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http://www.autodidacts.io/who-will-own-mars/
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @02:59AM (1 child)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html [google.com]
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationanddemocracy.org]
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-("
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 01 2017, @04:24AM
That we as a society are not going to happily get to Mars or the Asteroids or other star systems, or even just fix up Space Ship Earth, until we come to see the love of money as the problem, not the solution.
I guess it's the old "Money is the root of all evil" fairy tale. Sure, money is a tool that can be abused, but quotes like the above display an abysmal understanding of what money is and why we use it. Money's key utility is in algorithmically simplify our trade. Elsewhere, the article indicates that the perceived problem is that money is a scarce commodity in a post-scarcity world.
So, the few in the world with money generally are so *seriously* :-) caught up in keeping it all or becoming even *more* pathologically financially obese, that they can't help the world transition to a post-scarcity (and humorous :-) economy either.
Somehow this is supposed to be a problem because people are thinking about money instead of the proper groupthink that post-scarcity economies supposedly would need.
How about we worry about real problems instead? People starving in the streets is a real problem. People paying for their food and shelter with money is not.