Why Mars

Thinking about American history informs a lot of my intuitions about Mars.

I think the first Mars colonists will comprise a self-selecting group of people with the following traits: high agency, curious, adventurous, hardy. The first Martians will want to advance the human plot-line and establish precedents and direction for how humans orient towards the rest of space. In the same way that revolutionary America defined a new era of government and development for the entire world, I think Mars will do so for the entire solar system.

New ideas thrive when given space and freedom to take root. Mars will have plenty of both. The governance and economic systems of the future can work radically differently than current systems, and they'll more easily develop in a red field.

I imagine new systems of government and economics built from first principles and with the awareness of current technology. How would we design government if we already knew about the internet, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence?

We might construct a direct democracy based on AI delegated voting on all policy matters. Each citizen of a Martian city would have an AI agent that understands their policy preferences after an interview process (and updates that understanding fluidly through time). These AI agents would negotiate amongst themselves and vote on referendum topics to optimize for consensus compromises. We could skip building most financial institutions, since all financial primitives will exist for free and perpetual use by all citizens on their city blockchain, which also serves as the immutable ledger for all legal decisions. Each city could programmatically design its own monetary and fiscal policies, reflecting the desires of the polity.

Early Martian cities will probably feature thriving R&D and media industries. R&D because frontier economies will feature novel problems, plus frontier exhilaration and freedom will turbo-charge science. Media because people on Earth will feel fascinated by the lives Martians live. I expect many great social media stars to find their footing on Mars.

I expect Martian cities will blur the distinctions between capitalism and communism. The two have always reached towards the same goal by different means. Capitalism wishes for an efficient market. Communism wishes for universal welfare. An efficient market as defined by capitalism must have no information asymmetries. Universal welfare means every person's needs requires accounting for. When AI mediate all economic data we can asymptotically approach an economy with perfect information. The entire city will function as an organism by the principle of One for All, All for One. Information travels fast in such an economy, and everyone knowing that everyone else would feel distraught to hear of a fellow citizen suffering, the system would work rapidly to solve such problems.