> > Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: ... -you can create [a Mars colony]
> > from scratch in a century or two starting with, say, 30
> > or 40 young, healthy, genetically diverse women and
> > a big dewar of sperm....
>
> Altho it presents some extreme difficulties, could we
> not start a Mars society with a single woman and
> a bunch of ethnically diverse frozen embryos? Could
> not the single crosser of interplanetary space have
> her birth canal surgically enlarged before launch
> in order to facilitate giving birth by herself after self
> implanting an embryo some time after it starts looking
> like she will survive on the surface? It appears to me
> that all the mission requirements scale to the size of the
> astronaut. Our best bet might be a single very small
> woman, perhaps one with no legs, whose weight
> might be 30 kilos or less. spike
Surely we'll have artificial wombs a decade or two into the future, (those would be a good idea anyway), so there will be no need for such things. Besides, biological bodies are *not* the wave of the future. There'll likely never be a large-scale, multi-generation colonization of Mars or any other planet (save, maybe, the moon) by humans. Even the most conservative estimates place the Singularity at no more than a century from now. If the human race survives that, everyone with any serious pioneering ambitions will upload into some artificial form that's better adapted for space travel.