Do you have a better citation? Because loans are not feudalism — and if you want to insist they are, only Islamic Law jurisdictions (which bans interest rather than loans but eh) are non-feudal.
Loans in themselves are not 100% "feudal", though I don't think it's a binary "is feudal" -vs- "is not feudal"; more of a "how feudal". The implication above was that loan repayment via mandatory labour is feudal (or at least "more feudal").
> if you want to insist they are, only Islamic Law jurisdictions (which bans interest rather than loans but eh) are non-feudal
That's a pretty big "eh" tbh; I don't many people think interest is the problematic part of loans. Don't think Islamic Law can be excluded here.
At Musk’s target price for Mars flights, someone as rich as Bezos could pay for half a million people to go to Mars. (That said, if I had Bezos’ money, I’d buy flights from SpaceX to build a factory on the Moon to research space-based mining and manufacturing, and launch loops, with a view to expanding that into a full-blown colony over time).
That won't matter if SpaceX has a monopoly on the air they breath, the food they eat and the water they drink. One of the first legal questions they will grapple with is "Does earth law apply on Mars/to Martian citizens? Or is Bezos' contract moot"
Look at the history of colonization if you want to see the dynamic of human nature/greed/fiefdoms away from the mother country that is several-month's journey away. The Dutch East India company or the British South Africa Company may be decent case-studies, the only difference being that they could "live off the land" and exploit the natives. There are no natives on Mars, but I can't rule out exploitation.
Does the colony itself have to be owned by the transport company?
Any of the colony?
Including the life support, the factories which make the life support, the mining equipment which digs up the resources these factories use, or anything else?
I’m not expecting great things from human nature, but I expect Terran governments to forcefully insist on non-Monopolistic behaviour very quickly, even in the absence of abuse of power, as they’ll be lobbied by both potential investors and military hawks with “isolationism bad” rhetoric.
All of the Terran governments? I think it would be trivial to play different governments with launch capability against each other, especially if you can mine asteroids (or have technology that's almost there and can promise to supply cooperative governments raw materials in exchange of access to a launch complex and their domestic food market). The promises of riches in the colonies drove competition among colonizing countries, I don't see how it would be any different, it would be trivial to set up subsidiaries in the US/Russia/China/France and see who bites first.
A repayable loan is not feudalism.
Needless to say, the likely-Earth-based shareholders are likely to be unimpressed by such a colonial government.
If they don’t own the rocket company and don’t threaten the main colony? That might end up like Jonestown.
And if they do threaten the main colony or even take it over entirely?
My point with my comment was that because mars is far away, any earth response on mars would be rather slow. Mars would have plenty of time to react if earth ships soldiers over or whatever and they wouldn't care about seizure of earth assets. As for ballistic missiles, to what end? Kill all the innocent colonists to get rid of the warlord?
Even if it was the person that owns the rockets, if they're on mars, they may no longer care about the earth assets. I mean, if its a one way trip, they wouldn't be able to do anything with them other than send supplies. I assume if they were to play warlord, its at a point where they no longer care about the supplies. If earth used those rockets to invade mars, mars would still have plenty of time to come up with a plan to shoot them down or whatever.
> Needless to say, the likely-Earth-based shareholders are likely to be unimpressed by such a colonial government.
If mars is a one-way trip away, why would they care about Earth-based shareholders?
Not saying such a takeover would end well for mars, just that the isolation leaves it wide open for some maniac to play warlord. I also think its more likely that its not the person who owns the rockets, if someone does decide to do that.
Military action between the main colony and outliers is going to involve not-yet-invented doctrine and tactics because we don’t yet have enough experience of building such settlements to properly consider what warfare in or between them will look like.
One thing we can say is: anyone who looks like a dictator, and is based on Mars, and who has interplanetary rockets, is a threat to Earth, because while stealth in space can always be beaten by having more sensor coverage, it’s really hard to action that information. Likewise, Mars will see the Terran space marines coming and, depending on industrialisation level, either have a really hard time doing anything about it, or find they’re being preemptively RFG’d to stop them doing that to Earth.
(Hello MAD my old friend / how about a nice game of chess?)
Well, I was responding to:
> The Outer Space Treaty means anything launched from Earth remains the responsibility of the nation who launched it. SpaceX most certainly is under the jurisdiction of the US and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
My response being that jurisdiction may not mean anything, simply because of the distance involved. That was my point. If mars is a one way trip, then earths influence may turn out to be quite minimal, simply because its hard and slow to move between earth and mars. If earths influence is minimal, then jurisdiction is a rather moot point.
(PS: this of course assumes that's there's anything to do on Mars, it's not clear to me what the Mars colonists would actually do there all day, except constructing the actual colony - but what then?).
I haven't read the books but this just seems like the "British imperial colonialism but in space" trope typical of space opera.
Earth mining is often done in horrendous and poor conditions. Megacorps and industry do kill millions of people on earth today with little explanation or repercussions.
Sure, there were horrible industrial disasters like Bhopal, but in the book the aforementioned megacorp kills millions seemingly out of sheer evil. It felt too videogamey for my taste.
And I don't just mean literal gold or mining.. The Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s, cryptocurrency today, etc... there will always be early adopters and entrepreneurial risk-takers (of varying levels of competency) who precede, and sometimes outlast, the corporations where there's money to be made..
In the Expanse lore, this happened because of the Epstein drive, a relatively cheap type of fusion drive that allowed humanity to go further faster, even in small scrappy ships.
So it would make sense that early pioneers would rush out to the belt and beyond to stake their claims..
Look at mining in the third world today. Not so automated, right? Why would it be any different out in the belt?
Hundreds of years and millions of people trying to eke out a living, particularly when you also consider the state of planet Earth in the Expanse (essentially a giant welfare state).. that creates an third-world equivalent out there, and I think it's pretty plausible..
Anyways, I respect your take on things regardless.. this is just mine.. the story gets so much better beyond book 1, if you're ever thinking about reconsidering. :-)
Incidentally, can anyone recommend some hopeful science fiction? "Schismatrix" is probably my favorite.
Worth noting that Earth isn't part of the Culture, it has been left in ignorance to stare out at an apparently silent universe.
The humanoids that populate the Culture belong to any number of entirely unrelated species that are capable of interbreeding through deliberate interventions (upgrades, really) that paper over the genetic, proteomic, biochemical, etc. differences.
None of those species are related to Earth's Homo Sapiens, or to any other species belonging to Earth's biosphere (though I think there might have been an allusion or two to panspermia insofar as origin-of-life goes).
So. When I say that Earth isn't part of the Culture, I mean to include anyone who has any Earth ancestors.
OTOH, the Culture has had observers, agents, etc. visit Earth (after being appropriately retrofitted to resemble Earth humans at least anatomically, and optionally biochemically and genetically) on occasion, to determine whether to continue with the policy of nonintervention. In the Culture books published so far, the policy holds.
The authors have said they approached each book in the style of the characters and story they were telling at that time.
The first book is a noir detective novel (that happens to be set in space and in the future) so I can definitely see how it comes across as bleak..
The next book and beyond are written in different styles.
Thanks for the Schimatrix recommendation! I'd never heard of it, and I looked it up.. Added it to my reading list!
I might recommend The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata to you, that I've only just started... It's pretty good and I think falls under the hopeful sci-fi category (at least so far). :-)
I wish they made more sci-fi about robots and spaceships, I find that stuff entertaining and inspiring. If I want social commentary I have better sources than sci-fi writers.
And there is Sci-Fi that's not social commentary.
> And there is Sci-Fi that's not social commentary.
I'm not sure that this is true. I think you might be confusing the Action and Adventure genres with Sci-Fi. Star Trek, for example, is almost 100% social commentary.
It is certainly educational though, and to me, The Martian is rather in the category of “competence porn”
If mental and long-term health is not a concern, minimal-subsistence living conditions can be made for pennies. If someone snaps or drops-out, they can be replaced from thousands of others on the long application list.
Not unlikely, I'd say.
From what I've seen, cost of living will increase to the maximum level the poorest can afford it (which is why I don't see how UBI can work without massive changes in other areas).
With a laissez-faire system, the economic factors would decide whether machine or man labor is the most cost effective resource. When the mechanized means of production become more intelligent, faster, and accurate, what can the man or woman without any machines of their own do for money? They could work for less than the machines in dangerous conditions, doing the type of work that machines are too valuable for.
The optimist can also imagine a utopia where the need to labor vanishes and we collectively benefit from advances in science and technology, but that’s not a given.
Read more history and you'll see this is pretty much SOP for humans.
My favorite line from Sorry To Bother You.
> So, you making half-human half-horse fucking things so you can make more money?
> Yeah, basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy. That I was doing this for no reason. Because this isn't irrational.
2. We're nowhere near the level of smart, self-repairing automation. Given the distances involved, there's value in having a community of smart, agile, self-replicating flesh-and-blood humans to tackle unknown engineering challenges as they appear.
3. People keep expanding, and settle for good. Years pass. An interplanetary economy forms. People on the further edges focus on resource extraction and building up infrastructure for long-term settlement - but they still need things only Earth can provide, like food (and organics in general). So they trade.
4. Decades pass. On the outer edges of humanity, people are born who've never seen Earth. They start to develop their own culture and identity. Mars is being colonized. The trade arrangements is stable - Earth sells organics and R&D, they buy lots of resources to use for in-orbit manufacturing.
5. Many more decades pass. Mars is full of people who were born there, and never seen Earth in the first place. They trade with Earth and the space dwellers - the Belters, in Expanse - for resources. They develop their own culture too. Over generations, the Belters become adapted to low-gravity conditions, and can no longer survive Earth's gravity - cementing the cultural divide.
6. More decades pass, you arrive at the world of The Expanse. Mars and the Belt both declared independence, as they're their own separate cultures and nations. Trade dependencies, however, remain. Earth and Mars both have the advantage of infrastructure density and crucial resources abundance - they're developing their planets and surrounding orbital space. Stuck in an arms race, they develop superior military. Meanwhile, the Belters are stuck in a disadvantaged position. They own most resources in the Solar System, but can't effectively control them with inferior technology. And none of the resources are actually missing on Earth and Mars - they're just more expensive to get. The Belt has all the riches, but no leverage to turn them into wealth and power.
That's how you arrive at "mining asteroids in poor third world-like conditions".
As an example, slave societies don't have industrial revolutions because there's never a need to invest in labour-saving devices. Indeed, the Romans knew of water wheels and windmills but never used them much because you could just buy a few slaves. If slavery hadn't been introduced to Rome, who knows what alt-history would've emerged from the Roman engineering prowess.
Keeping humans alive in space on the other hand is stupidly expensive.
It is now. But the most expensive part of that is shuttling people and infrastructure up the Earth's gravity well.
Imagine that our society retains some level of sanity for the next couple decades. In that scenario, we'll continue on the path of expanding to space, starting with a rudimentary cislunar economy. This means near-Earth asteroid mining and in-space construction, which lets us drastically reduce the amount of mass needed to be launched into orbit. That economy would not be independent - it would sell resources mined in space (to be shipped to the surface) and manufacturing services, hopefully moving most heavy industry upwell. In exchange, they'd buy food, organics and specialized components from Earth.
Imagine couple decades of iterative improvement on this. Eventually, humans will be able to survive long-term in space with minimum input of terrestrial resources. E.g. almost-closed-cycle greenhouses that can supply a ship with food for a decade until they need restocking with substances that can't yet be created in space. Such capacity allows people to expand further, access more resources and ship them back.
What's the value for Earth in this? Continuing the exponential growth past the carrying capacity of the planet. The more industry is moved upwell, the more space there is downwell for habitation, consumption and service economy.
Why not robots? Light lag. To me, the challenges we need to overcome to send humans into interplanetary space are easier than those required for fully autonomic, AI-powered robots. If that's true, then we'll have to make interplanetary expansion a mixed human/robot endeavor. The time it takes for a signal from Earth to reach Mars is between 5 to 20 minutes - so 10-40 minutes RTT. This is unacceptable for any kind of serious remote operation, so even if robots do most of the work, you still want human controllers to be on the work site.
Once you start sending mixed human/robot on long-duration missions far from Earth, dumber robots operated more directly by humans - and, importantly, serviceable on-site, will be the cheapest option.
Also like The Expanse: shadowy mega-corps, and space pirates!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Truckers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgdeaHr5LT0&ab_channel=Movie...
Square pigs:
http://cinephilecrocodile.blogspot.com/2018/06/space-trucker...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVH9o7OMAkU&ab_channel=TheMo...
Both the film and that blog's stylesheet are the embodiment of 'so bad it has to be good'.
They'd probably be volunteering to go, no one would need to force them.
Just a "fun" fact I discovered recently: it's cheaper to buy new powerbanks and salvage the battery cells than buy the battery cells themselves. It is also cheaper to buy a whole new laptop than replace a laptop processor. That is insane levels of wastefulness.
"/s" really is needed I guess