end 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers.
Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right?
Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes.
The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in.
(If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)
The premature-birth thing can be fixed now with artificial wombs: we'll just keep kids in there longer, perhaps 2-4 years. Throw in some genetic engineering and some techniques to rapidly indoctrinate and train these people and we can grow a clone army! Bwahahaha!
Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right?
Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes.
The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in.
(If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)