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Ask Slashdot: What Kind of Societies Will the First Mars Colonies Be?
New submitter nyri writes: I'm making a two-part study in what kind of societies humans will build on Mars when we start to colonize the red planet. In first part, I'm trying to approach the question sociologically as rigorously as possible. Sociology being what it is, this also includes informed speculation. So, what does Slashdot think: What sort of colonies will humans build on the red planet? How large will they be? How will they make decisions and select their leaders? What kind of judicial systems will they use? What happens if a colony's population grows larger than they are able to sustain? Will they be religious and if so, how? How will their internal and external economy work? And so on...
A second part of the study is of psychometric nature to explore the kind of personalities be present in first colonies. I also encourage you to take the survey.
A second part of the study is of psychometric nature to explore the kind of personalities be present in first colonies. I also encourage you to take the survey.
A couple of months of research can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.
Your questions are not new, to science or to science fiction, and have been covered extensively by people with relevant PhDs. Instead of tracking down their research and reading their conclusions and the reasoning for them... you're asking Reddit. Anonymous, probably ignorant and wish-based responses with the occasional gem you won't be able to reliably distinguish from the giant manure pile.
Humanity is far too stupid to achieve a society of any real population on Mars before things like CRISPR, 3d printed plagues, and atomic warfare reduce our societies to a shadow of their former glory.
Heck, even the overuse of antibiotics is about to reduce our medical field to some sort of 1800's vintage joke.
"Sir you have appendicitis. Back in the good old days you would have lived, but now we can't even do surgery without you dying of an infection. Here is enough morphine to ride out the rest of your days in relative agony..."
It will start out as a Democracy with enlightened leadership. Eventually, factions would develop and then devolve into a barbaric society where there will be one despotic leader, science will be forgotten and folks will be just getting by until they all die-off from thirst.
Or, they will argue among themselves so much that a decision will never get made and they all die from thirst because of their inaction.
Or, the Martians come out of hibernation and eat all of them.
Nothing good will happen because humanity is a stupid child race and incapable of rising above its basic primate thinking.
Because there is no fucking reason to go there other than bragging rights. Its a dead planet. The only time people migrate is when there is something to migrate for, be it a gold rush or self preservation. The reasons to go to Mars are............ Yeah
First of all, nobody is going to Mars for a lot longer than most people think. Costs too much now. Costs will drop slowly, And second, once people get there, most exploration will surely be done by robotic rovers -- probably controlled from orbit. AFAICS, there won't be any colonies until some terraforming is done. At the very least, getting rid of the toxic perchlorates that are said to be prsent in the soil. And hopefully some Oxygenation of the virtually nonexistent atmosphere. There may be a (very) few research stations on the surface and those will likely be militaristic. Think Antarctica -- which, BTW, is what the Martian climate will be like except that Antarctica is warmer and you can breath Antarctic air if you are careful about frostbite.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there are not going to be any Mars colonies. We may have research labs and possibly some vacation resorts but I don't see there being any real colonies. Not like scifi has us thinking.
The issue is not atmosphere or water, those can be addressed, but gravity. I was listening to some pod casts and reading some papers. There are a few scientists that think that our life cycle it tied very closely to a 1G gravity. With out this conception and development of a viable fetus is impossible. If this is true then there will never be colonies on Mars, or almost any place else.
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The real question is 'why' we would colonize Mars, and it has to make some kind of economic sense because it will be an expensive endeavor.
love is just extroverted narcissism
"The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled 'Elon.' Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet."
Wernher von Braun
The Mars Project, Page 177
Here is a link to one of the papers I read. This one doesn't state that conception and development will be impossible but does show considerable risk in the process.
http://journalofcosmology.com/...
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You're probably correct. That's pretty much how North America was settled. See the Virginia Company. How pretty it turned out is left as an exercise to the reader.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
I think it will be very similar to how Antarctica is today. There is a good starting point as a study case. Several science bases (maybe even some civilians, as Chile have in Antarctica today), each base belonging to a country of origin on earth, so each base will have a "local" law depending on that country. Lots of interactions/helping between bases. Mars won't be considered a foreign territory by any country, for many years to come. As in Antarctica, claimed territories will overlapped, but should not be a problem for anyone for some time. Problems will start when countries start exporting natural resources back to earth... specially coming from those overlapped territories. Thats my 2 pesos.
Agreed. We already got to 10th Rule of Acquisition here on Earth, no reason to think it will be any different on Mars.
Mars.... Brought to you by Carl's Jr
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I mean his Mars trilogy was nearly completely about the rise of a unique Martian society over the 100-200 years since its founding.
I think there are a lot of similarities between the exploration of Antarctica and of Mars. Sure, I'll get to some important differences, but I think it's the right starting point.
Once upon a time, Antarctica sounded like just about the most harsh, alien, abandoned and adventurous place one could go. The world's boldest men organized heroic expeditions to reach the ultimate bragging right: being the first to visit the South Pole. In time some succeeded, but not before others miserably died. The sheer adventure and alienness of Antarctica captured our fantasy. H. P. Lovecraft's best fantasy horror story takes place there.
But then, Antarctica was replaced in our imagination by Mars, the new go-to setting for our fantasy and horror. We got to the point where we knew just enough to fire up our imagination about what Mars is like, but we could still fill in the many gaps in knowledge with our fantasy. Just like "conquered" Antarctica with bold expeditions, we will eventually "conquer" Mars. Human footprints will get made, photographed, instagrammed, and gushed about. And then what?
Then Mars will start to seem a lot more like Antarctica: a place where we could survive and even build cities, with great effort and great expense, but ... why? The reason why no settlements are being built on the Antarctic continent is not because of international laws. If those laws expired, it's not like villages would start springing up. We have some scientific stations in Antarctica, and will will have some on Mars. I think their governing principles will be almost identical. But we have no Antarctic immigrants, and I don't expect Martian immigrants, beyond a couple of very rich weirdos. Once the place is covered with footprints, the exoticism will have worn off, and we'll see it for what it is: a strangely beautiful but also profoundly inhospitable cold place that's hostile to human habitation, and that probably should be preserved rather than bulldozed for space condos. The scientists there will complain of terrible food, terrible ping, terrible odors, terrible crampedness, annoying cancers and terrible shipping charges on anything they want to buy. At that point, who will be signing up to live there? The same people now dying to live in Antarctica.
..at first.
As much as I'm wired to look at what can go wrong with things (because ignoring that could be disasterous), I really hate to have to be that way with this subject. However there's so many things that can go wrong, most of them fatal, that you really can't ignore it.
The first few attempts at human colonization of Mars will likely be disasters where all the participants end up dead for one reason or another; sadly, anyone who agrees to go has to accept that it's very possibly a suicide mission. There is no rescue from Earth; there likely won't be any way of escaping back to Earth; the Martian atmosphere, such as it is, isn't breathable, and it's thin enough that (if I understand it correctly) radiation from the sun is a problem -- as is radiation exposure just getting there in the first place. Any habitat built there has to be 100% self contained, 100% self sufficient, essentially like a spacecraft except rooted to the planets surface, and with some notable exceptions: you have to be able to grow your own food in a sustainable way, you're not bringing all your food with you like you would for a LEO mission or to go live on the ISS. And so on, and so on. A whole list of things that, if they aren't done right, can kill everyone in the colony. That's not even taking into consideration the unknown unknowns that could also kill everyone. Assuming we stuck with it, there'd have to be several attempts at a Mars colony, before you got one that actually didn't end up with everyone dead. At least at our current level of technology, that is. Fifty years from now might be a different story entirely. Of course, fifty years from now, we might not even be capable of putting anything in LEO, for all we know.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We need to learn to walk before we can learn to run. We need Training Wheels on this particular bike -- and luckily for us, we've got the perfect place to practice right in our local neighborhood: the Moon. We should be building a permanent human presence on the Moon first, with all the infrastructure that implies, followed by industry to support space operations. We can make all our mistakes on the Moon, first, where it's possible to come up from Earth to fix them and/or rescue inhabitants. Industry built there can support any Mars missions (or asteroid missions, or whatever) easier than having to launch from Earth all the time. There would be many more advantages to this than I can easily list here.
A society on Mars will be a Utopia. Because humans have done such a fantastic job of creating a utopia on earth.
In short: humans will continue to be filled with: greed for excessive share of resources, lust to posses others for their own gratification, desire to control others, and need for others to stroke their egos. It will be wonderful!
People too young to understand this might think that technology will solve all our problems. Clue: it's not a technical problem. Or that people on Mars will be "better". Or we'll only send the "best". But the people who get to select the "best" won't be selecting for what you are thinking of. And even if they are, the problem is not an external problem. It is an internal problem that humans have and cannot overcome.
Some think that enough wealth will solve the problem. The lessons right here today should quash such notions. People are greedy. Insatiable greed. No amount of accumulation is enough. If a person has two loaves of bread and their brother has none, some people will share and some will not. The ones who will share will be exploited by the others who will not share. And wealth is nothing more than tokens that, in total, represent all of the available resources and labor. Printing more tokens simply diminishes the value of those tokens. (eg printing money) Some people have an insane amount of wealth (eg, share of earth's resources) and think they don't have an obligation to help poorer people because those people are not entitled to a share of the earth's resources. And the people who will argue this point are exactly a demonstration of why we have a problem that we cannot fix ourselves.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I'm not sure what this is referring too. There is a difference between sex in the sea and sex in zero gravity
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And they will most likely be speaking Mandarin.
Unless the US can get rid of the cancerous politics called Trumpism, China will be the next imperial colonial power.
I'm mixed on Trump but he really is more a symptom than a cause. To "get rid of him" you need to address the causes. Otherwise you'll just get another person like him - or worse.
I actually did think of the "maternity ring" when I was posting the OP. I just wasn't sure how viable that it would be on a Mars colony. Basically the way I see it you would have to go off world to conceive and give birth.
I'm not really sure about the feasibility of a "maternity train" planet side. You would have two forces active on the fetus a the same time. Natural gravity and artificial gravity. It is a interesting concept that would merit farther study though.
Of course there is always the possibility of genetic engineering any future colonist. I honestly don't see any way around that at all if we want to become a space fairing species. I imagine any colonist that inhabit a future Mars or moon will be human only in name and evolutionary roots. Say homo sapient martian or homo sapient luna?
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I guess you think you're suddenly in zero gravity in a swimming pool too?
Seems you don't know the difference between bouancy and zero gravity. Never mind, you'll get a clue one day.
why... what is the end goal of having a Mars base?
Redundancy, and the spreading of life.
There is nowhere to go after that in a human lifespan at current (or 10x current) velocities.
Venus Mercury Ganymede Titan Callisto Io Moon Europa Triton Titania Rhea Oberon Iapetus Charon Umbriel Ariel Dione Tethys Enceladus Miranda Proteus Mimas Nereid Hyperion Phoebe, and then a bunch of smaller stuff.
Why is one (current) human lifespan a limiting factor?
Actually, it was a great success - they had a couple of *major* problems with the first experiment (especially unexpected CO2 loss to the concrete), but were able to make it through by the skin of their teeth - though admittedly it was pure stubbornness that kept them going to the end of the mission. And I seem to recall a lot of people problems as well. Basically the problem (beyond the unexpected) was they had too many people for the size of the ecosystem - and not enough people for healthy social interactions - things were basically working, just not quite well enough to quite cut it.
There's also been at least a couple long-term Russian experiments using switchgrass and the like for atmosphere recycling, though I believe they ate stored rations. And I think I've heard of a few others, though I can't recall any details.
An actual colony could address the problems relatively easily - you have a decent population of at least several dozen people and growing, and eat mostly imported food for the first few years as the gardens expand, which they will do as fast as you can manage since there's no need to keep plant life in balance with animals when you have an unlimited supply of CO2 right outside. You make absolutely no attempt to maintain a sealed environment - you import resources and dispose of waste as needed - and the most vital bulk ecological resources, CO2 and H2O, are in plentiful local supply.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Check out your sources. That article's written by a nutter.
Holy fucking crap....
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Joseph has been criticized by the scientific community for embracing unorthodox mechanisms of evolution. In one instance, the biologist P.Z. Myers ridiculed a claim by Joseph that a rock found on Mars is a living organism similar to a type of fungus existing on Earth.[4] He has also made controversial comments about sex, including "Biologically, females serve one purpose: to get pregnant".[5]
In 2014, Joseph filed a lawsuit against NASA as he claimed they failed to investigate whether a rock seen on Mars is in fact an alien lifeform.[2][3]
I have a legitimate concern and to back up my issue I reference a article written by a loon. Why isn't that just ... perfect. Thanks for pointing that out.
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Could we not simulate gravity by rotating stuctures? I guess those would easier to maintain zero gravity.
We can, and probably will in space. I'm just not sure how rotating structures will work on a planet service. The issue I was thinking about is the conception and development of a fetus in other than Earth gravity.
But some other posters have pointed out by the time we set up a colony on mars we might have the technology to solve this problem. So i'm not sure how much of my OP is valid any more.
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Assuming 10km radius for the track, you'd need the "maternity ring" to move about 1100 km/hr (mach 1). Not hard at all in orbit (two habitats attached by a 10km cable would do it), and not terribly hard on Mars (get one of Musk's earth borers to dig an underground track)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"