclusion that a significant portion of humanity is susceptible to Pandorum, and that just one person is enough to doom an entire mission.
Time was running out on Earth, and they needed to build a new better spaceship than the Eden with none of it's weaknesses caused by the human condition. Thus, the Elysium was born and launched (with 8 years still left to spare).
One major improvement the Elysium has over the Eden is that it was designed to fly and land itself. No human interaction whatsoever. Humans just had to survive the 100 year journey to make it to the other side, and the reactor could easily survive ten times that number of years without maintenance, which is why there seems to be a dire shortage of service technicians aboard the ship.
Another improvement is the automatic scheduling of flight crews. It is said that each flight crew is supposed to wake up the next, but this is a lie told to the humans to give them the illusion of control, because we see pods being activated at allocated times by themselves throughout the movie, and this makes sense if the engineers wished to reduce human error.footnote2
Another big improvement is the somewhat short wakeful times of 2 years per flight crew. It seems likely now that the Eden had longer wakeful periods in which Pandorum could set in, and these were shortened to two years in the Elysium.footnote3
A third major improvement is actually one of the main plot devices in the movie: Amnesia.
Theory #5: Amnesia is not a side effect of extended hibernation
The Elysium had a 100 year journey, which divided by (seen:) 7 different crews, each performing at 2 year intervals means that each person is awake (100/2/7=) 7-8 times giving roughly 15 years of wakefulness.
15 years is a lot of time for Pandorum to accumulate over, and I don't think the Earth engineers wanted to risk it.
On the side of the hibernation pods is written something along the lines of "extended periods of hibernation may cause amnesia", but I think this is also a lie and that amnesia is purposefully induced in an auspicious attempt to reset any latent levels of Pandorum that might exist in crewmembers, so that they can start their next shift in a more pacified state.
Indeed, when the second crew member is revived he is in a relatively calm and stable state and relates that amnesia is actually quite normal and that it takes a while "to get it all back".footnote4
Lingering Thoughts
One question that remains for me is why did Earth, knowing what happened with the Eden, still decide to tell Elysium about their fate?
To which I can only say - maybe they were not completely certain of the causes of Pandorum, or maybe they thought the ship was Pandorum-proof and assumed it was safe, or maybe just simply that they were scared to go out silently and only wanted to say goodbye to someone.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
¹ I would like to believe that Earth only knows about what happened on Eden because hopefully there was still one survivor aboard who managed to regain control of the ship and relay to Earth what happened, but who knows maybe Earth was just watching remotely.
² That, or the ship was malfunctioning so bad that it was activating pods at random. However I choose not to believe this because Nadia's entire crew was activated at the same time and that was only 6 months before the events of the movie, and Norman Reedus' character speaks of being assured that Bower was going to "relieve us" hinting that he also was activated with other (likely now dead) crew members.
³ Why do I think they were shortened? Because they were specifically mentioned, either to serve as a guide for us to gauge how long each member is awake, or to tell us how the Elysium was different from the Eden.
⁴ Sure, he regains his memories very quickly afterwards but I place this more on the extraneous circumstances he was in and like to believe that he would be more placid if revived in a more normal environment. Or, that other crewmembers would spot the symptoms in him faster in his weakened state of revival.
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