If I were part of the planning committee for creating guidelines for colonizing exo-planets here are some of my suggestions for how the colony would be established.
1) Planning for tomorrow:
One of the misfortunes Earth has had is our need to mine minerals, the environmental impact of extracting metals from the ground has been substantial. Colonizing another solar system gives us the opportunity to reduce that potential impact. Before the colony ships even arrive, robotic mining infrastructure could place a constellation of asteroids in orbit around the target colony world. Ideally these asteroids would have means of artificially stabilizing their orbits added to them and on a regular schedule minerals would be dropped into a designated mining zone. Not eliminating the need for mines, but at the very least limiting the number.
2) Urban Planning:
Cities on Earth have developed organically over the centuries, this has led our cities to have strange idiosyncrasies in lay out and use of natural resources. While I wouldn't want to encourage cities to look like depressing grid patterns of identical buildings, we should also aim to avoid city lay outs like Boston, where no one seems to know where streets should connect with each other. The tv show Tera Nova as short lived as it was, did have an incredibly well thought out first city where the design grew out in a radial pattern, allowing for relatively easy navigation. Organizations like the Venus Project have cool examples of what these cities might look like. The goal is not to crush adapting to the local climate, but it is to minimize false starts that we had here on Earth.
.... Taking a break for lunch and enjoying the weekend (1/17/2016) be back later
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