Living on Mars with the same socio-economic system that we use on Earth will be impossible. Trying to colonize Mars might be the best thing for the human race because we will be forced to change the way we organize ourselves and manage our resources. So far, on Earth we have been able to get away with using an economic system that demands massive waste, and a very competitive mentality on every level of society. in a space station or colony, it will be harder to ignore the usefulness of an ethic of we are all in this together. It seems that it will be more productive and more necessary to be organized by a kind of economic system that promotes collaboration, rather than competition. A good example would be to look at how people are organized on current space missions. I highly doubt that resources are distributed in a hierarchical way, with the most important crew members getting more and better rations than crew members with lower skill levels or who do less work. I also doubt that crew members sleeping quarters sizes are based in relation to some hierarchy of wealth or meritocratic justifications. As for the ship or space station, which members of the crew owns it or its parts? I am guessing that there is very little actual property, but rather, all crew members have ACCESS to what they need. People contribute by doing the tasks that are required, that their personal skills and talents allow....at the same time they each receive what they want and need, provided it is available and doesnt conflict with harm to the habitat or create un-needed scarcity. These 2 things (contribution and met needs) do not have to be tied proportionally to each other, as we have been doing on the messily run Earth. This method of organizing a group of humans on a mission or a space station is not done out of some moral or philosophical reason, but rather because of the logic mandated by a scientific need for efficiency. There is no need for the crew members to compete with each other for material wealth or property because they actually see each other on some level as on the same side. On Earth, we havent gotten to this realization yet, probably because we still have resources to burn through and our culture/economics are decades, if not centuries behind our scientific understanding that we are one species and so on. A Resource Based Economy or RBE is an efficient, logical and humane way to organize. These are things that people like Buckminster Fuller knew very well when he used the term Spaceship Earth.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 03:27:03 +0000
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