Interview with Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Space.

On July 10, Future Tense and the JustSpace Alliance will host an event titled "How Will We Rule In Space?" In Washington. For more information, to confirm your presence and watch the livestream, visit the New America website.

At its radical July 4th celebration, President Donald Trump is touted that the United States will "soon be planting the American flag on Mars." NASA hopes to send astronauts to the red planet in the 2030s, while Elon Musk is pursuing his own Martian projects. Let's say humans come to Mars and stay there. How are we going to organize? How are we going to create a community?

Robert Zubrin, president and founder of the Mars Society Organization, an advocacy organization for space, has been working for several decades to answer these questions. Since 1998, her non-profit organization has supported research and sparked interest for both government-funded exploration and for private expeditions on Mars. I spoke to Zubrin, author of Arguments in favor of space: how the space flight revolution opens unlimited perspectives, on the various challenges faced by potential Martian institutions. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How do you envision the colonization of Mars and what will the first settlements look like?

I think it will start with an exploration and then by establishing a permanent base on Mars to support the exploration. Anyone who sponsors this base, be it the US government, an international consortium of governments or private groups, will have an interest in people remaining additional rotations on Mars because the biggest expense is transportation. round trip. If sending someone to Mars was $ 100 million – and that's a low estimate – it would be easy to give that person $ 5 million to stay for two more years. So, I think you're going to start seeing people keep extra rotations on Mars, just as there are some who spend extra rotation for trips to Antarctica. And then, relationships will form. And people will have children. And you will see the beginning of a real settlement, a base.

"There will always be people who will have new ideas about how human beings should live together."

– Robert Zubrin

Once you have this base on Mars, which is perhaps supported by the US and its Euro-Japanese allies, it is developing all these technologies to create resources on Mars and the interplanetary transport becomes cheaper. At this point, it becomes possible to consider not only other countries, even the smallest, creating their own base on Mars, but also private groups. That it is an entrepreneurial colony, which derives its income from the inventions created by its staff to meet the challenges of Mars, or even private groups, there will always be people who will have new ideas on how human beings should live together.

Should we be concerned about potential conflicts between these settlements?

I do not think so. Mars has an area equal to that of all continents. You will have a lot of free space. There is no reason for them to overlap. And I think you will see here a lot of what you might call "noble experiences". That is, people who have new ideas about how to control society. Some of these ideas will be good ideas and others will not be. . Those who are good ideas will succeed and people will go. These colonies will succeed, they will thrive, attract immigrants and grow.

On the other hand, there are ideas that lead nowhere, that actually do not offer a better life to people and that are not practical from an economic point of view. These colonies will fail and they will disappear. And those who offer something better will not grow up, they will be examples to the rest of humanity.

People ask me, What will the government look like on Mars? I do not know. I think that there will be many different ideas tried.

What could work on Mars look like?

The labor shortage will lead to the Martian settlement not only for low-labor-consuming machines, but also for things that increase the power of the workforce in volume and diversity, including robotics and artificial intelligence, for example. And of course, the fact that they have limited land for agriculture means that they will be driven to innovate in biotechnology and they will have very little patience for people who propose hypothetical scenarios: What if the killer tomatoes came off? Why do not we do this after 40 years of study before letting you study he? I think the culture of Mars will be pragmatic and inventive. Now, these inventions made by the Martians to meet their own challenges will have a value on Earth. They will be filing patents for these new technologies on Earth and will license them, and that is how the revenue of the Mars settlers will be generated. The information is the easiest thing to transport on interplanetary distances.

Could some Martian societies replicate systems and institutions, rules, etc., on Earth? For comfort?

Some might do it, but it's a different situation, and you could say: Am I really going to waste all this time, all that talent, preventing it from being used by paperwork? Pragmatism means that you make full use of available talent. And I think it will really be a feature of Martian society. I do not see how it could not be.

When do you see schools, churches and community organizations being created?

I think once you start having kids, you will have some form of school. They could be very different from what we have now. I think there will be a lot more hands-on training. And I think that many of the things that churches do are somehow associated with family formation. I think that they will become more important as people start to start a family.

What about public spaces and open areas, for discussion and debate?

Almost everywhere you go on Earth today, in almost every society, there are parks and open areas of some type. And I think Martian cities will certainly be walking cities. There will be a community there. The Mars Society is currently organizing this contest on the design of a Martian colony of 1,000 people, with many different points, including technological, social, political, economic and aesthetic considerations. An Israeli group reported that one report recommended that the social system be based on the kibbutz.

There is another point that I would like to make. I mentioned it earlier. Some people have written that extraterrestrial societies would be tyrannies because the government could cut you off and kill you. I disagree with this 100 percent. In the Middle Ages, they had a saying: The air of the city makes a man free. Cities were freer than the country. And the more complex a society becomes, the more interdependent it becomes, and the more the goodwill of every citizen is essential, because only one citizen could sabotage a colony of Mars. That's what I was getting at. More complex and advanced companies require greater respect from their members. Because everyone is essential. A government of such a place must treat its people properly.

In the end, Mars will grow to the maximum if there are a number of Martian colonies, realizing their own inventions, each experimenting with new ways of doing things. It is ultimately in the greatest interest of all. This will be a positive example for the societies of the Earth.

People are talking about the current threats to humanity – people say it's overpopulation, global warming, resource depletion or asteroid impacts. I think these are actually bad ideas. And in principle, a bad idea, causing all the disasters of the 20th^th century: that there is not enough to do. Working together, and I mean working in a very broad sense, as part of a larger undertaking to open up space to humanity, allows people to realize that it is not true that there is so much to do because the Earth comes from the infinite sky. And frankly, that's why I'm in this situation. It's the way you design the future that determines what will happen.

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