Once developed, a planet is a boost to the whole human economy. More people! More production and consumer demand! More trade! But you have to develop the world first. For example, Mars. It could be terraformed and developed, as we know from countless SF novels. But how do you convince people to take the first step of settling on the Red Planet?
There is no indigenous population to enslave, so we would have to convince people to move there. How could we do that, given that the initial migrants will be the ones who get to discover all the exciting, counter-intuitive ways in which their new home can kill them? Not only that, but there’s already a long history (on Earth!) of new settlements that go bust, dooming investors and settlers alike.
Here are five ways to convince people to maroon themselves on Mars (or any other planet) so that a century or two down the road, with a bit of luck, their descendants might make someone else a lot of money.
Note that these methods can be combined…and in fact, are probably overlapping sets. Note also that eventual success is far from guaranteed. Success is not really the point.
Folly
Never underestimate the human ability to convince oneself that what one wants to be true is true. Take for example the stalwarts of the Darien scheme, who gambled a fifth Scotland’s circulating wealth on a colony on the isthmus of Panama. What, aside from deadly disease, inept planning, and attacks from rival nations, could possibly go wrong? Let skeptics scoff: were it not for the Darien scheme depth-charging the Scottish economy, Scotland might still be an independent nation.
An SF example might be found in the backstory to Alexis Gilliland’s The Revolution from Rosinante, which begins at the end of a period of exuberant space-colony investment. As the book opens, investors are beginning to understand that profits will not justify the investments made. A hilarious market correction ensures, with consequences felt from the fragile North American Union to the asteroid belt.
Fanaticism
Suppose one has a worldview whose clear superiority one’s more numerous neighbours inexplicably fail to acknowledge? Neighbours who permit rival philosophies to flourish despite being obviously inferior to the One True Way? That line of thought brought the Pilgrims to North America, where they could be free of Holland’s brutal policy of religious toleration. At first it didn’t turn out well: starvation and disease followed, as well as conflict with the natives whose land they were appropriating [see, again, footnote 1].
SF example: the founders of C. J. Cherryh’s Union intended to create an uninhibited technocratic state beyond Earth’s control, unrestricted by any moral considerations. Mission accomplished, as millions of azi were created, there to be exploited without the burden of pesky human rights laws.
Pride
If we do not settle this airless, radiation-soaked, toxic waste dump of a planet, then surely our rivals will! They will accrue all the glory that comes of homesteading an implacable, hostile hell-world. Whereas if we do it, the nation will be admired and feared!
SF example: Tau Ceti’s habitable world was settled thanks to national pride, as described in Paul J. McAuley’s 1989 Secret Harmonies (published as Of the Fall in the United States). To quote one character, “No one there wants to leave the stars to the Russians.” Of course, being at the far end of a twelve light-year sublight supply chain turns out to have significant downsides when the starships stop coming.
Transportation
The easiest way to get people to go along with grand schemes is not to give them any choice in the matter. This has been a very popular strategy throughout the years, from the comparatively benign way in which Scots Highlanders occupying land more suitable for sheep were encouraged to move to Cape Breton, to the far more brutal manner in which Africans were kidnapped and enslaved throughout the centuries.
SF example: Jerry Pournelle was keen on transportation as a plot enabler; it appears in a number of his stories, including 1976’s Birth of Fire, in which American gang member Garret Pittson is relocated at UN expense to Mars, where he can expect to spend the rest of his life developing the Red Planet’s economy. A return ticket is not included.
Desperation
Sometimes one is not running to somewhere but from somewhere. Settling a new land can be dangerous, but the possibility of death is better than the certainty of death (or worse) if one remains at home, whether death comes at the hands of invaders or mere natural disaster. Legions of refugees have surged across the face of our planet seeking survival elsewhere, often in the face of concerted efforts to deny them safe haven.
SF example: the homeworld of Zenna Henderson’s People was facing destruction. They had no choice but to migrate to Earth, even though the indigenous population was unlikely to welcome them. The People adopted human form and founded their communities far from prying human eyes. Will this strategy allow them to survive alongside the xenophobic, violent humans?
***
I’m sure you can think of many other such books and will tell me all about them in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Maybe a mix of fanaticism and pride, but I’ve imagined a scenario where you have one of those tech billionaires who wants to colonize the solar system because they grew up reading Dune, and find recruits in fringe religious or political groups that like the idea of setting up shop somewhere where extant terrestrial laws and norms can’t apply to them. For the most philosophically in tune with our theoretically tech mogul, perhaps one of those libertarian groups that keep trying to build and/or conquer islands. Call it Space-steading.
I can hardly wait for the people who object to mandated masks having to accept the social norm of opening the inner airlock door or the outer door but not both at once.
One does suspect that the cult of individualism may face some problems in a “small mistakes will kill you and every one you know,” scenario.
I am trying to remember the name of an ’80s vintage book where a benevolent billionaire buys hundreds of cryopreserved young people, revives them, and generously re-educates them to be valuable unpaid labour in his plan to settle a new planet under his governance.
My personal immigrant ancestors left Agrarian Europe to settle in the Agrarian US in order to own their own land rather than work somebody else’s. The desire for land or a desire to escape conditions at home seem to have been the chief drivers of American expansion.
Theresa@@.-@: That’s essentially one of the uses to which corpsicles are put in Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time. They don’t settle the worlds, but prepare them for terraforming as a prelude to colonisation.
Stross’ Eschaton which had a sense of humor and ultimate power, grabbed a bunch of space enthusiasts/libertarians and put them in a space colony well away from Earth. The society that resulted was not akin to what its founders expected as I recall.
3: Have you read this hilarious account of what happens when Libertopia meets bears?
In Traveller, the Third Imperium’s Ministry of Colonization took a multi-pronged approach to recruiting colonists for Forboldn, an unpleasant but not hell-class world in the Spinward Marches: prisoners could volunteer for remission of sentence, the unemployed to no longer be unemployed, those needing medical treatment beyond their means to receive treatment, retiring military to be granted land (in the expectation they would form the core of the local police and military)… and persons of advancing years with needed skills to be offered age-delaying drugs.
Memory finally cooperated; I was thinking of Allen Steele’s “A King of Infinite Space”, but it was published in the ’90s.
@8- I’d heard of Libeartopia, but not in that much detail.
Let’s see. Why would anyone cross the Atlantic Ocean to come to this “new world”? (According to DNA tests, I’m 99% European, so it doesn’t look like any of my ancestors crossed the Pacific.)
The most recent member of my family to make the trip was my grandfather. As a White Russian during the Russian Revolution, the entire family ran like hell. It seemed to be a good choice, since the alternative was very final.
Much further back, I have two relatives who came over in the mid-1700s. The first was my Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite ancestor. Apparently he was not given permission to marry in Germany, so he came here to get married. (There was a bit of anti-Mennonite activity going on at the time.) The other was my Scottish ancestor, who after being on the loosing side in the Second Jacobite Rebellion, was given the option to go across the water or die. After the time of his involuntary servitude was over, he had the choice of staying where he now had friends and connections, or go back home to a land that was subjugated and where his family might very well have died. (There was probably a woman involved, too.)
One more was in the late 1700s. Apparently Thomas Jefferson thought the wine and the grapes near his home sucked. So he paid some Italians to come across the water to do a better job of growing grapes and making wine. I’m not sure if my ancestress was involved in these activities, but since her family went, so did she. (I have no idea how successful they were; I’ve never thought of Virginia as wine country.)
As an aside, I vaguely remember a news program from some years ago. One of the projects putatively recruiting Martian colonists had just gone through a round of reductions, and the interviewer was talking to one of the folks who had made the cut. They seemed to be trying their best not just to say, over and over “But you’re going to die. Do you understand that? You’ll go to Mars and you’ll die there, and you’ll be dead on Mars. Why would you want to do that?” As the future Martian cheerfully discussed the spirit of human adventure or some such.
All of which is to say, I don’t think that finding warm bodies for the first wave or two will be all that difficult.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Mars have no magnetic field and lots of radiation, barely an atmosphere, and soil poisoned by peroxide? Not to mention a fairly deep gravity well that makes any meaningful commerce with the mother world impractical? I can see capturing asteriods as being lucrative, but don’t see Mars as a great destination.
I was watching something on Scottish history with the ex and part way through it she admitted she always assumed my version of Scottish history was highly exaggerated. Ha ha no.
Two of my four grandparents and five of my eight great-grandparents were immigrants from Europe. The other three great-grandparents had some ancestors come from Europe in the 17th Century.
Neither Plymouth nor Jamestown settlements would have survived without the help of the native peoples. Indeed, the Jamestown settlement started raiding the local native peoples’ settlements for food in 1609.
One of the reasons I’m not sanguine about space colonies, especially for-profit space colonies, is that nobody in their right mind is going to go to a company town umpteen million miles away from health & safety and human rights agencies.
Yeah, it certainly seems like Mars is an uninhabitable hellscape.
@16: Indeed. In New England, the settlers moved into houses emptied by disease amongst already-cleared fields – and they still died at an appalling rate.
#14: perchlorate (in lethal concentrations), otherwise yep.
Ironically, one of the finalist pairs who were vying to be the first Martian settlers are a couple who were in the first Biosphere 2 crew back in the 90s. That fiasco was intended to be a century-long closed ecosystem, with crew rotating in and out of the enclosure and an occasional deep clean, but otherwise sealed up tight.
The founder of the New Age cult who ran the Biosphere 2 project intended it to be a proving grounds for an orbiting colony, pretty much as this article and comments describe. He is a typical charismatic tinpot-dictator type, and his vision was to form his own society out in the cosmos where he could rule with an iron fist.
The chief operating officer of the shell corporation running Biosphere 2 was…Steve Bannon. Yep, THAT one.
Bujold’s Ethan of Athos – now that uterine replicators have been invented (by that dangerously egalitarian Beta Colony, but never mind), woman-hating, sex-fearing religious extremists can start their own lovely male-only agrarian utopia.
A couple of hundred years down the road, it’s still male-only, still agrarian, but most of the residents seem to have no fear of sex and religion seems to be extremely optional (they still hate the women though, even though nobody alive has ever met one or even been allowed to read about one). One gets the impression that it’s not exactly what the founders intended.
@14 And yet Mars would still appear to be our best candidate for another potentially habitable planet. Does any other in the solar system even come close? Not that I know of…Which is why I suspect that, no matter how far our technology might advance, Earth will always be our only home.
Oddly, Venus fifty km above the datum offers Earthlike gravity and temperature, with atmospheric shielding against radiation. There is the small matter of the air being poisonous but it’s the best of a bad lot.
@18,
At least the Pilgrims didn’t commit armed robbery quite so early as did the settlers at Jamestown. My New England ancestors (there’s a reason my nom de web is “Swampyankee”) did end up fighting in that entirely horrible war (for both settlers and native peoples — it’s still the bloodiest war, in relation to population, in British[1] North American history). Even the native peoples who allied[2] with the British settlers were screwed. Those on the losing side were sold to the death-camp like sugar plantations in the Caribbean or executed.
Company towns have a long and despicable history (see, for example https://prospect.org/economy/company-towns-still-us/, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/housing/company-towns-1890s-to-1935/, and http://www.coaleducation.org/coalhistory/coaltowns/historic_context.htm#wars). I suspect many of the space colonies will resemble these more than the idyllic homes of free-thinking, entrepreneurial residents that are a staple of sf.
—–
[1] Yes, I know “British” is anachronistic in the 17th Century.
[2] It’s not like the British moved into an area where everybody loved each other. Warfare between the various First Nations of northeastern North America was hardly unknown. The alliances between settlers and First Nations were because the leaders of those peoples decided it was in their best interest to get the new kids on the block to ally themselves against their pre-existing rivals. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake.
@22 I also understood Venus to have more Earth-like gravity, but assumed it was far too hot.
Minor nitpick: the People in Zenna Henderson’s stories didn’t “adopt human form”; they were humans — just more advanced than us.
@22 I believe Earth-normal atmosphere is lighter than Venus’ atmosphere at those heights, so rather than living in colonies suspended from lifting bags, colonists could live inside the lifting bags themselves.
@22 Fifty km up is the atmosphere layer with clouds of sulphuric acid. Not necessarily a showkiller.
NASA has been sketching out plans to explore Venus using blimps for some time. Here’s one recent account:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/10/nasas-blimp-and-cloud-city-plan-for-venus-exploration-and-colonization.html
I suppose one question is- if you have to build a self contained shelter to protect you from lack of breathable atmosphere, lethal radiation, and poisonous soil, is there really any benefit to plonking that shelter down on Mars instead of leaving it floating in space?
In Scalzi’s Old Man’s War-verse, 75 year olds sign up for the Army to have adventures off-planet and, for the handful who survive, have the option of settling down on a colony planet -albeit with risks of alien invasions.
In Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love-verse, the protagonist and like minded others strike out for new colonies whenever society gets too populated and bureaucratic for these libertarian free spirits.
The first novel I came across that did this was Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. The first part deals with how the advertising agency the protagonist works for (previous success: introducing a mild alkaloid into instant coffee to ensure brand loyalty) sells pre space-probe Venus as real estate. It’s still remarkably readable today; another plotline involves vats of cloned chicken flesh, which is currently happening in Singapore on a small scale.
@30,
Except Heinlein’s protagonists always have the wherewithal to get up and move away, something that tends to be more widespread in those crowded, bureaucratic societies. Given the actual experience of societies with minimal government, the result is more likely to resemble feudal Europe than Eric Frank Russell’s K22g. It would be very hard for your average feudal family of serfs to get away.
@32- But at least there are no bears on Mars. Giant ballooning spiders on Venus, on the other hand…
@33,
More dangerously, there would be people.
Swampyankee @23:
Reminds me of The Outer Worlds Song:
@35- Well there’s a question. Given the scenarios we’ve outlined, we might reasonably expect ruthless oppressionof the majority of colonists as a norm. But would that be ruthless exploitation in the pursuit of profit (which, again, depends on there being something of value to be sent back home- even if that’s only the lives of the colonists (at least one Mars venture was purportedly planning to fund itself partially as a reality show)) or simply out of interest in the exercise of power?
One might imagine a polygamist cult leader finding Martian settlement an attractive prospect- no more of those pesky Federal regulations into how many teenage girls you can marry- but without a larger outside population to dump excess males into, that could get very ugly indeed.
Has anyone upstream mentioned the possibility of the UN enacting a space homesteading act similar to the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862?
There are a number of important differences between hypothetical space colonies and historical examples, the most important of which is that by the time European settlers arrived, indigenous people had been present for many thousands of years. Consequently, all of the hard work of determining how to live in the New World had been done … it’s an interesting question whether any of the colonies would have flourished (or even survived) without native know-how and property to steal.
Well, there are enough examples (once you look outside the Americas) of previously uninhabited islands being successfully settled in the last couple of thousand years to suggest it isn’t that difficult a problem (Madagascar, New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, Easter Island, Iceland, …).
@29
There are some advantages of putting your colony on Mars (as opposed to leaving it in space). First, human biology (as well as that of many plants) is adapted to gravity. Some things just don’t work as well in freefall. Second, on Mars one can dig underground to relatively cheaply get a few meters of radiation shielding. Getting millions of tons of radiation shielding into space is harder. Third, while Mars’s atmosphere is thin, it still provides much better protection from micrometeorites than vacuum does.
@29
You also have matter, like carbon dioxide, water in some areas, & a lot of solid ground with various elements that you might use to make stuff.
Asteroids have that too, without the advantages & disadvantages of gravity. But vacuum doesn’t.
@36: Craster’s Keep, Mars edition! Space colonies will probably lack the isolated self-sufficiency to pull that off, though.
@39: rotational gravity! advantage: can actually get 1G. disadvantage: rotation.
@40: I’d imagine either building a rotating colony near the asteroid, or building colonies at good locations (Earth Moon L5?) and importing the raw materials.
@41- No worries- as long as you hew to the Amazon Terms and Conditions and keep having your loyal followers perform Human Intelligence Tasks, you should be able to afford enough one way delivery drop-offs to keep everyone just hungry enough not to have the mental energy to question your decrees.
Slight variation on some of those themes – trick the useless third of your population into getting into a Space Ark and then accidentally crash landing on some unsuspecting planet.
Just try not to die from a disease originating on a dirty telephone due to all of your telephone sanitisers being several light years away from your home planet.
(Hitch-Hikers Guide, in case you were wondering).
On the “transportation” front, Heinlein beat Pournelle to it with _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, of course.
Although some of the economics in that book might be a tad… shaky :) Still, it was a good read 40 years ago, I haven’t tried it lately.
Basically, the thing to do an Mars (and probably a lot of other worlds) is to let robots do the dirty work.
After assuring there is NO indigenous life (which any truly ethical space-faring civilisation should do), then it makes no sense to send only a small group of humans to Mars, while it’s still so hostile. Let the robots clear the way.
It’s a proven concept: eight Mars Rovers have already been there. While these only explored, the next generation might start to do work: neutralise the perchlorate in the soil, find water then concentrate it in the most suitable place. Send robots to the asteroid belt and beyond to bombard Mars with comets full of volatiles.
Go even further: set up fusion plants at the poles–where most of the water supposedly is–and build massive coils of superconducting materials to implement a planetary electromagnetic field against incoming cosmic radiation, while doubling as energy suppliers for the terraforming robots.
Then, when a part of Mars is sufficiently terraformed, send in the humans. Probably not going to happen because it’s not ‘heroic’ or ‘inspiring’ enough. And SF is partly to blame, as a story about terraforming Mars predominantly with robots does not sell (believe me, I tried, and if there is one story/novel that does indeed depict a machine-led terraforming of Mars, or any other planet, then I’d like to know about it).
Finally, if robots indeed pave the way, then history can repeat itself as humans displace the original inhabitants–the robots–or use them as slaves. . .
The illustration of a Mars base at the top of the article, an “artist’s conception,” is the work of Carter Emmart. He depicts the Mars vehicles and base design cooked up by a study at the Second Case for Mars conference in 1984. This is just one of Mr. Emmart’s pictures of the mission scenario, more of which may be found at this link.
Carter Emmart is now at the American Museum of Natural History, where he is Director of Astrovisualization. Which is a very cool title, if you ask me.
@41: an issue with gravity-from-rotation is how much mass has to be lifted in order to build a station that can support 1 gravity of strain; IIUC, the ISS is relatively lightweight because it doesn’t have to withstand gravity as a whole. (Yes, the individual pieces have to not collapse when launched — but small pieces are easier to brace than a large structure.) There have also been hints that rotation may not be kind to the human nervous system unless it’s done in a very large, slow-turning structure; I don’t know what the current speculation is.
IMO the book that most accurately characterizes the likely motivation for future space colonization isn’t SciFi. It’s One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, which later became the documentary film Alone In The Wilderness. It’s the real-life story of Richard Proenneke, a middle-aged man who went to live alone in the Alaskan wilderness in pursuit of a simpler, more peaceful, lifestyle and as a personal exercise in self-reliance and creativity. He lived there for some 20 years until age forced him to return to civilization, making diaries and films to send to his relatives which later became the basis of the book and documentary. Tragically, not all who sought to follow in his footsteps were as skilled or prepared…
Today the discussion of space colonization is dominated by folly, fanaticism, and pride cultivated by the prestige industry of space agencies and the space enthusiasts’ cult of cosmo-humanism. We erroneously still think of everything done in space as somehow ‘heroic’, ‘adventurous’, and vitally important ‘for all mankind’. What we willfully ignore is the obvious lack of any future human labor demand in space development given the inevitable rise of robotics and AI and the long demonstrated fundamental inadequacy of the suited astronaut, particularly in an economic context. The real work of commercial space development will, inevitably, be done by remote control as a simple matter of economics. There may be a lot of future jobs involving space, but not the millions of jobs physically out there commonly suggested by today’s celebrity space cadets. Mars, in particular, is not a likely prospect of commercial development. There is nothing on the planet that cannot much more economically obtained elsewhere. It’s only potential export is science knowledge, which is ultimately not sustainable. It has only so much stuff to teach us.
Those who go to space will not do it for economic reward. It doesn’t suit the model of New World colonization. I think Bruce Sterling had it right with the suggestion that the primary motivation of space colonization is weltschmerz; the personal desire to get the hell away from the rest of society, its noise, its countless hassles, and a habitat where every damned thing is owned by someone else with a compulsion to lord it over everyone. This would imply that the activity will not happen in earnest until, as with Richard Proenneke, it becomes an option for individuals or relatively modest groups of like-minded people, perhaps heavily leveraging that robotics and AI technology that commercial space development will be accomplished with and perhaps demanding trade-offs like the acceptance of a Transhuman lifestyle reducing the hazards and overhead of settlement. Space will be the province of people who seek a simpler life, a creative opportunity in endless free space and raw resources, and who have the astounding imagination to look at a place like the Kansas City Subtropolis and imagine The Good Life. This suggests that it will not likely be common for quite some time, given the necessary technological leverage.
Again, Star Trek seems to have accidentally gotten this right, depicting whole worlds rather casually colonized by tiny groups and even solitary households, Star Fleet having relatively little trouble evacuating these settlements when threats emerge. A spacefaring culture has little reason to settle in large numbers. After all, if you can travel freely among planets, asteroids, or even stars, with the boundless labor of robots giving you the means to live well and easily even in a place like Mars, what reason do you have to put up with anyone else’s BS for long?
@45:
In the later Foundation/Robot books, it is revealed that robots terraformed planets in advance of human colonization in secret, so that humans arriving at new worlds found them easy to live on.
@43:
Friend: “Where are the Chinese people in Firefly?”
Me: “Back on Earth. The ‘verse was settled by the B Ark.”
Friend: *laughs for five minutes*. I kind of got worried.
But seriously, doesn’t make sense that they could magically terraform (gravity!) dozens of moons but Earth was “used up”. I would totally buy the founders of Alliance rewriting history, though…
@44: Don’t you mean the economics were a little rocky?
@45: Saturn’s Children simply had Mars colonized by robots. Much easier!
@47: zero-gee sucks, low gravity probably sucks, rotational gravity may suck. Hmm, sounds like baseline humans colonizing space may be hard…
@49: If you mean the “Killer B” Foundation books, I think they also added the robots genociding any intelligent aliens they ran across. Must protect humans!
@50: Yep.
Personally I have nothing I’m attached to on Earth other than the idea of helping humanity prosper healthily. As soon as I get my invite ticket to Mars I will happily join, and not out of individualism, but because I want to be part of something greater than me which strives to offer a better tomorrow for the entire human civilization :)
Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a classic of the Transportation type: the UN is drafting people, including the main character, to do the dreary task of colonizing Mars. But he can get out of it if he’s insane, so he’s consulting an AI psychiatrist to make him more neurotic.
@53: That sounds to me like a SF’d version of Catch-22: Nobody sane would want to go, so if you don’t want to go, you’re sane.
The Vorkosigan stories have several colonization scenarios. Most of the planets are at strategic jump points, so have to be occupied regardless of suitability for life, like Komarr. The incentive for terraforming and living on that planet is getting rich from controlling the interstellar traffic, Same with Jackson’s Whole. Whereas Sergyar requires aggressive management of the existing life forms, and the Empire wasn’t coy about uprooting Barrayarans for that effort despite the plagues and weather.
The Barrayan Empire has one completely inhospitable planet and another which requires painful soil conditioning to be fruitful. A turn key ready planet like Sergyar understandably has great appeal.
“Most of the planets are at strategic jump points,”
I don’t think Lois made any such claim. We see some worlds (or systems, no planet at Kline Station) that are strategic, but several world seem friendly: agricultural worlds in the Hegen Hub, Escobar, Athos where feral chickens run loose. Komarr and Beta seemed called out as particularly *in*hospitable by modern Nexus standards.
“Komarr and Beta seemed called out as particularly *in*hospitable by modern Nexus standards”
And Beta was colonized before jump points were discovered, so strategic position couldn’t have been a factor in its selection.