A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

by Kelly Weinersmith

American diplomats liked it, but once it was handed to the US Congress, it was widely seen as a socialist system that would discourage investment.

While the OST merely said nobody could claim the Moon, the Moon Agreement would’ve obligated states to share any benefits derived from the Moon.

they’re not precisely a nation claiming a chunk of the lunar surface, they’re certainly a nudge in that direction.

It’s not appropriation of land exactly, and it’s certainly not sovereignty . . . but it is something like turf.

the rules that we have are vague. By some nation’s interpretations they permit endless exploitation and pseudo-territorial claims, but without sovereignty. Nuclear powers are moving to stake claims in a largely unregulated environment in which they may disagree about what the law actually permits.

When we think about the future of the Moon or Mars, the goal may not be rapidly extracting maximum value. It may also be things like preserving a pristine environment or preserving humanity from blowing ourselves up in a territory dispute.

If you go back a hundred years, there weren’t that many states. There were, as today, many “peoples,” meaning identity groups like Jews, Zulu people, Japanese people, Roma people, Cherokee people, Persians, and so on, but at the top level of governance, much of the world was ruled by a small number of empires possessing vast colonial holdings. This is no longer true.

During the twentieth century there were three major state-creation periods. First, the collapse of the “Central Empires” in the wake of World War I. Second, the rapid decolonization of empires that mostly took place between 1945 and 1975. Third, there was the liberation of states controlled by the Soviet Union, which dissolved between 1988 and 1991.

States have a right to stay whole, but distinct peoples have a right not to be oppressed. When these rights are put in tension, sometimes states are born, and in some cases they have gotten full international recognition.

the concern is what the precedent set by recognizing Kosovo would mean for local affairs. The case of independence for Kosovo then is not simply down to whether Albanian Kosovars were persecuted; they clearly were. But their access to remedial secession and to getting widespread recognition exists in tension with the desires of more powerful states not to have to recognize secessionist movements in their backyards.

The fundamental structure of a company town creates a massive power imbalance between owners and employees that occurs even if we assume the operators aren’t mustache-twirling villains.

the difficulty of autarky may be the last and largest nail in the coffin. If you think Earth is dying and you want to save humanity, you either have to transfer a huge population to Mars—possibly on the order of hundreds of millions—in a short period, or you have to have unimaginably developed robotic technology. Although it’s hard to predict the future, it seems to us that if we’re so good at robotics and ecology that we can build a permanent bubble world for 1 million people on a distant oceanless planet, well, surely we can clean some carbon dioxide out of the air on Earth.

The First Space War? Doesn’t ring a space bell? That’s because you know it as the First Gulf War, 1990–1991, but to people who study military space, it was a pivot point in history, when space assets were absolutely crucial to rapidly crushing the Iraqi Army.

the increased risk of war in this scenario comes not from some sort of objective assessment of well-being by nations or individuals, but from the fact that one power was experiencing a large, fast, relative change in power that a potential rival could see coming.

the timeline is substantially longer and the project wildly more difficult and that the governance work to do is more about regulating the behavior of Earthlings than designing a Martian democracy.

we have not moved beyond conflict. Our ability to harm ourselves vastly outweighs our ability to protect ourselves.

In healthy communities of thought, the people in the corner shaking their heads and wagging their fingers aren’t barriers on the road to progress, but guardrails.