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Comment by rothbardrand | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't really be relevant. For why, read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

TLDR: The moon colony will be able to make its own rules and keep earth at bay.

I'm sorry but this is just silly. Just because something happened in a novel published more than 50 years ago does not at all make it likely to happen in real life. The Moon is much less habitable than we thought it would be in the 60s, meaning any moon colony will be very dependent on the Earth for the foreseeable future and the rock launcher wouldn't be bulidable with the kind of infrastructure in the novel.

The point is it's really hard to impose laws and forms of government on peoples living days or months away from you. Sooner or later they'll want to make their own.

Same lesson as KSRobinson's Mars series. Same lesson as the United States secession and rebellion against Great Britain.

You make the government local, or the local government that eventually forms will rebel. Then it will beat you, because it can react to the local situation more quickly.

You might be able to control the Moon from Earth, but Mars will definitely be self-governing. It's all about the latency.

Why didn't Canada rebel? Australia? Falkland Islands? Malta? India? Nigeria? Belize? Tunisia? Samoa? Puerto Rico? The Philippines? Guam? Most of the Caribbean? In fact, off the top of my head the only times that you saw a colony rebel in a circumstance like that was the U.S and Haiti. Now you can point pout that most of the countries I mentioned are independent or quasi-independent today but most of them got that status after WW2 when it was actually much much easier to travel. And all of those countries also had the benefit of being able to have a breathable atmosphere, a magnetic field, and land which you can grow crops on none of which Mars or the Moon have which would make them much more dependent on their home nation.

I'd guess that was because there are more factors in play than just distance. But I get the sense that you're trying to invert a logical implication somewhere.

The comparison you should be making is the rebellion of a distant colony versus a more local rebellion. I.e. why did the American Revolution succeed, but the Whiskey Rebellion fail?

You said "You make the government local, or the local government that eventually forms will rebel. Then it will beat you, because it can react to the local situation more quickly. You might be able to control the Moon from Earth, but Mars will definitely be self-governing. It's all about the latency." Which sounds like you think distant colonies successfully rebelling is a rule of history that means Mars will inevitably be self-governing. I pointed out that in fact, most colonies did not rebel and only became self-governing in the 1900s it no longer took months or weeks to travel to them.

The Whisky rebellion was essentially an armed tax protest, of the kind that happened fairly often in American history and before independence. Its goal was never to topple the US government or create a separate nation.

Says who? Plenty of empires had people living that far without rebellions breaking out. Yeah the US rebelled against Britain but Canada, Australia, and a bunch of other places didn't. Hell, most of England was more than a couple days away from London for most of English history without breaking away. Let alone a larger country like China.

How much of the British Empire still reports to Britain?

One of my all time favorite books.

I like how the power roles between the sexes on the moon are reversed too. The matriarch has all the power because women are scarce and they take on many husbands out of this need. They always hold the cards and culturally everyone accepts this.

Also, because the value of women is so high no man ever dares attack one less they be sent out an airlock. It is cultural justice. No trial. A man just knows that if he is seen assaulting a woman, he is dead. The community can't afford to lose a single female.

Plus with all the talk of the A.I. Armageddon the book plays right into that discussion.

The American west was once very lopsided as well, males became cowboys and the women rarely traveled west. In one generation the few women out west had equal numbers of both gender kids and now that history is not important to the culture.

The book is interesting, but it was written for a society that doesn't exist. Women and men will not be as lopsided in a colony. The first few ships might be mostly male construction workers, but after that expect to see a much closer balance.

Many societies have historically been matriarchal. It just happened that Christianity, Islam (maybe Judaism? not sure...) were patriarchal and societies that embraces these religions came to dominate most of the other society/ peoples.

I do hope the future will be more "centrist", neither patriarchal nor matriarchal.

Will be in how much time? Considering the first man who went to the moon needed to place a national flag on it asap, I think we are risking a serious conflict and IF we could avoid it better we do whatever is possible BEFORE having people fighting directly on the moon.

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