Quote Originally Posted by Storm_Of_Snow View Post
Your main problem then becomes the current colonist educating their successor while maintaining all of the colony's resources, especially the cloning equipment. And if you start to get problems with that process, or if the current colonist suffers an accident, then that colony is on the way out.

Plus it's not necessarily guaranteed that the new clone will have the same mind set as their forebear.

One female colonist with IV tech and a supply of X chromosome spermatazoa might work (and a group version of that might be a way of supporting a maintenance crew for a generation ship), but again, you're hoping they don't suffer some injury that shortens their life or leaves them infertile, and twins or other multiple births might seriously stress the available resources.
Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
Well, there's also the issue that no clone is a 100% perfect replica of the original--there's going to be flaws creeping in to the genes of the copies, and since you're going to be taking "copies of copies", a colony based entirely on cloning isn't going to be sustainable forever; eventually the corruptions of the genome will become great enough to cause problems. Plus, having everyone with pretty much the same genes leaves you open to some disease that develops which particularly badly affects people with that genetic make-up.
Depending on the tech - I need only 1. Actually, being an 'all powerful' alien, I might need none. I'll just construct the entire genome from memory, churn out a bajillion clones with small alterations for variety, and have a fully settled world within a few years. Get started on global warming in just weeks.