Seriously, suppose that the survival of the species depended upon humanity locating and colonizing a planet light years away. It would truly be wasteful to send men when you could simply have a large female crew of appropriate genetic fitness and of appropriate reproductive age and a nice, diverse and large bank of sperm samples from men who have been screened for genetic fitness, etc. Seriously: why waste any precious space on a spacecraft when some sperm would do just as well?
And similarly, they could just install artificial wombs on the ship and populate it entirely with men, who'd all be able to provide either an X or a Y chromosome for the next generation as opposed to wasting space with some pointless subspecies of humanity who only have X chromosomes. It would also have the added benefit that once you get to the planet, all of the colonists would be able to open their own jars.
Yes, but I was being realistic. My plan would use already existing technology for populating a planet. Long term storage of sperm is already possible and much easier, cheaper and more reliably produces usable gametes vs storage of ova. You didn't even address the difficulties in harvesting and storing ova for those non-existent artificial wombs. Sperm is easily and readily collected at virtually no cost (monetary or biologically) to the donor, unlike ova. This is without considering that artificial wombs have not been created and are not yet available and would take much more space than sperm storage. Sperm would provide all that was necessary with relative ease of storage and utilization and as you pointed out(I had not thought it necessary to mention that but perhaps I wrote my post poorly and it was unclear), provide X and Y chromosomes so that male and female children could be created as desired. It’s much more cost and space effective and efficient. Also women are, on average, smaller than men and so either we could send more female explorers (more genetic diversity) vs male explorers or utilize the saved weight for other cargo. We could even send already fertilized eggs or simply ova waiting for fertilization, to increase the genetic diversity even more, although storage requirements are more complex than sperm storage. There is the possibility of using your idea of artificial wombs but again: we don't have that technology yet and it would be much require much more space on any spacecraft or initial colony set up....
Of course, I was only speaking about the practicalities and economics of sperm vs ova harvesting/storage and utilization of these. Worth considering is this: Women tend to be less violent and less competitive and tend to form cooperative rather than competitive groups vs men and in that way, they might be more suited to long distance space travel and to start colonizing another planet than men would be.
Parthenogenesis was a different idea altogether. It is entirely different and much more speculative than an all female crew plus sperm for space colonization. Those were two different scenarios :
1. all female crew plus sperm
OR
2. Parthenogenesis. I was assuming that this would happen on earth. But sure, it could be a strategy for space colonization. Parthenogenesis, aside from not occurring in humans at this time, does have the disadvantage of limiting genetic diversity.
Of course there was the other scenario where women basically live in their own society and when they think it is necessary, select men who are kept elsewhere for breeding purposes. w
In these scenarios, men would become at least temporarily obsolete or would be relegated to being kept for breeding purposes only. Sort of how women were treated for millennia. I'm sorry if my original post was unclear. I'm not advocating for any of these except that the more that I think about it, sending all female crews for colonization makes a lot of sense, at least initially.
I haven't addressed any of the sociological or societal aspects of this at all. From a merely practical standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to send all female space crews plus sperm if you want to colonize another planet. You get the most opportunity for larger crews (and greater genetic diversity), saves extremely valuable space, and so on.