Something that popped in my head that our resident economists and political scientists out there can answer. If there is a sizable colony that is formed on Mars, what kind of economy will it have? Will people have salaries? What kind of government will be formed?
This will be an amazing social, economic and political experiment for sure.
Be careful of posting popping in head stuff. I have only light guesses so far:
- I believe political autonomy is the only way to fully realize redundancy, otherwise there would be way too many synchronized shared risks with Earth.
- But, that might not even bubble to the top first, if the people of Mars are not in a completely oppressive governance when they arrive in numbers; if they have any type of self determination in the beginning of critical mass of people, they'll quickly tire of paying attention to anyone else at all, meaning Earth; people in general with a sufficient level of competence naturally are worse off when being oppressed. In either case, they can create their own governance. I can't guess precisely what that would be, but it would probably be a mixture of smart modern futuristic ideas and crappy communist ones that are from the various spies that worm their way onto Mars somehow. I also believe the spies will continue to be the source of evil and wars there as here.
- Thank god that Oil will not be the primary motivator on that planet, given that we are in a new age of people that aren't completely worshiping the Oil gods. But, they'll have other chemical dependencies to consider: air, water, things that allow farming, things that allow construction, things that allow energy, and rocket fuel if they ever want to do Earth trade (which we are preliminarily assuming they'll initially want to do), so some material companies on Mars may yet cause trouble.
- Then, there is the possibility that despite oppression, people there may have the need to overcome their oppression, as they have occasionally tried to do on Earth in some places. This could be another source of governance.
What is most certain about governance is that the better the governance, the longer that version will last, each time.
- Bitcoin.
- Blockchain chained barter.
- Accounting for responsibility is usually not done much in economy. However, accounting for power, control, and material organization usually are done in economy. I'm guessing that as soon as the first fat person is born or immigrates, or the first hoarder, or some material gets in too small supply, or someone wants to spur lazy people into working in some sort of regularized useful way, economy will be absolutely required, since it will be needed to balance out the inadequacies. They will probably try all sorts of things, from copying existing systems to creating new ones.
- Every conceivable kind of currency, current and future.
- Sources of accounting will be somewhat tied to the various governance and ownership structures.
Because money is a story that the people believe in, the stories that are told on Mars will have a lot of sway. They will tend to be adventurous, demanding, particular about necessity, and optimistic, as well as prudent and conservative. Beyond those trends, they will also be able to copy those stories with the people on Earth in relation to how much communication with Earthlings they do of their respective stories; I cannot determine how much censorship will happen, so it's impossible to know how well those stories will communicate. It doesn't take much censorship to erase monetary stories (as evidenced by the outsized effect of FUD on our economies).
- Creative, optimistic, cooperative, determined, exhausted, etc. I think there's going to be a lot of social energy created from the intrigue of wanting to, doing, and planning the living in a terraforming phase of civil creation.
- There is a strong possibility that internationalism will infest the original colonies, with Babylonian problems, such as multiple languages, and the unacceptable levels of discord that is made possible by those who wish to sew it using the great tools of multiculturalism and multilingualism. However, if those problems are overcome, those items will eventually be made non-issues. That is, there will be one language, one culture, and no regard to other categories of persons (other than the necessary such as male, female, smart, dumb, young, and unhealthy). I only mention this possibility, since if internationalism takes hold, it will crap all over all the stories, experiences, and histories of the colony(ies). How fast the colony(ies) jettison the multicultural and multilingual crap will have a lot to do with how fast they jettison the evil that comes with it. In the meanwhile, we may read a lot of crap while they go through that process. Be forewarned: once they have solved that problem, the local Earthling internationalists will censor their newfound social function, and we Earthlings won't even know about it, or how good, great or mediocre it has become.
- If they have technical problems that don't allow everyone to live somewhat aligned with their respective body potentials (such as causing substantially premature death), there may be some temporary social distortions directly related to those particular technical issues.
I can only guess on the basis of what I've seen on and from Earth.
I'll use one issue as an example to see how complex this could be. One of the stupidest things I've ever seen from NASA is the concept that after working with coworkers all day long that the people would then want to be so near each other at the end of the day that they're practically making love at home too. After making this mistake in their experimental dome on Earth, they finally realized that having living quarters packed in like cockroaches was a bad way to organize highly intelligent long lived humans. But, I'm not confident that the original city planners for Mars colonies will realize this, and will instead make this mistake again. This is one example of a problem that Martians will have to overcome; how they overcome issues like that are random from the point of view of people guessing the future, since it could manifest in all sorts of ways when you put them way out there in complex systems of their own. For instance, the first person to force the issue of being further away from others could be the first person who needed to be away from others and was bold enough to do it, but it's hard to guess who that would be, and what sort of intellectual, physical, social and technical powers they'd have to achieve those means, and those particulars would in many ways determine the manifestations of their successes. However, averaged over larger numbers of time, space, and matter, some of these will turn into regularized patterns we'll understand better from our own experiences, but not exactly, due to the unique characteristics of the foreign place (Mars).
Another thing that will change out there is when they transform. For instance, I can imagine a society based upon caves will be ill-equipped to deal with free roaming children who can breath open atmosphere Martian air, and vice versa. Some other transformations should be easy. For instance, in the same example, I could easily see the cave dwellers embracing atmospheric existence readily. But, sometimes things are built in ways that aren't completely flexible, and need modification and/or rebuilding. Once again, I find that it has more to do with random historical nuances and less to do with anything we can guess.
Often factors are built more by the mistakes made than the successes; often, the successes are practically transparent and assumed. Of course, any transparent success that suddenly fails would create its own equations and interesting items.
One of the initial glories of Mars will be a plethora of interesting things. After that newness dies out, that could be a further issue to resolve, but a more boring one. However, I have confidence that that will be a long time in coming in the long term, if ever.
