How do you organise life on Mars?

For good or for bad, it looks like the first human will walk on Mars by the end of the decade. If current objectives are achieved, there could be millions of people on Mars by the end of the century.

At the moment, attention is squarely focused on the science and engineering of getting a big metal can from here to there carrying up to one hundred civilians. But there is another big challenge that is equally important for sustaining life on Mars that virtually no one is seriously thinking about: how do you organise life on Mars?

There will be no borders, no states, no political systems, no constitutions or legal precedents, no enforceable rights, no economic systems, no money, no property, no businesses, no employment, no wages… the pillars of life on Earth, all gone.

The length of time it takes to send a message at the speed of light from Mars to Earth or Earth to Mars is 5 – 25 minutes depending on the distance between the planets which varies because of their orbits. So, inhabiting Mars is not like inhabiting the Moon which is close enough for most aspects of the legal and political system to be direct extensions of systems on Earth and governed from Earth.

If you stick a load of different people who don’t really know each other in a confined space on Mars, one thing is for sure, eventually someone is getting punched. If the punch is really bad and a defendant ends up in court, you cannot wait 5 – 25 minutes for every question from an Earth-based Barrister during the cross-examination of a Mars-based defendant.

Image produced by OpenAI’s DALL.E from the instruction ’An astronaut getting punched by another astronaut on planet mars’

Life on Mars would eventually need to be completely self-sustained in the physical sense, and the social, political, legal and economic sense.

The politics

Initial preparations for creating a new world on Mars will need to happen from Earth but this means some really difficult questions will have to be forced through Earthly politics and this might not produce the most desirable outputs.

One of the exciting things about setting up a new world is that there is an opportunity to learn the lessons from what has gone wrong on Earth and attempt to set up new political and economic systems that are more equal and less exploitative, corrupt and divisive.

But to do this, the major political and economic players on Earth will need to voluntarily limit their control over how Martian systems are designed.

Mars will end up reflecting dominant and flawed Earthly systems if the US and China, or even the UN General Assembly, are left to co-author a Martian Constitution. It is unlikely they will voluntarily limit their control, but it is likely they will fail to agree on a way forward leaving many decisions to colonies on Mars by default (the major space-faring nations could not even agree to sign off the Moon Treaty which set out how activity of states on the Moon would be governed).

Something like a Martian Constitution could be drafted by a diverse committee of constitutional experts, social scientists, technologists, astrophysicists (local knowledge is important), some politicians and some citizens here on Earth before being amended and adopted on Mars.

Which people go to Mars first will be highly contested if most of the important decisions are made by the first Martian colonies - they will create the foundations of something that could last thousands of years. The dominant groups will have by

disproportionate influence, so the number of people who go from certain groups, and the power that different groups have or are seen to have, matters.

SpaceX will deliver the first people to Mars so the United States and Musk will have significant influence over who goes first. To prevent imperial narratives and realities emerging like they did when new worlds were conquered through colonial pursuits on Earth, it is important that a diversity of nations are represented on every trip to Mars and that they have equal power to shape the foundational political, social, legal and economic arrangements that are forged on Mars.

How will decisions be made? For as long as it is practically possible, direct democracy is likely to be the best form of government. When the Martian population expands beyond that which a direct democracy can manage, representative democracy would be the logical evolution but as we have come to learn on Earth, it has lots of problems… could there be something better we haven’t tried yet? Someone should be thinking about that.

The economy

It is likely that the first Martian communities will better reflect communist societies than capitalist ones.

Initially, there won’t be a market, there won’t be consumer goods or houses to buy, so there is no need for economic competition or reward because there is nothing to compete with or to chose to spend your money on.

To begin with, there will be a strong sense of interdependence among inhabitants because they will need to rely on each other. Most of the early inhabitants will have important skillsets needed for creating the physical conditions for life to be sustained and day to day life will be spent creating those conditions – it is better not to disrupt that work with a competitive, inherently exploitative and inequality inducing economic model. But eventually, when hundreds of thousands of people inhabit Mars (which could be within the next 30-40 years) some kind of economic model will need to develop that overcomes the shortfalls of a communist-inspired system and the shortfalls of capitalism which is ruining our home planet.

Someone should start thinking about what this economic model could look like because Mars is a quite a different environment for doing economics compared to Earth. Economic models on Earth are based on individuals making choices about their preferences. On Mars there are far fewer choices to make.

Furthermore, there is a big difference between people who are ’mission critical’ (and who have the scientific expertise and equipment to extract materials from Mars to create important and valuable resources) and those who are not mission critical or who do not have scientific skills. It is important to consider how these differences translate into differences in economic and/or political power. On Earth, there are lots of ways you can create value without having highly advanced skill sets; on Mars, there will be fewer ways of creating value without advanced skills so whatever economic system is used will need to protect those who are not ’mission critical’ without excessively privileging those who are.

What about society, culture and community?

Humans crave a sense of community and belonging. Throughout history, much of this sense of belonging has been based on specific and interconnected geographies, histories and cultures that make groups distinct from one another and internally tightly knit. On Mars, these geographies, histories and cultures disappear.

Image produced by OpenAI’s DALL.E from the instruction ’3D render of astronauts at a concert on Mars’

Languages will probably converge because if people only speak their native language they will only be able to speak to a handful of others. Cultures are likely to converge because what makes cultures distinct on Earth will largely disappear. Everyone will be living indoors, partially underground and in domes or big spinning doughnut type things that use centripetal force to mimic gravity. There will therefore be no sense of place or territory. The things that make up our identities like our work, our hobbies, the sports teams we support or the political parties we join, or the places we like to visit, the places of worship that billions attend, the concerts we go to … will either radically change or completely disappear.

These things will begin to return over time as the population on Mars grows and if physical infrastructure becomes very expansive, or if Mars is terraformed so the climate is more hospitable, and people can live outside and more independently (e.g. to increase temperatures Musk has proposed using giant solar reflectors or… setting of thermonuclear explosions at the poles – it is very cold on Mars). But it could well be hundreds of years before cultural diversity re-emerged.

The transition from such rich cultures on Earth to living communally will be abrupt and disruptive at best, and could be completely destabilising and alienating at worst.

That said, forcing more emphasis on commonalities over difference could be an incredibly powerful thing if it enables new kinds of political, economic and social systems to develop. On the other hand, it goes against the human instinct for needing smaller communities and that could create serious problems for large communes.

Not enough people are thinking about the non-engineering side of sustaining life on Mars, and most of the people who do are engineers doing it as a side-hobby and who grossly underestimate the social, political and economic complexity of creating a new world. The social sciences have been struggling for decades as impressive scientific advances have made the ’soft-science’ stuff seem second rate. But with the inhabitation of Mars on the horizon, the social sciences have a big real-world opportunity to test their metal.