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Message for @elonmusk: we have a version of Mars right here on earth that we can start colonizing right now. It's called Western Australia. No-one lives there, it's the right color, and there are Kangaroos and plenty of solar power.
#KangarooMars
#KangarooMars
If we had mechanisms to ensure that all the relevant stakeholders are given a fair share of the benefits, we could construct a whole series of "Alpha planets" right here on earth, on land that is currently unoccupied (wasted).
Alpha planets could be physically isolated via nonlethal drones, fences and natural obstacles.
New citizens of alpha planets could be chosen to somewhat reflect the region, e.g. people of African Origin would build and run Sahara Mercury.
New citizens of alpha planets could be chosen to somewhat reflect the region, e.g. people of African Origin would build and run Sahara Mercury.
The Alpha Planets would be deliberately economically isolated from the rest of the Earth economy. Physical goods would sit in a 1-3-year quarantine and would face heavy taxes to get in and out of an alpha planet.
You could get a lot of the benefit of colonizing the solar system this way. Alpha planets would be isolated from many physical and biological disasters that could hit our global interconnected economy.
It's not physical obstacles that prevent this from happening, it's coordination and game theory.
Mapping Global risks and whether they can be mitigated with an isolated colony:
cc @anderssandberg do you already have something like this?
cc @anderssandberg do you already have something like this?
A lot of people are making the same point about Mars being harder for a hostile aggressive power to invade.
This is flawed because you're imagining the difficulty of attacking Mars is based on today's spaceflight capability, but today's capability is too small to colonize Mars!
This is flawed because you're imagining the difficulty of attacking Mars is based on today's spaceflight capability, but today's capability is too small to colonize Mars!
It will take something like 50 million tons of freight from Earth to Mars to found a self-sustaining colony on Mars, which is about 10,000 SpaceX Starships each flying to Mars about 30 times.
To simply nuke a Mars colony to death would take perhaps 1/1000th of that capacity.
To simply nuke a Mars colony to death would take perhaps 1/1000th of that capacity.
