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.
A repayable loan is not feudalism.
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.
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.