Criteria for Resolution:
1. Self-Sustaining Space Colony:
- A space colony must be established that can support human life autonomously with a sustainable supply of necessary matter and energy.
2. Requirements for Self-Sustaining:
- The colony must be capable of producing its own food, water, and oxygen.
- It must have reliable sources of energy sufficient to support the needs of its inhabitants.
- The infrastructure should allow for recycling and reusing resources to a significant extent, reducing dependency on external supplies.
3. Realistic Expectations:
- It must be realistically expected that humans can live autonomously in the colony for extended periods.
- The colony does not need to be failure-proof against all possible disasters, rare events, or long-term degradation but must be sustainable under normal operational conditions.
1,000
1.00Moon base seems the most feasible.
https://youtu.be/XOhz7ZBZ_1U?si=FAdQG8dIi-aMcocb
The upcoming Artemis missions will give us a good idea of how long it will take. Food, water, o2, shelter all seem do-able (eventually), but energy source and temp. regulation of the habitats will the be main challenges.
Solar power is ideal, but the lunar night poses challenges. Either a moon-wide solar array network or nuclear will have to be used.
I even doubt by 2050 Earth will be 100% solar and nuclear powered lol...
Suppose there's a perfect emulation of you, Ihor Kendiukhov, running inside a computer. At the moment it was copied, it would act and change its internal state absolutely the same as you would, for any possible state of the world.
This is not assuming that this emulation is equivalent to you individually, but: is this emulation human for the purposes of this question?
Suppose a ship that was basically a Von Neumann probe with a bank of embryos and/or uploads was sent to another star system before 2050, but hadn't reached it yet. Upon reaching that destination it would build such a colony without assistance from Earth, but while in flight it's not capable of sustaining humans. I assume that resolves NO?
@Jan53274 more or less indefinite. Not literally indefinite, but at least for civilizations' lifetimes.
You gave lots of criteria about what you mean by self sustaining, but not much about what you mean by space colony, specifically, wikipedia says space colonization is the use of outer space for colonization, whereas extraterrestrial colonization is its broader form, including the use of celestial bodies, other than Earth, for colonization. I'm not sure that's how the average person would use the term, so to clarify: for the purposes of this market did you intend to exclude potential moon colonies and mars colonies, etc.?
@bluerat No, every colony beyond Earth will qualify. So, all kinds of extraterrestrial colonies in the sense you used the term will qualify.