How Mars will be polite

If humans never go to Mars, the worst of our impulses will accompany us there. The red planet will not rid us of murder, violence and blackmail. There will be kidnappings, extortions and robberies. Over time, we will even see bank robberies. For generations, people have imagined life on the Martian surface with extraordinary details, from how clean drinking water will be purified to fresh food, but there remains a question that remains unanswered: how will Mars be she watched?

Suppose that at some point in the future, Mars is populated for at least three generations at least; it's at least three generations who have never known life on Earth. In this scenario, the human population on Mars is also large enough that one person can meet at least three strangers – three people they had never seen before – every day. And finally, there are enough colonies on Mars – villages, farms, industrial factories, science labs, entire cities – that 90% of the population has at least one community to visit in person. What criminal possibilities will emerge in this scenario? Who will be responsible for tracking vandals, thieves and saboteurs, not to mention rapists and serial murderers?

When similar demographic stages were reached on Earth, our policing methods were adapted accordingly. We have introduced street lamps financed by the public sector. We opened police stations in new, remote areas. We formed a real army of professional detectives, including those who would work under cover. We gave the cops access to the most advanced technologies we could justify, from military vehicles to drones. We began investigating the police through the implementation of body cameras and internal business innovation. With Martian crime, the promise is that we can understand everything in advance. We can design a Mars Police Department before we get there, knowing that we will need its investigative and detention powers to protect human settlers.

Christyann Darwent is an archaeologist at the University of California at Davis. Darwent is doing his field work in the Canadian High Arctic, a place so cold and remote that it has been used as a training ground to prepare astronauts for future missions on Mars. Darwent's expertise in the decomposition of organic matter under extreme environmental conditions gives him a unique insight into how cadavers could age on the red planet.

As we speculate on the future of Martian law enforcement, Darwent pointed out that his expertise remains firmly grounded. Her husband, she joked, is the one who reads science fiction. Nevertheless, Darwent brought a medico-legal point of view on the subject, noting that almost everything on a criminal investigation would be different on the red planet. She described how animal carcasses age in the Arctic, for example: one side of the body, exposed to high winds and extreme weather, will be reduced to a bleached and unrecognizable bone labyrinth, while the other to be almost perfectly preserved. Think of Ötzi, he says, the so-called "Iceman", discovered in a European glacier 5,300 years after his assassination. Ötzi's body was so well preserved that his tattoos were still visible. The murderers on Mars could have their hands full: the bodies of their victims, abandoned in isolated canyons or unmapped caves, could persist in the Martian landscape "in perpetuity," suggested Darwent.

Consider the basic science of crime scene analysis. In the dry air, similar to a freezer, and the extreme solar exposure of Mars, the DNA will age differently than it is on Earth. Blood from blunt trauma and stab wounds will produce new patterns of splashing in the low gravity of the planet. The electrostatic charge will give a new type of probative value to the dust found hanging on the outside of space suits and neighboring surfaces. Even radiocarbon dating will be different on Mars, "said Darwent," because of the atmospheric chemistry of the planet, which makes it difficult to date older crime scenes.

The Martian environment itself is already so deadly that even violent murder could be disguised as a natural act. Darwent suggested that a potential killer on the red planet could use environmental lethality of the environment to his advantage. Deadly poisoning could occur as if the victim was simply dead from exposure to abrasive chemicals, called perchlorates, in Martian rocks. A weak seal on a space suit or an oxygen counter that seems to have failed, but that has actually been tampered with, could really be an intelligent homicide concealed from view.

When I asked Kim Stanley Robinson – Award Winning Trilogy Of Mars He imagines the human settlement of the red planet with extraordinary details – on the future of police activity on Mars, he replied with a story. In the 1980s, a team from the National Science Foundation was sent to an Antarctic research base with a single handgun for the entire crew. The weapon was intended as a tool of last resort, for the most serious emergencies, but scientists felt that its potential for abuse was too serious to remain uncontrollable. According to Robinson, they disassembled the gun in three parts and stored each piece with a different guard. In this way, if someone gets drunk and gets angry, or simply cracked under the loneliness and pressure, there would be no realistic scenario in which anyone could pick up the coins, put up the rifle, take him hostage (or worse).

In this case, Antarctica has become one of the most cited examples of the application of the law to other worlds. Like Mars, it is a cold and inhospitable place on the edge of all terrestrial jurisdictions. In 1996, under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, the FBI sent one of its agents to the US polar base to investigate an alleged case of assault, perhaps setting a precedent for criminal investigations on Mars. If Red Planet's credit unions are hit by a series of cheeky robberies, agents at a local FBI office can deal with the situation and go to investigate.

Another US police force on Mars could actually be an extension of the US Marshal Service. The marshals are adjuncts of the American judicial system and have served overseas as attachés to the American consular courts. Because space law is being prosecuted, at least for the time being, by international courts of justice, this suggests that marshals could play an interplanetary role, enforcing the jurisdiction of the courts. Like the FBI, the marshals also went to Antarctica – indeed, the marshals were technically in space. In 2001, astronaut James Reilly, an honorary US Marshal, "took his badge and credentials in the skies" during a mission aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Reilly also stepped on the International Space Station during this trip, likely bringing US jurisdiction to India. himself

Elsbeth Magilton, Executive Director of the Space Law, Cyber, and Telecommunications Program at the University of Nebraska Law School, explained that "your jurisdiction generally follows you. Where are you citizen? These are the laws you take with you. However, she added, space jurisdictions can also be contracted in advance, effectively agreeing in advance to national laws applicable to a given mission or even to a particular astronaut. It is also possible that the application of the law on the red planet take the form of companies under the responsibility of companies deprived of any terrestrial nation-state.

Consider the puzzle presented by an Australian national working on Mars for a US company that was registered for tax purposes in Ireland. He confessed to murdering a Japanese seismologist in a non-jurisdictional mountain range, somewhere in the equatorial region of the Red Planet. Who on Mars would be responsible for bringing this man to justice?

Geographer Phil Steinberg is the current reference theorist for thinking about unusual jurisdictions and interstitial spaces that fall outside the traditional definitions of sovereignty. Steinberg is Director of the International Border Research Unit at the University of Durham in the UK. He has published numerous articles on the crime, legality and limits of the nation-state, including the true story of a 1970 murder on an "ice island" in the Arctic Ocean, transformed into a floating military research station. .

Steinberg gave me several examples of what he called "criminal law in non-normal spaces". He reminded me, for example, that it is contrary to international law to operate a ship at sea without flying the flag. "At sea, you have the obligation to connect with a state," he said. "Failure to comply with this obligation is not just a crime against the States, but a crime against humanity. Because it is a crime against humanity, every state has the right to prosecute it. "

For Steinberg, this has curious implications for maintaining order on Mars. If someone left his defined jurisdiction – for example, fleeing the US zone to avoid being prosecuted for a crime – in order to seek refuge in a part of Mars unclaimed by a nation-state, his actions could to be qualified as a crime against humanity. They would have lost the protection of the nations, becoming a sort of stowaway worldwide. "Of course," said Steinberg, "it always leaves the question of whether someone would really apply it."

It seems more likely, he suggested, that the authorities would simply let the fugitive go – after all, a criminal who fled to the undeveloped wilderness of Mars to avoid capture by the police would commit suicide. functional way.

For David PaigeTo worry about crime on Mars is not ahead of its time, it is not necessary from the beginning. Paige is a global scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a member of a team selected by NASA to design a ground penetrating radar system to explore the sub -Martian sol. The crime on Mars, Paige told me, will be so difficult to execute that no one will be tempted to try.

"The problem," said Paige, "is that people will be monitored in different ways." The Airlocks probably record exactly who opens them and when, for example, they place everyone's location at specific times. day, even at the exact square foot of the space in which they were at a given moment. Vital signs of residents, such as high heart rates and adrenaline levels, will also likely be recorded by sensors embedded in Martian clothing. If a crime were committed somewhere, the timestamped data could be correlated to a spatial record of where everyone was at that moment. "It will be very easy to reduce the possible culprits," Paige suggested.

Mars is also a deeply inhospitable environment, he said. People will probably find themselves in sheltered lives, rarely outside; when they do, they will be cushioned inside large voluminous combinations that prevent movement. "If everything is more or less contained," he said, "I think an investigator would have a pretty easy time on Mars compared to the Earth investigations, given the relatively static nature of the situation." make an arrest. It could really be so simple.

When Paige spoke, I remembered a classic plot of the modern detective story: the mystery of the closed room. These conspiracies, which often portray a small group of people stunned by unexplained murder within them, have become a pillar of popular police fiction. By definition, one of the survivors is guilty; the murderer should therefore be easy to find. That the story unfolds in an international rail trip, as in the case of Agatha Christie Murder at the Orient ExpressIn fact, at a family reunion, at a foreign hotel or in a science lab on Mars, there is little reason to believe that such a crime will be easy to solve. At best, a small piece of forensic evidence could leave room for the game; in the worst case, the survivors could be in conspiracy with each other, making the discovery of the truth almost impossible.

Paige proposed another reason for his vision of a crime-free Mars: the caliber of the settlers themselves. The fantasies of human life on the red planet tend towards a sort of picturesque utopian and industrial: high-tech cities and specialized scientific laboratories, populated by responsible adults chosen for their physical form, their emotional maturity and their mastery of rational self. We will only send our best and brightest stories. After all, the cost, complexity and risk of training anyone on the red planet will be so extreme that only the best-selected people will be chosen. These will be people who simply do not represent a criminal risk – and if no one breaks, Paige asked why on Mars would you need police?

Of course, no matter how resistant to the criminal temptation of our first Martian settlers, these people will one day have children and it is simply impossible to predict the psychiatric stability of generations of people removed from their security-conscious ancestors. We can even expect generational rebellions in which crimes and offenses could become frustrating – children have fun with airlocks (with inadvertent fatal consequences) or workers steal medicine in the medical room to feed dependencies.

Moreover, it is not clear that we will only send our best and brightest to Mars. Take the case of Australia, infamous not by carefully chosen scientist-ambassadors, but partly by criminals involuntarily exiled by the British authorities. Or consider remote oil, gas and mining operations, where workers may be just as likely to have a drink or two as reading philosophy in the peace and quiet of their dorms. It is quite possible that we are essentially sending quasi-sacrificial workers to Mars, people with difficult borders and ready to tame a difficult environment for those who follow.

In this version of the history of colonization of Mars, the brutality and isolation inherent in the terraforming of an extraterrestrial planet so far from home are likely to be mitigated by the same kind of difficult life that humans already excel on Earth. And with these lifestyles will come crime. Unpopular Workers Falling to Death in Split Canyons Isolated or Crushed Under Industrial Equipment – Were They really accidents? Without a police presence on Mars, these types of murders will probably never be investigated, let alone resolved.

By far the most convincing counterpoint to Paige's optimism is that even on Earth, well-trained and highly supervised people – even those who know they are likely to be caught – have committed every imaginable crime . There are soldiers who become bank robbers. Olympic athletes who kill. Commercial pilots crushing loaded planes, deliberately killing everyone on board. Brokers, bankers and other Wall Street residents who commit suicide and murder under conditions of psychological fragility. The idea that human beings sent to Mars will simply not be immune to the break does not hold – and we discuss the possibility that life on Mars, regardless of the resilience of the future a person on Earth can lead to dementia, or the loneliness of the red planet could have a "negative impact on the human psyche". As Marina Koren wrote, referring to future space missions, "psychological screening can only predict a lot."

Imagine a criminal armed with a knife was cornered on a Martian search base, near a critical airlock leading to the outside. If the police shoot a gun or even a Taser, it could damage key elements of the base, putting at risk thousands of innocent bystanders. Other forms of melee combat learned on Earth could have adverse effects. even a single punch could rob both the criminal and the cop, as they collide in reduced Martian gravity. How can the police control the fugitive without making matters worse for everyone?

Josh Gold takes these scenarios seriously. Gold is a fourth degree black belt in the Japanese martial art of Aikido, as well as the co-founder of the Ikazuchi Dojo in Irvine, California. He is also an expert in motion and sports entrepreneur, having consulted personalities such as Disney, Formula 1 and Sony on the performance of the human body in unusual scenarios. Gold is now using his expertise in body kinematics to lead what he calls a "cross-functional team" developing the world's first martial art for space.

A science fiction nerd confessed, Gold is convinced that the issue of security in space is neither abstract nor hypothetical. It's very real, he insists, even in the present moment. We are already faced with the prospect that space tourists are causing mutual damage, he explained to me, not to mention astronauts on long-term missions committing acts of belligerence, sabotage or aggression. sexual. Even in the simulations of Mars here on Earth, Gold reminded me that security risks have arisen among highly skilled and carefully controlled crew members.

"From a law enforcement or security perspective," says Gold, "many of our best practices are fundamentally broken down into zero G and have significant implications for low-G environments, such as Mars and Canada. Moon. . Most of our fundamental movement tactics need to be completely redesigned. On Mars, said Gold, the risks of miss fire are simply too great, which may puncture the wall of a pressurized base. The Martian police will rather be armed with hooks, knots and adhesives, he suggested, not bullets, which only emphasizes the importance of self-defense in hand-to-hand combat.

Gold's approach was to draw techniques from different martial arts – even non-combat sports such as gymnastics and parkour – by filtering them according to their relationship to gravity. According to Gold, Brazilian jujitsu offers a handful of tactics that could be useful in low-gravity fights, including locking and squeezing movements – or "snaking" in Gold's words – rather than collisions and brute force . Even in Aikido, he pointed out, joint locks are often used to unbalance an opponent and launch it, but it will have to be rethought in space. "You can imagine," he said, "in a zero or low-G environment, that you could twist a limb in a certain way so as not to drop someone but to reorient it. in the space. " ballet entanglement as a street fight – and that will change the way the police engage with aggressive suspects.

For the moment, of course, it is difficult to test these concepts, but Gold has been looking for opportunities to test his martial art on parabolic airplane flights (called "vomit comets"), which offer several minutes of free time. ;weightlessness. He also mentioned the possibility of using the International Space Station as a sort of out-of-world dojo, but the cost of flying experimental astronauts-warriors remains prohibitive.

For now, he said, these are advanced computer simulations, experimental movement workshops, and patience. In any case, it is important that we get this right – and soon. "It is clear that this is necessary," said Gold. "If we want to become a species outside the world, we will have to understand how to maintain peace".

Charle think Cockell to respond to, let alone prevent, the crime on Mars will require more fundamental intervention. Cockell is a political theorist and astrobiologist based at the University of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on the political implications of space travel and colonization out of the world in books such as The meaning of freedom beyond the earth and Dissent, revolution and freedom beyond the earth.

Cockell does not mince words when it comes to the unexpected political risks involved in an extraterrestrial settlement, on which he is refreshing and cynical. "An extraterrestrial society focuses solely on practical goals, without resorting to a higher goal," he warns. The meaning of freedom beyond the earth, "Will surely drive its people to despair and despair when in the end they will begin to question their purpose, their humanity and all meaning in their lives". If you are bored and live on a planet where you can not even breathe the air outside, in a sense why do not to turn to a life of crime?

In the precarious Martian environment, where the effective and continuous functioning of survival systems is so important, sabotage becomes an existential threat. A saboteur can alter the oxygen generators or fatally disable the most crucial airlock of a colony. When human life is so closely linked to its technical environment, these acts should not be considered as petty crimes, he explained. In the literal sense, they would be crimes against humanity – even on a sufficient scale, an attempt at genocide.

"I think the fact that tyranny is easier in space is obvious," he explained, precisely because there is nowhere to escape without risking an instant death due to extreme cold or asphyxiation. In other words, the constant presence of near instantaneous environmental lethality will encourage strong social control systems with limited error tolerance. Orders and procedures will have to be followed exactly as planned, as the consequences of a single misstep could be catastrophic.

In addition, the power to generate and distribute something as simple as oxygen will give what Cockell calls "control levers" to specific and corrupt individuals. At one point, this inspired Cockell to create an ironic poster to illustrate one of his articles: alluding to the classic British posters of the Second World War, his slogan was: "Grow the plants from the ground up. interior for freedom. "The more people who grow plants on Mars in their habitat, the more oxygen there is in the Martian atmosphere and the less computers have to be produced. There is an interesting potential link between agriculture, plant growth and freedom. The more you control your oxygen supply, in other words, the less the Martian state – or a private company of predatory oxygen – controls you.

Cockell took this in a surprising new direction with a 2016 article entitled "Exoconfac". The title is the abbreviation "Extraterrestrial Containment Facility," Cockell's attempt to lay the foundation for designing prisons out of the world. Among his most notable findings was the idea that in a low-oxygen environment, such as a prison on Mars, guards might be tempted to use depressurization as a tactic of compliance. Authority figures could hold the air to make prisoners more flexible – or residents of an entire city more easily appeased. For Cockell, politically motivated depressurization should be made literally, physically impossible – that is, jails in the space should be designed in such a way that atmospheric pressure abuse just can not happen. This is another reason why we imagine a Mars P.D. in advance is so important: without foresight, we have little hope of protecting ourselves from such scenarios.

When I described Cockell's plans for an off-world prison at Lucianne Walkowicz, she seemed to be rebuffed. "We did not understand the law," she said, "and we are already designing prisons." Trained as an astronomer, Walkowicz is the current president of astrobiology at the US Library of Congress. She and Cockell could use a different vocabulary – freedom or equity, or oppression vs. exclusion – but they share the same agenda: to ensure that human beings can live together on other worlds, free from the burden of totalitarian politics. and government repression.

The possibility of exporting undisputed structures of police brutality or authoritarian racism to another planet is horrible. Yet Walkowicz fears that this is too likely. We discussed a video that became viral in the summer of 2017, depicting a white man's hand using a soap dispenser without difficulty, followed by a black man's hand. who can not run the same machine. Its darker skin never triggers the light sensor; from the point of view of the machine, it's as if only the white man was there.

Imagine a 2001Just like the red planet scenario, Walkowicz suggested that instead of HAL become a thug, a camera-operated lock or other system – perhaps an essential oxygen supply equipment based on recognition algorithms facial white colon. A person could be left, trapped outside their home, unable to trigger the airlock or get more oxygen, literally suffocated by the biases of the poor computer program. The effects would be both fatal and annoying.

The reminder that we could go to Mars to find that our undisputed prejudices were programmed in the technical environment itself is a depressing but necessary fixture to the utopian tendencies of a post-terrestrial futurism. "There is nothing magical in the space that will cure the biases of machine learning, algorithmic policing or everyday interactions between people," Walkowicz said.

If we imagine a model P.D. Mars, it is imperative to imagine also the potential flaws of this police service. And we would do well to ask such questions now, before we unwittingly build an interplanetary dystopia run by cops who shoot first and ask questions later.