I think this again shows an unhealthy fixation on planets. Sure, they are nice and big and if you are very lucky might be even habitable.
But given that you already have a massive mobile self sufficient workstation in space it would IMHO make much more sense to start with setting up some simple in space infrastructure first upon arrival & then using that to run a space to ground transport link. That should give you all the benefits of starting with a space based civilization in the new star system rather than stranding 2000 at potentially hostile planet with no means of support and space based assistance, battling for survival.
Well, unless you really like all those lost colony novels with low tech human societies existing on exotic planets that were not able to keep their tech level. ;-)
Yes, exactly. Why not mine a few asteroids, deploy comms and mapping sats, etc.
Building a ground civ from scratch would be hard enough for anyone, let alone a space-adapted population who have spent generations being coddled by AI, and who have exactly zero experience of planet-side ops with hostile terrain and meteorology, with physical tools that they have never used in an operational setting.
Yep - it really makes sense to do it like that - I don't say planets are useless, but if you just arrived after possibly hundreds of years in deep space, you might as well par you ark somewhere safe and resource rich, do any repairs or upgrades, gather some resources, while possibly doing some initial exploration by probes or even small initial crewed missions.
It might be different for other missing profiles, like some very compact minimalistic missions where everyone is in some sort of suspended animation & you dump the whole ship into a suitable planetary environment, as to ship is just not setup to sustain them for any period on board. But this requires quite substantial advances in both stashing colonists for possibly hundreds of years without killing them as well as getting a compact ship to a star system with habitable planet, decelerating it there and landing it.
Seems more likely we will have the first trillion of extra terrestrial humans living in diverse habitats built from local materials at a nearby star much sooner than something like that.
But given that you already have a massive mobile self sufficient workstation in space it would IMHO make much more sense to start with setting up some simple in space infrastructure first upon arrival & then using that to run a space to ground transport link. That should give you all the benefits of starting with a space based civilization in the new star system rather than stranding 2000 at potentially hostile planet with no means of support and space based assistance, battling for survival.
Well, unless you really like all those lost colony novels with low tech human societies existing on exotic planets that were not able to keep their tech level. ;-)