500 years is not a distance, unless you specify also the velocity at which you travel.

@L.Dutch-ReinstateMonica eh, "500 years of travel" seems adequate. It does at least handwave away the usual tangential arguments about where and how and so on.

@StarfishPrime, right, but influences the ability of communicating with motherland...

@L.Dutch-ReinstateMonica that's a very good point.

as @StarfishPrime mentioned, the focus is on the colonisation itself, not necessary the journey. I wanted to give a sense that the planet is so far away that help from earth is rather unlikely...

@L.Dutch-ReinstateMonica you're right about communications... I'll edit the question...

500 Persons are not enough for self-sustaining population, as far as i know

This reminds me RimWorld scenario. Top priorities: build storehouse to stop your supplies from deteriorating :).

I don't know about others but my first priorities are a hot bath and a cup of hot cappuccino...

Check out SFIAs Life in a space colony series

500 years of Earth time or subjective time for the colonists? Makes a major difference to the answers.

How big is the colony ship? Can it land? After landing, can it serve as a fully sufficient base, or, if the ship itself can't land, can such base be deployed? How much supplies the colonists have?

@JulianEgner If you're referring to genetic diversity, a near-future CRISPR kit should take care of that! ;-)

FYI, 500 years of travel with the tech in 50 or so years from now (how long it would take to build a ship for this mission) would result in maybe 1 to 15 light years of distance, greatly limiting the candidates (Ross 128b or Luyten b), and ensuring that communication IS possible, but the ping times would be 22 to 24 years

Food, water, air, shelter, sleep and safety. After that, the list gets long but you're going to need those first 5 to survive and the 6th to thrive at least.

@JulianEgner 500 people (mostly women) + 20k embryos / frozen sperm+eggs would do the trick, though.

@ceejayoz yes, but you have to think about what that does to your society. Women will be not much more than laying hens.

@JulianEgner I'm also inclined to think by the time we can manage interstellar travel we'll have artificial wombs worked out.

Are we to assume that this planet is not inhabited by any burgeoning technological (lower Paleolithic or beyond) culture?

@JulianEgner , according to the Encyclopedia Britannica article on MVP (Minimum Viable Population), 500 is likely enough.

@ceejayoz ok, thats a point. @ cowlinator interesting, I thought it was more

@JulianEgner That figure is an estimate of a randomly chosen population of a given species. With careful selection, you can get much lower. Just ask yourself why a population size should matter in a sexually reproducing species in the first place :) Why can a bacterium reproduce from a single cell to fill the entire planet, but not humans? And needless to say, things become completely different if you include things like healthcare, genetic engineering, in vivo fertilization etc.

Plot twist: The ship arrives at last, only to discover that other humans already colonized it after leaving Earth only 100 years ago after the discovery of faster-than-light travel. Technology kept evolving back home.