What to bring to colonize a new planet?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I’ve been reading some SF lately (Tau Zero particularly) and wondered about what you’d need to bring with you if you need to start a human civilization on a new planet, without the option of getting help from Mother Earth. So it’s a single trip, you have your crew of say some 50-100 persons, a ship with advanced technology, the amount of stuff you can put in a large ship. But: you won’t have any of the infrastructure we take for granted on Earth: no power plants, no hospitals, none of the countless factories and industries that we commonly rely on for our basic needs. How are you going to create energy? Obtain raw materials? If a computer chip breaks, you can’t make a new one.

To make it easier, let’s assume a pre-human earth, with similar flora and fauna but no strange diseases, and the ship lands in a mild climate with forests.

So what should you bring in the ship? Possibly it requires a smart combination of basic tools/materials and general knowledge among the crew to build other tools? Is it actually feasible? Or do you need a deus ex machina like a replicator with near-infinite objects in its memory?

[I’m not sure whether this is the correct forum, but this seemed the best fit]

2

Well I always heard that Mars needs Women.

3

Well, for starters, you’d bring your ship. Your ship already has a very impressive power plant built in, and a number of sorts of fabrication facilities. It’ll be a while before you duplicate all of that on the ground, but you don’t need to.

4

Assuming this colonization is a deliberate planned course of action for establishing permanent human habitation, your initial population is probably not a big enough gene pool. There are many different opinions in similar discussions on Reddit and other sites. Some say you need a starting population of as small as 160 people, and others say you need thousands. If the initial group is small, you may need to institute mix and match planned parenting with each individual needing to find a different gene-donor partner for every successive child. If you have enough medical capability on the ship, you could bring frozen embryos to expand the genetic diversity of the next generation. I saw one scheme that involved a mostly female crew, who would each bear three or four children using frozen embryos in order for the next generation to be three or four times the size of the original crew, with everyone being unrelated to each other.

If you have trees, the colonists can at least build log cabins for housing and log palisades to hopefully keep out dangerous animals. If it’s a pre-human Earth with compatible biology, you can eat the animals, but test everything first. Even on Earth, some things are unexpectedly bad for you, like polar bear livers, which make your skin fall off, and then you die. However, there won’t be crop plants selectively bred for human consumption. If you don’t want to be hunter-gatherers, you would need to bring a big seed bank with you, as well as the capability to manufacture tools for planting and harvesting.

If your spaceship has the ability to do scans from orbit before you land, look for a spot on a coast that has access to resources like iron and copper. On Earth, humans primarily live in cities near coastlines. That’s where civilizations develop more easily. If your spaceship lands in the middle of a continent, you will have to build roads to get anywhere, and carts or vehicles to move things. On a coast, you just need boats.

5

Seeds are easy to bring along. So are frozen embryos, for that matter, and the medical facilities needed for implanting them (again, you’d bring the entire medical facility with you, rather than trying to build it from scratch on the ground).

6

First problem: that’s not a large enough gene pool. Can you up that to 1000-2000 people? Even that will be an extremely small pool.

Fortunately, it is possible to bring additional genes in the form of sperm, eggs, or fertilized eggs. Can’t store them indefinitely, but it should be possible to do so long enough to boost the genetic diversity of your colony to something more viable in the long term. Skew the next few generations towards women as they are a greater limiting factor on population building than men are (and you’ll have frozen sperm to help avoid in-breeding). Maybe a rule that paired up/married people can just let natural conception choose their children but non-paired people have to have girls for the first X generations or years or whatever. Or maybe something else.

Make it so you can take some of the facilities available on that ship down to the planet. Since it’s a one-way trip no need to keep the big ship in orbit. Recycle as much as possible into things useful for the colony. Obviously you can’t take everything, but a lot of what you take should be information that would allow you to re-create things, or knowledge of things like medicine or various mining/farming/whatever techniques.

You might consider, as part of the final decommissioning of the starship, launching a satellite network over the new planet for various uses from weather to mapping to communication. They won’t last forever but they could be extremely useful while they last for setting up the colony, adapting to local conditions, and keeping in touch with either satellite settlements or explorers.

(You will definitely want to spread people out over the new world so a natural disaster doesn’t wipe out the entire colony.)

Some energy could be hydro, wind, or solar, some/many/all components of which (depending on exact tech) could be made on site in the new colony. You can burn the local equivalent of wood for some purposes. Or even the local coal/oil. You’ll have to smart small and bootstrap yourselves to more advanced and more powerful energy sources but it’s what humanity did the first time around.

What about food and other useful crops? Are you sure we can eat the plants already there, or do we need to bring some of our own? How about livestock - can’t bring a ton of animals but you could bring some and boost the gene pool for the “farm” by the same means you boost it for the human part of the colony.

Bring some basic mining equipment - assuming the planet is “Earth like” but also untouched there should be mineral resources fairly accessible, unlike today when all the “easy” sources of ore have been mined out by 10,000 years of civilization. The build up to a high tech society will have to be recapitulated but with much more knowledge than possessed by our ancestors we should be able to do that much quicker, with fewer delays and false starts.

Bring a lot of plans and blueprints for devices that can be built as technology is developed on the new world.

And, obviously, bring some spare parts for whatever high tech you’re bringing with you, to tide you over until your colony can “catch up” to where things were before you took the long trip. They probably won’t last the entire distance in time but they don’t have to - they just have to last long enough to help get the colony going.

7

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. There have been population bottlenecks in human history without them wreaking havoc on the gene pool. There’s a theory that the entire Native American/First Nation population of North America descends from one group as small as seventy individuals, and the succeeding generations were (and are) doing just fine genetically.

(Sources: Popular press, “Nature”, but behind paywall)

8

If the planet is Earth-like, with breathable atmosphere and edible plants and animals (I suppose that’s called a “class M” planet in sci fi…), then it’s certainly feasible. We know for sure because it’s been done before, here on Earth, more than once. The difficulty arises when you need to create an artificial biosphere.

9

That’s one theory, yes, but not the only theory. I’m not sure that I’d want to bet the future of a colony on being an outlier like that. “Founder effects” are a real thing, and a real problem for isolated small communities

10

Another consideration is that most population bottlenecks in the past, in humans and other species alike, started with groups that were already fairly closely related, just by virtue of being from the same small geographic area. A human colonization expedition to another star, however, would include people from all over the world, and the colonists might even be specifically chosen for greater diversity and for a lack of known disease genes.

11

The Polynesians had a plan that worked pretty well. I think they brought chickens, pigs, and 4 or 5 basic food crops (all roots or trees, iirc, no grains) and some of the trees were also useful to build homes, tools, and canoes to explore further.

Bringing human embryos seems fussy. Have the crew be mostly young women, and bring sperm. Or, expect occasional contact with other groups.

12

The originally postulated number of people is just way too small for the economy of scale needed (with our current technology) to maintain a technological civilization. 50-100 people can barely have the level of specialization needed for a neolithic village. So either they revert to hunter-gathers (or at best iron-age horticulture), or else they have “cornucopia” replicators that really amount to a machine form of self-replicating life.

13

Even if you had cornucopia machines/universal replicators that could make anything from raw materials, you need the raw materials. Mines for ores for every element that you will need for everything that you use, which will be scattered far and wide across the planet.

Every single component in every single piece of technology you use has to be made, somewhere. Cases, whether plastic or metal. Wires. Wire insulation. Screws. Flux for solder for circuit boards. Paint. Our modern civilization requires a vast number of people to make the millions of things so common that they are invisible to our attention.

Probably the most difficult thing would be microchips. Unless somebody makes a miracle handheld nanotech device for producing microchips, you are going to have to haul over and reassemble chip fabrication plants, which almost certainly contain the most complex and delicate machinery in existence.

For an advanced, sustained, independent colony on another planet you need either indistinguishable-from-magic levels of technology far beyond anything we have a clue how to actually make or if it even could be made, or you need millions of people working in factories churning out widgets.

14

We’re not going to launch any interstellar missions until after we’ve mastered space infrastructure in the Solar System. Things like asteroid mining and orbital solar power. Probably also space elevators, or the equivalent. So we’re obviously going to keep all of that for our colony.

For chips, we’re not going to be using the latest and greatest bleeding-edge technology. It’s better to use older, known-reliable designs, even if they’re a bit slower. Most likely, the ship will just have a very large supply of chips on board, long enough to tide the colony over until they’ve built up the tech to build new fabberies. And of course they’ll include plans for the fabberies.

15

It’s extremely unlikely that interstellar settlement will involve pioneers reenacting the European colonization of North America ala’ Heinlein, but that’s the postulate of the OP.

16

I really think the OP is describing how the Polynesians colonized the Pacific. An Earth-like planet that might have edible stuff, but uncertain. No existing people. Bringing a breeding population that might not get replenished for a while. That’s all been done.

17

Telephone sanitizers.

And hairdressers.

18

Would 50-100 people be too small a gene pool if, hypothetically, every single one of them was chosen to be from a different ethnic background? There are many nations in the world that have populations with far less diversity than that.

19

By the time we have the capacity to build a generation ship, we’ll probably be able to digitise DNA. Even better, build a radio receiver, and Earth could transmit any arbitrary number of new genomes, including food animals and plants.

It seems quite unlikely to me that a distant Earth-like world would have plants that are digestible by humans; there are almost certainly too many possible alternate biochemistries to be sure, and we wouldn’t be able to tell for certain until we get there. Too risky to assume that the biosphere would be safe or edible, and we certainly wouldn’t want to destroy an alien biosphere just because we can’t eat it.

20

Yeah, maybe i read too much into: