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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: 2) by Spook brat on Friday March 31 2017, @10:07PM
Thanks for the reply! I see that you're trying to make a respectful reply, and I'll attempt to grant you the same courtesy.
A dispute is the lack of a contract (explicit or otherwise); a dispute is people engaging in behavior that is not well defined
*That is a very odd definition of dispute, and I have to wonder how you arrived at it.
In my mind a dispute is a conflict of ideas, a difference of opinion. Disputes are common even among parties with established contractual relationships, with no government needed for it to occur. All that is needed is a misalignment of interests and a disagreement regarding the preferred resolution. More on this later.
*I see nothing wrong with discussing ill-defined social norms; I recommend that one of the first boundary cases you test your system against for robustness is the birth (or graduation to age of majority) of a new citizen within the established system. What is your proposal for how to deal with integrating them into the existing social contract? This is not a frivolous triviality; it is a necessary condition for your society to persist past the founding generation.
It's time to start constructing intricate, fine-grained well-defined contracts between individuals.
In what I say, there is no requirement that there be recorded intricate details for every interaction between every individual; that is your straw man argument. Indeed, a "culture" is the name that is given to a very complex set of rules that are more or less implicit, not written down in a record
*These two statements do not match. I see that I am confused, can you please explain what you mean? How is a societal contract both (fine-grained/between individuals, well defined) AND (cultural (i.e. applies to everyone in society), implicit/not written down)? Societal scope is the opposite end of the scale from individual scope, and well-defined contracts are almost always written (frequently notarized by third parties) for the purposes of both clarity and dispute resolution after-the-fact. I do not understand how these can simultaneously be the basis of a society.
*Your point regarding lobbying being a hack of the Government for personal benefit is valid, and any new society needs to take steps to avoid becoming similarly corrupt. Be prepared to explain how the neutral third parties in your society who provide arbitration services will be kept from being similarly corrupted. (note: I'm not interested in exploring that now, so don't feel compelled to explain it to me)
It is already widely understood that a monopoly is probably a bad idea, especially a monopoly that is imposed violently. Yet, that is exactly what a government seeks to be in various aspects of society.
To combat abuse of this position, the founders of the United States Government attempted to enshrine the concept of a Separation of Powers; taking that concept to its limit yields the concept of competition within a market of voluntary trade, where "voluntary" means "as specified by contracts to the greatest extent possible"—enforcement of a contract is itself specified by the contract (and is therefore voluntary), and the service of enforcement must co-evolve along with the rest of the market.
*I agree that the separation of powers outlined in the U.S. constitution is one of the best things that the Founders got right in the process.
One of the primary misgivings I have about the system you propose is the distinct possibility that one or more of these contract enforcement agencies will become powerful enough that it becomes a monopoly on use of force on its own. There is a very clear pathway to it, as the network effect and other market forces will make larger enforcement agencies more effective than smaller ones. Let's be honest about what these organizations will be: armies of mercenary lawyers. Those three words together in the same phrase strike fear in the hearts of free-thinking citizens of any land. I see no way that a system of checks-and-balances would naturally arise to limit the power of these agencies in the society you propose.
*Let's get down to brass tacks about dispute resolution. The primary form of it in any human society is violence, in one form or another. In any society those who have more leverage to bring to bear will win - the dispute will resolve in their favor because they have the ability to coerce the other party into complying. This is the essence of class warfare. This is the essence of wars between nations. This is the essence of lawsuits. To quote the great philosopher Jack Sparrow, "it's about what a man can do, and what he can't do." You mentioned elsewhere that you reject the idea of international embargoes as coercion; I assert that without the means to influence the other sovereign entity to stop they will not. No contract will absolutely prevent one part from bringing to bear what force they have available if they choose to break their contract. No treaty will prevent a nation from declaring war and forcefully annexing the land and resources of another. Pretending otherwise ignores both human nature and all of human history.
I'm out of time; I'll write some more later. Feel free to reply to what I've already written in the mean time, there's more than enough of it :P
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]