…for Mars.
They seem to be a little confused about positive versus negative rights. You may have a right to leave, but you can’t demand that someone else pay for it. A “right to oxygen”? Not obvious how to handle that one. The solution to how to overthrow a tyrannical government is, of course, a Second Amendment.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Can a democracy exist on Mars?
…naive, wishful thinking seems to underpin all of the very hard questions about what governance and daily life on Mars might possibly look like. One reason could be the participants: the organizer of these events is an astrobiologist, and they seem to have gotten their insight into politics from writers like Stephen Baxter. This is not a dig against either men — astrobiology is an incredibly interesting subject, and I love Baxter’s books — but they are not experts in governance or nation-building (which is what a colony will be). There is, luckily, an entire field of academic study devoted to these questions: academics who have spent decades understanding how and why regimes can be resisted, how to build new nations, and so on. They don’t seem to have been included in this discussion.
Instead it looks like most other efforts at imagining space colonies: well meaning but ultimately naive technocrats imagining a western technocratic society as the best structure. And just like with Musk’s concept of a Mars colony, the serious economic issues at play here, which are a big deal in designing any society, are ignored. They assume it will be a mostly-deregulated libertarian economic system, again despite the inescapable fact that any space colony will have to concern itself primary with generating enough air and water to keep everyone alive. It is utterly baffling.
As he notes, tech people aren’t necessarily the best people to design a functional society.
Star Trek is a post-capitalist society – if you’re setting up a settlement, what is the economic set-up going to be? The economy could be completely different.
That doesn’t sound very encouraging. Doesn’t say specifically if they have any SF authors there. Ditto on the second amendment. One of the (many) reasons Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy took flying lessons for me mid-way through the second book. You’ve succeeded in your revolution and the first thing you’re going to do is ban guns? Nitwit.
It makes perfect sense. There never was never a successful counterrevolution fought with swords.
On a related subject, stay tuned for my forthcoming novel, “The Ides of Mars.”
I agree completely. I don’t like the talk about a “post-capitalist society” either. Then again, it’s an article from the BBC. They don’t understand, or more likely refuse to accept, the fact that so far all the post-capitalist societies that have ever existed have been poverty-ridden disasters ranging from the merely awful (East Germany) to the absolutely nightmarish (Stalin, N. Korea, Khmer Rouge, Mao). Star Trek was and isn’t as post-capitalist as many people think. In the Deep Space Nine series, the main character, Captain Benjamin Sisko, had a father who ran a restaurant in the French Quarter in New Orleans. And while their replicator technology, along unlimited natural resources, and cheap transportation across interstellar distances, made production costs very low, or almost negligible, there did seem to be a market in originals in everything.
How many DS9 episodes began with some variation on “somehow we have to get some gold-pressed latinum [?] from the Ferengis” because the Federation had oh-so-progressively abolished filthy lucre?
Well banning guns after your revolution “worked” for Mexico. They have had the same party in charge for most of the last 100 years, and look how far they’ve come… I think I rest your case 😉
The trick with negative rights is that you have to do the translation into responsibilities a little differently. E.g. whereas a positive right to free speech implies “I have the responsibility not to use force to punish his speech”, a positive right to oxygen merely means “Someone else has the responsibility to give him oxygen”. This accounts for the popularity of negative rights: life is tough, and that “someone else” guy really ought to be pulling more weight.
I think you have “positive” and “negative” twisted here. A “positive” right is what the government does for you (usually at someone else’s expense), while a “negative” right is what the government is prohibited from doing against you.
I did mix that around; thank you!
If I were writing a Constitution for a new nation I’d like to amplify a clause in the US Constitution that gets forgotten or poorly understood: no titles of nobility. The premise that government officials and agents being held to the full law that they administer and enforce goes a long way to limiting tyranny. Even rendering much of the Bill of Rights redundant, though a bit of redundancy in critical systems is not bad.
Another point I’d like to see is making repeal of poorly considered law easier, and limiting the term of law passed in a rush.
Its a tricky one considering how hard it is to live without air. Stands to reason, that a government would have to provide some basic services in an extreme environment. This all depends on the way a colony is constructed. An enclosed city may well require the production and distribution of air in the form of a utility but dispersed settlements may require people to be more self sufficient.
But could a city government or utility cut off air if you miss some payments? That could be a death sentence so there will probably be a different funding mechanism.
Could be a way for various colonies to differentiate and attract settlers.
I imagine that even if there was an air utility, people would still want to enhance it on their own.
This is obviously why the government provides everyone with free food here on Earth. It only makes sense that there be a government operated food utility.
Not quite the same thing but thanks for playing.
Remember the original Philippe Khan Turbo Pascal (Anders Hejlsberg was the less well known back-room guy who actually developed it)? It was an editor, compiler, and language run-time library in an 80K image or something, of which 20K was the run-time library that it replicated into the executable images it created?
Compare with Delphi 2010’s mega bloatware?
How about Niklaus Wirth’s Pascal language original description and say the latest release of Ada?
The United States Constitution is like the early Turbo Pascal IDE or like the original Pascal definition document. Lean and mean like nothing seen since and maybe even nothing seen before it.
Also, it wasn’t a system of laws as much as a compiler for a system of laws or even a meta compiler. There is much that is “meta” about it in describing how things were to take place rather than the things themselves.
The Bill of Rights was the first piece of “cruft” that got grafted on, although the Bill of Rights was a condition of acceptance of the whole thing. The Bill of Rights is also famous for its parsimony and narrow focus (except for that notorious “A well-regulated Militia” preamble to one of the Rights).
C’mon people. If cutting off air is a death sentence, would not the process and procedures for cutting off someone’s air be bounded by the “cruel and unusual punishment” along with the “due process” clauses without having to put “air” in your constitution document along with the standards for its molecular composition colonists are entitled to receive?
So Gregg Abbott wants the States to convene a Constitutional Convention. Even Libertarians and Conservatives don’t understand the nature of the US Constitution and why recreating it today is nigh impossible. Pray for us sinners in the hour that we go ahead with such a thing.
I don’t know for sure but I suspect at least a few of the commenters here would be OK with shutting off the air.
In some places in the USA, power and gas can be shut off in the middle of winter. In other places, its illegal. Would not turning off the air need to be explicitly stated? Depends on how much scratch they start with.
Also, the physical makeup of a colony makes a big difference. Would air be piped across open distances to separate individual residences? Maybe not but if a large group of people live in what is essentially a single building, things change.
Imagine you want to be a colonist and are deciding where to move. You have the skills to get a job at either one but don’t have millions to build your own homestead so you live in the city, so to speak. Colony A says they provide basic life support systems. Colony B says you have to provide your own basic life support. Where would you take the job?
In a pressurized enclosure with limited means to modify your limited living space, I think air would be part of the relationship between citizens and their government. Taxes or some other funding mechanism that doesn’t require a monthly bill for air will be implemented. Depending on the specific type of colony, providing air could be on par with protecting a terrestrial country with a military.
If anyone thinks they will live on a space station or a colony on Mars and not pay taxes or that services required by government won’t be different than ones provided on Earth, they are fooling themselves. And of course if you have the means, you are free to homestead and live entirely on your own terms or as much as circumstances allow. The only way to get away from government is to live on your own but even then, you are the government just an idiosyncratic dictatorial one.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Read it. Learn it. Love it.
“The libertarian novel about the government’s computer using its ability to eavesdrop on and impersonate every electronic communication ever so as to instigate a violent rebellion enabling the Lunies to excuse unilaterally breaking their grain contracts, and it’s the hero?” — Austin Dern,
from http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4862423.html
One thing that I think our founders tried to do but didn’t quite have the full vocabulary or mathematics for was the negative feedback loop. All government control should have an intrinsic negative feedback loop. They have “checks and balances” but I think we can do better now days. As an example: maybe something like for every EPA mandate the EPA loses some % of funding that is directly related to how much the mandate costs.
The EPA having to pay for economic losses imposed by it’s enforcement, under the takings clause, would seem to bring some missing sanity.
A contract imposed by force, as the grain “contracts” in that book were, is no contract.
I agree. I just thought it was a funny comment, and I thought the entire discussion I linked to might provide an interesting alternative perspective for someone who loves the book as much as Fuloydo apparently does. (And I love it too, despite any flaws it might have).
Suppose you’re working to establish a colony on Mars. You can’t just transport a bunch of random people there and expect to succeed. The initial cadre of people you need to send must be self-starters with multiple skills and a strong work ethic. Depending on how much of your infrastructure could be built robotically before the first people arrive, the first days, weeks, and months will be a struggle to survive. There will be no surpluses available to support slackers.
Even after you’ve established, you aren’t likely to have a lot of surplus resources to carry those who don’t contribute. Mars is an unlikely place for a welfare society. If you don’t contribute, you don’t get to stay. Just because you might be able to afford the cost of the trip, it doesn’t mean you get to treat the colony as a luxury resort. In time, as people become too old to work and too accustomed to Mars’ low gravity to return to Earth, some accommodation will have to be made.
On thing that I think people (conservative, libertarian and liberal) don’t understand is that Government is really good at doing only ONE thing: Losing Money.
Luckily there are some things that we as society don’t want to have a profit motive. As an example:
Law enforcement: I don’t want the cops to make money on if they can convict me.
Military: I don’t want the guys that decide when to go to war, to also make a profit on that war.
etc:
Once you figure out what you don’t want to do without a profit motive, then you know what you want the government to do. Now because there is no profit motive you have to add some other motive with a consistent automatic negative feedback loop. Otherwise it will not be controllable.
Just remember that without a profit motive it will cost between 4 and 15 times more. But for some things it is worth the extra money.
Law enforcement: I don’t want the cops to make money on if they can convict me.
With civil asset forfeiture, the cops can make money without even having to press charges, much less get a conviction. But that’s a point for another thread.
For early settlers on Mars, I don’t see much need for a profit motive. What are they going to buy? Perhaps they’d be paid by some employer to take care of their families back on Earth. I think it’ll be a while before there are families on Mars.
How appallingly arrogant and useless. The Martians will write their own when the time comes, based on their perception of what they need and the actual conditions they face.