Elon Musk said no gods, no laws on Mars

I mean, if I owned my own planet, I'd institute whatever rules I wanted, too.

Musk is a (wealthy, intelligent) crank, but this does bring up one of many things that really needs to be decided before we start shoveling money and effort toward something like this.

I think this is great fodder for a science fiction story. Except it's probably already been done.

Ah yes, here it is

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LibertariansInSpace

ChaseJxyz said:

Here's an article about it from the independent. But the gist of it is that the red planet will not follow ANY Earth laws, or recognize the sovereignty of any Earth countries. On the Earth and the Moon they will follow Californian laws (so they have to prop 65 and treat independent contractors as employees* and all that) but once they're on Mars, then it is Elon's Kingdom.

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Unless Elon plans to pull up stakes, move to Mars and barricade the entire planet, I don't think he gets to decide what is or isn't the legal framework of another world. He may be instrumental in getting people to Mars, but that doesn't mean he owns it.

The "no god, no laws" thing will probably work great until there's more than one presence on the planet... or a sufficient imbalance between those under his rule and him.

Sort of like how libertarianism always seems to look attractive on paper to some people, but in real-world situations - especially with a population greater than one - it tends to... not. (This, I'd think, would be especially true when one's literal survival would rely on cooperative use and maintenance of technology.)

I want a planet.

Brightdreamer said:

The "no god, no laws" thing will probably work great until there's more than one presence on the planet... or a sufficient imbalance between those under his rule and him.

Sort of like how libertarianism always seems to look attractive on paper to some people, but in real-world situations - especially with a population greater than one - it tends to... not. (This, I'd think, would be especially true when one's literal survival would rely on cooperative use and maintenance of technology.)

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This is definitely true.

And some silly things libertarians get hung up on here on Earth, like carrying guns around, might not be a smart right to champion in settings where one's habitat is continually at risk of explosive decompression.

But I get the vibe that Musk is more of an aspiring despot. Many of us play and enjoy various city builders and civilization type games where we get to develop, guide, and rule simulated societies. One can opt to be a benign dictator or to rule with cruel oppression. But for someone as rich and, um, celebrated as Musk, idle fantasies become pipe dreams, which can then transition to serious aspirations.

I suppose we should all be glad he's got his beady little eyes on Mars instead of wanting to take over some nation on Earth.

With a 2 year travel time, "law" is going to mean exactly what the people on board say it does, full stop. Libertarianism isn't what thrives in situations like that - at least not if everyone wants to survive.

Why don't I have a planet?

Who sold Mars to Elon Musk? Who is he to be deciding rules for an entire planet? See how long this lasts once the Russians, Chinese, and who knows who else lands up there?
And, it's not like he's planning something new: this is the old-fashioned company town, or the lord and his serfs.
'Nothing new under the Sun' does not just apply to Earth.

And Brightdreamer's right - it's an idea that might work, right up until the second person lands on Mars.
People (plural) need rules and laws to live in groups.
And enforcement - or Moses' Ten Commandments alone would have made us better people.

Oh, and maybe there will be no gods (more accurately, religion).
Yeah, right until someone cracks a dome or rips a spacesuit - then, they'll be begging for a god, god of their choice, any god available, to come help them, pronto!

mccardey said:

Why don't I have a planet?

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The mails are slow right now. Give it a few weeks.

lizmonster said:

With a 2 year travel time, "law" is going to mean exactly what the people on board say it does, full stop. Libertarianism isn't what thrives in situations like that - at least not if everyone wants to survive.

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But darn it, if I want to feed the space bears then I should be able to and my neighbors will have to deal with it!

Sorry, I just thought of that other article in this forum about the libertarians and the bears.

Seriously, could you imagine what it would be like to be in an enclosed environment with someone who insists, like a petulant child, that no one else is the boss of them and that any shipboard rules and restrictions on behaviors and facilities usage are tyranny? They'd be tossed out the airlock in short order. It would be hard enough not to be at one another's throats, even if everyone is courteous and follows the rules to a tee.

mccardey said:

Why don't I have a planet?

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You can have this one soon. We’re almost done with it.

Introversion said:

You can have this one soon. We’re almost done with it.

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Sure, but she'll have to share it with cockroaches and Keith Richards. They had dibs.

I want a new one, like Elon Musk is getting.

mccardey said:

I want a new one, like Elon Musk is getting.

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Don't we all?

mccardey said:

I want a new one, like Elon Musk is getting.

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Eh, if I get a new planet, I want a move-in ready one, with a magnetosphere, breathable air, and sufficient biosphere to sustain human life already installed. Mars is going to be a multigenerational fixer-upper...

Diana Hignutt said:

Sure, but she'll have to share it with cockroaches and Keith Richards. They had dibs.

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Man, cockroaches will live with anyone.

I have a sci fi story on the backburner on this very theme. Set on Mars in a human colony run by people who didn't want to follow Earth laws. Technically speaking, there are no laws on Earth except those that humans make to govern our societies. If humans go to Mars they will make laws. If they have any sense at all, they will make them democratically.

Of course Earth laws won't automatically apply on Mars, same as how UK law only applies in the UK and if Scotland want to become independent, as they probably will do sooner or later, UK law won't apply to them any more and they'll make their own laws. Probably nearly identical to UK laws, but that'd be up to them. As mentioned upthread, if Musk or anyone else wants to make laws for the whole of Mars, he'll have to fight various other nations and peoples over it. Hopefully, democratic, non-literal fighting, seeing as (as also mentioned upthread) any Mars colony will have to worry about explosive decompression and other potential catastrophes that will threaten human life. The Martian by Andy Weir should give people a good idea of how difficult it is for humans to survive on Mars.

One theme of my potential sci-fi story is that any human colony on Mars, no matter how technologically advanced, will basically be a glorified fish tank. You can potentially make a very large and comfortable fish tank, but it's still a fish tank. An enclosed space that humans cannot leave without a space suit. And if you live there long term, that's going to suck. And increase the potential for conflict. Like cabin fever but on a much larger scale. You know that scientific colony in Antarctica? That's a piece of cake compared to living on Mars. They have a breathable atmosphere, no radiation to worry about, Earth's gravity, and only the Antarctic climate as a threat to their survival. Also, they have the internet without any noticeable radio delay - Mars is anywhere from 3 - 22 light minutes away from Earth, meaning that if you want to access the internet, download times will be 6-44 minutes just for the signal to get from Mars to Earth and back again. If you want to go home from Antarctia, you can fly back. On Mars it would take months to years to get back to Earth and cost a fortune. A literal one, not a figurative one.

We didn't evolve on Mars and personally I'm sick of physicists forgetting about biology when they imagine their future on Mars. Do you really have to study evolutionary biology to realise that there will never be another planet anywhere that will be as good as Earth, because we evolved here? We are literally formed to fit Earth perfectly. Our biology is adapted by hundreds of millions of years of evolution making it perfect for living on Earth. Living on any other planet means doing the reverse - adapting the environment to suit our biology. Which is a hell of a lot harder. And some things you can't just fix with a souped up fish tank. Mars has a smaller mass and weaker gravitational field meaning that living there will put people living there long term at risk of muscle wastage and osteopenia/osteoporosis. Also, walking isn't easy, as the astronauts who went to the moon found out. Our musculoskeletal system and the nervous system that controls it evolved for Earth's gravity. Sci fi stories might be able to use handwavium gravity making machines but real life can't do handwavium. You can create a sort of artifical gravity on a space station by making it spin but on a planet/moon you're stuck with the planet/moon's gravity.

Also, no god on Mars? Being non-religious I don't believe there's any gods here either. But religious people, well, do any of them believe that their god only exists on Earth? Muslims sure don't. First two verses of the Qur'an translate as: "In the name of God the Most Gracious Most Merciful. Praise be to God Lord of all the Worlds." So yeah. I think most Christians also would consider that God is god of the entire universe too. Most people would agree that there are the same number of gods on Mars as on Earth, whether that number be zero or not.

Anyway, Musk is welcome to his miserable fish-tank-on-Mars colony.

I think there is potential benefit in having a colony on Mars, like discovering more about the origins of the solar system or even mining it for minerals and stuff. I just don't think anyone should be in any delusions that it's going to be anywhere near as good as living on Earth. It is most certainly not a solution to humans crapping all over Earth. If we pollute this planet enough to make it uninhabitable to humans, we are (to borrow Andy Weir's opening lines of The Martian) pretty much fucked. RIP Homo sapiens sapiens "wise wise humans". That would give some alien species that happens upon the remains of our species and its "civilisations" in the distant future much to laugh about.

Quite frankly if we can't survive here, on Earth, the planet we evolved to live on, we are not going to be capable of surviving anywhere else in the universe.

frimble3 said:

Oh, and maybe there will be no gods (more accurately, religion).
Yeah, right until someone cracks a dome or rips a spacesuit - then, they'll be begging for a god, god of their choice, any god available, to come help them, pronto!

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This is the 'no atheists in foxholes' argument, and it's just not true, imo.

ChaseJxyz said:

My secret hope is that there's a people's uprising and Musk is, shall we say, removed from power and the people now own the colony collectively

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With a two year travel time, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't make it there.

JimmyB27 said:

With a two year travel time, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't make it there.

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I was hoping that he'd take Donald Trump with him.

I don't want the same planet Donald Trump gets. I want a good planet. And if I can't have a good planet I want a pony. All of my friends have ponies.

neandermagnon said:

We didn't evolve on Mars and personally I'm sick of physicists forgetting about biology when they imagine their future on Mars. Do you really have to study evolutionary biology to realise that there will never be another planet anywhere that will be as good as Earth, because we evolved here? We are literally formed to fit Earth perfectly. Our biology is adapted by hundreds of millions of years of evolution making it perfect for living on Earth. Living on any other planet means doing the reverse - adapting the environment to suit our biology.

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We do tend to forget this, don't we? Is it even possible to carry a healthy pregnancy to term at 0.38% of Earth gravity? How about 14% (as is Titan's)? That would be a fly in the ointment for a serious colonization effort on any potentially inhabitable planet or moon (some argue Titan is a better choice than Mars, because it at least has decent atmospheric pressure and protection from cosmic radiation) in the solar system. And even an Earth-sized planet with life in another solar system, could we ever get there, would have an alien biochemistry. Images of lovely, Avatar-like worlds where everything is alien yet familiar too (lush plants and flowers so like ours, vertebrate body plan, breathe the same type of air and eat the same kinds of food) is exceedingly unlikely. We're less at risk from alien plagues than we are biospeheres with life forms and atmospheres that are toxic, or biochemically inaccessible, to our own metabolism. Heck, we don't even know that DNA would be ubiqutous as a molecule of life, and truly alien DNA, should it exist, would certainly have a different genetic code (no reason that UGU and UGC would code for cysteine, for instance, on a planet in another star system, even if the alien life forms utilize the same amino acids we do).

And I despise the idea that we can simply screw up our home planet because there are plenty more to choose from out there, and somehow it's morally responsible to go screw up an alien biosphere after we ruin our own. So many SF writers also forget the fellow residents of our planet. The earth's other species (aside from ones needed for agriculture) never seem to have much value in the standard "colonize space and abandon the dying Earth" type scenarios. Neither do all the humans who will inevitably be left behind on said dying Earth, because there's no way to transplant billions of people to Mars (terraformed or not), let alone a planet in another solar system.

There have been a few SF novels that have touched on this. I remember one by Kay Kenyon where human's efforts to terraform an alien planet met with spectacular failure, and ultimately they had to bioengineer themselves to fit the planet. Which meant they were now something other than fully human.

Sherri Tepper also focused on the ethics (and stupidity) of colonizing space when we couldn't even exercise enough restraint to care for our own planet's ecosystems.

Others (some of Cherryh's books) touch on the ethics of colonizing and terraforming an alien planet, and of humans being changed by the worlds they colonize, even when the ecosystem seems incredibly compatible.

Seriously, since we've been so horrible at caring for our own biosphere, how could we deal with the limitations and self restraint needed to live in a hostile environment where all basic resources, even Nitrogen (people always forget Nitrogen, because we take it for granted here on Earth, but there won't be much on Mars), are scarce and must be maintained, recycled, and balanced carefully?

Having said all this, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy are interesting reads, because they do deal with the potential politics of mass colonization of Mars, including conflicts based on religion (which, surprise surprise, doesn't stay behind on Earth) and between pro-terraforming forces and those who want to leave Mars as it is as a geological testament to the history of our solar system.