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Everyone's excited about rockets to Mars, and each SpaceX launch brings that dream closer to reality. Musk and others are putting a lot of money and brainpower on the technical problem of getting people to Mars. Less sensational topics, such as surviving on Mars, receive less attention — but plenty of money and serious thought, because there's no way to get around them.
But there's another important question which isn't getting much attention:
Who will own Mars, and how will it be governed?
Does Mars belong to the people who get there first? To the highest bidder? To all the people of Earth?
Does Mars belong to Earth, or does Mars belong to Mars? Does it belong to the Sun? To the Martian microbiome, if there is one? (What are the indigenous rights of microbes, I wonder?)
Who will be in charge of Mars once the colonists arrive? If Mars turns out to have valuable resources, who gets them? And if a Mars colony is to govern itself, what kind of government would it have?
The Mars colonization project is driven by the ultra rich. And those who want to stake their claim on Mars may rather the rest of us didn't think too much about the little problem of who owns the planet next door, and why.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday March 31 2017, @06:08PM (2 children)
> Who will own Mars, and how will it be governed
Nobody, because it's a lump of rock that requires you to get constant resupplies from Earth to survive on.
Launching those supplies could be interrupted by any major power who isn't happy, so everyone will either have to play nice and share.
Or start a war until someone's supply runs can be made immune to interference, either with a new way to send stuff out, or by destroying everyone's orbital missiles.
Alternatively, humans could stop being so fucking greedy that we have to figure out who owns said lump of inhospitable rock, its Exclusive Economic Zone, and the Oil beneath.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 31 2017, @06:42PM
Nobody, because it's a lump of rock that requires you to get constant resupplies from Earth to survive on.
That is incorrect. The Moon is in that situation of requiring supply with really strong scarcity of hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Mars has every element in sufficiently ample quantity, such as the basics (C, H, O, N, S, P, Fe, etc) that a single colony could get all elements needed for plant and animal life from the local environment (C, O, N from atmosphere; H, O, S, Cl, Na, Mg, Ca, K from ground water/ice and dissolved salts; P, Fe, C, Na, Mg, Ca, K from meteorites).
Further, Earth is not the only source for resupply when resupply is needed. It would take far less reaction mass, for example, to ship water from Phobos, a small moon of Mars to the Moon than from Earth.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday March 31 2017, @06:47PM
Nobody, because it's a lump of rock that requires you to get constant resupplies from Earth to survive on.
That's not necessarily true. At first, definitely. But in theory, eventually a Mars colony could become self-sustaining. There's water there, and sunlight, and presumably a decent amount of natural resources to mine. It's dubious of course, as there's not much of an atmosphere, it's a little far from the Sun so it's pretty dim (meaning PV won't work that great and will need significantly greater area), it's pretty darn cold (so you'll need even more area for capturing solar energy for heating), but it could probably be done, eventually.
Personally, I'm not sure what the allure is. It's definitely an interesting place to explore for scientific purposes. But it'd suck living there. And if you just want to do mining, you'll probably get a much better return for your investment by grabbing asteroids nearer to Earth. If I controlled scads of money and could personally make a decision about how to spend so much money that it could fund a serious Mars colonization effort, I wouldn't spend it there, I'd built a giant rotating space station in a Lagrangian point orbit near the Earth, and work on (before the space station construction) asteroid and maybe Moon mining for getting the raw materials. You're going to have to build a sealed, artificial habitat on Mars anyway for humans, so why do you even need the planet? My space station will have a full 1g of gravity, something that's impossible on Mars. And inhabitants can take a vacation to Hawaii with just a couple days of travel time each way.