What could a future sovereign Mars economy look like?
phys.org
phys.org
Mars is a planet that is VERY hostile towards (human) life at the moment. As far as I know we do not even have the remote technical capabilites to do stuff like terraforming to make marss inhabitable. So that means we would have to create closed constructs that protects humans.
Lets assume, that we have the technology to contruct settlements that are capable of sustaining humans up there. Couldnt we just use the same technology to remain on earth no matter how hostile climate change makes it towards humans ?
Even in the worst case scenarios for climate change. Earth will still look like a paradise in comparison to a "good" day on mars.
Sure, a very select few rich people could survive this, but it just does not scale and is a pretty shitty life. There is no cost effective way around protecting earth's biosphere so that we all can continue to live here.
It's not very hostile. It's the least hostile place after Earth. That's why you see all of the "lets build colonies on mars" "plans". These are not plans they are more like fun topics for people in various fields to theorize and speculate.
To do some of that speculation myself. Any settlement on Mars or anywhere else other than earth for that matter, won't be there for people to live on but to support some activity happening there. Think more science outposts and or refueling stations than cities.
Who is the "we" there? Some of us would indeed choose to remain on earth, while others will choose to go to Mars.
We will colonize Mars not as a collective action of "Earth", but as the sum of many individual actions of people who possess their own free will.
Spacesuits won’t protect you from the high velocity rocks that occasionally hit our planet. Statistically one of those will cause another extinction level event with or without humans. A particularly unlucky one may wipe out all forms of life except bacteria. Or any of the other horrors out in the cosmos like a CME that could send Earth back to the Stone Age.
Besides all that, Mars is less hostile than Earth in the most important way that matters. Mars has 38% the surface gravity of Earth making access to space much easier. For a space faring civilization Mars makes a lot of sense. We also have no idea what’s underground, there may be elaborate lava tubes and tunnels that make it far earlier to survive than we realize.
Also, CME is coronal mass ejection and they happen all the time. One happened last month. CMEs are worse for Mars than Earth since Earth has atmosphere to protect while Mars gets the radiation directly. Carrington Event would cause power outages on Earth and possible death on surface of Mars. Like other things, Earth can prevent CME power outages. Can afford lots of preparation for cost of Mars colony.
If you are talking about gamma ray burst, then those would affect both planets. Earth has the advantage that would probably habitable and any survivors can live outside even if only using rocks. If civilization collapses on Mars, there won't be a Stone Age.
My feeling is that Mars civilization doesn't have to worry about external extinction because it would be fragile enough that won't last long. It depends on technology to survive and any interruption in that technology will cause collapse and there is no recovery. In the short term, it will be reliant on Earth and any problems on Earth will doom the colony.
And I second the recommendation of "A City on Mars" as mentioned by another commenter here.
Replace Mars with North Korea and Earth with the rest of the world and his paper reads coherently, though Pyongyang isn't quite as harsh as the author, e.g. "tourists cannot bring Mars currency back to Earth."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10380
The Weinersmiths' survey "A City on Mars" is a more comprehensive treatment on the subject.
Banking is going to be the least of the Martian colonist’s worries for the first several decades if not the first century. Mars could be a sovereign nation or set if sovereign nations but why the insistence on absolute separation from the people on Earth? Even just trading scientific research for water would be massively beneficial for the people on Mars.
Marx probably would think on this as a kind of utopian socialism, and his criticism would be that you cannot understand the Mars society and its economy without thinking firsthand how exactly people will organize production to ensure their survival: the superstructure comes after the infrastructure. He would say that if people ends organizing production in a capitalistic way, like in Earth, then this would concentrate wealth, and therefore, power, in few hands; undermining democracy despite how much the society appear democratic on the surface. But probably would agree that if they manage to ensure a more egalitarian society from the ground up, diffusing capital ownership as is proposed in the paper, then a revolution would not be necessary, as there will not exist a previous entrenched ruling class in Mars trying to undermine this. However, Marx would point that the real end result would probably confuse the author who is too accustomed with capitalist economy to the point of not envisioning in the paper nothing fundamentally different than what he sees in a capitalist economy. Would then point that what the author propose about distributing capital is not different than what he defines as communism and that perhaps it may be possible to create it more directly in the outer space than in Earth, but it would depend on the challenges that humanity would face during this era, and on how much technology (aka development of means of production) we would have to deal with such different environment: if Mars economy is too much dependent on Earth, it will not create something that contradicts capitalist development on Earth.