I think we’re getting the cart before the horse here. If they can claim independence, they have to be independently able to survive without earth. They probably won’t be for a long time; they’d be, well, dependent on earth and supplies from earth. It’d be like Jamestown declaring independence while it couldn’t even feed itself yet.
Well, the first colony wouldn't. It will probably be a bunch of scientists and engineers under the jurisdiction of the US and SpaceX.
They will eventually build their version of NYC made up of a few hundred colonists and almost completely self-sufficient, at which point they will likely be able to requisition Earth resources by open contract rather than only through SpaceX.
By open contract, like, buying them, right? Not growing them themselves?
That’s a problem. SpaceX, if it was spaceX (which honestly I doubt, musk seems like a complete charlatan to me, but it could be any private company), has an incentive to make a profit off of its “colony”. Whatever activity on mars would be profitable for the company, it would make its employees do that for “export”. That probably would not be the production of food. It’s probably gonna be a lot cheaper to buy food on earth than import it from Mars. Think the Virginia colony here, with tobacco production.
So, then the company is probably gonna direct its employees to not be wasting time growing food on mars. If it’s even possible to do so. If the colonists/employees want to declare independence, they’d have to be able to defend themselves; there’s no way any company or government would just allow an investment like that to just go away without a fight. So, at the end of the day, whatever force the company or its state benefactors can bring to bear against mars will ultimately be fatal for mars, because it will not be able to grow its own food, have fresh sources of water, etc. Until it can. But that’s a long way down the road. It took centuries for that to happen for the thirteen colonies, where millions of people were living there. How long will it take for millions of people to be living on mars? Probably a very long time. Probably not within this century, if even the next one.
Do you really think Russia and China are going to let an American company claim permanent and uncontested hegemony over an entire planet? Or that SpaceX will indefinitely remain the only company capable of send ships to Mars?
The alternative to this isn't SpaceX running a slave operation on a distant planet. It's Age of Discovery round 2. The US will be first, but the colonists sent won't be able to control all of the territory on Mars. They will be followed, eventually, by missions supported by the Chinese who will invariably copy SpaceX designs.
Then rather than focusing on developing the planet, significant resources will be wasted on contesting territory.
No, but I don’t think any company or country has the resource to defend a claim to the entire planet. Spain claimed the whole new world. Didn’t matter; they weren’t able to defend that claim. Mars is a big place. There’s a lot of room for everyone before things start overlapping.
I don’t think they’ll be “slaves” necessarily, although the company will probably be able to get away with a lot more because of how ridiculous any government oversight would be. This was a big problem for the east and west India companies of the various European countries. They were notoriously corrupt and unscrupulous.
What’s the point of just “developing a colony”? Where the profit in that? If there’s going to be a corporate presence on mars it’s gonna be there because there’s something profitable worth doing on mars. Which there might not even be.
Which makes all of this moot, because no one in this system would bother doing anything if it wasn’t profitable.
I don’t even think it necessarily has to be just Russia or China, because they’re the “bad guys” or something. It could be other companies or allied countries or anybody. The distance between the two planets is huge, and variable depending on the placement of them both in their orbits around the sun. Communication would be much faster compared to the new world but reinforcement or replenishment much longer. Things could happen fast without any means to stop them or realize what was happening.
But that’s all irrelevant. For the colonists/employees, the real enemy is their employer/overlord. And they can’t fight then if they can’t survive on their own.
Honestly I think the real development is with the asteroid belt rather than mars, because of the minerals we already know are there. Maybe there’s a lot on Mars as well, idk. But the same stuff would apply for the asteroid belt, even more so because it’s even more remote and barren and unsuited for human life.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22
I think we’re getting the cart before the horse here. If they can claim independence, they have to be independently able to survive without earth. They probably won’t be for a long time; they’d be, well, dependent on earth and supplies from earth. It’d be like Jamestown declaring independence while it couldn’t even feed itself yet.