Okay so this evening’s shower time generated thoughts about off planet colonization. This is of course a good source of many thought problems (or as Einstein phrased them thought-experiments, of which I forgot the german name for...its kinda nifty so if anybody remembers feel free to post).
First, of course, is the fact that if we honestly look at it there is not practical reason for colonization. For simplicity’s sake I will refer to mars for the duration of this entry, but as I was saying economically if we were to create a colony on mars what would it do for the remaining earth bound society? Absolutely nothing, the mars colony’s economy would have to be totally isolated and of course much similar because it would go back to the more basic fundamentals of trade, a good for a good, a service for a service. I don’t think under these circumstances that a pecuniary system would actually function well in a small colony, I think it would have to be over a thousand individuals prior to that being effective.
Second, to create this colony it would require initially quite a bit of investment on earth here that will never see any return, after this initial one the colony would have to support itself fully, the ability to manufacture all the goods it requires, including construction materials for expansion so future missions would only require transportation of people, animals, scientific equipment, etc. In terms of society of course each and every person on the colony should have a useful skill, and have to work well with others, and of course have to be good parents, which leads to the next thing.
Thirdly, colonists would have to initially be picked from a broad group of genetics free of the vast majority of bad recessives. As a slight aside its kind of interesting that would of course mean that a decent number of the people there will not be attractive by today’s standards because as a society most of the united states and Europe have been breeding women that can not truly have children, actually there is a theory that is one of the reasons the Neanderthals died out.
Finally, the problem with having an isolated colony is the fact that everything coming to the colony would have to go though some sort of biological contaminate cleansing, as well as the fact that nobody would ever be able to come back to each for two reasons, the first being it would be far too inconvenient and economically infeasible to transport people back and forth and because after time the colonist immune systems would not be able to handle all the diseases that breed on earth.
Well that’s just a rough list of the ideas I had, the of course require a substantial amount more work.
First, of course, is the fact that if we honestly look at it there is not practical reason for colonization. For simplicity’s sake I will refer to mars for the duration of this entry, but as I was saying economically if we were to create a colony on mars what would it do for the remaining earth bound society? Absolutely nothing, the mars colony’s economy would have to be totally isolated and of course much similar because it would go back to the more basic fundamentals of trade, a good for a good, a service for a service. I don’t think under these circumstances that a pecuniary system would actually function well in a small colony, I think it would have to be over a thousand individuals prior to that being effective.
Second, to create this colony it would require initially quite a bit of investment on earth here that will never see any return, after this initial one the colony would have to support itself fully, the ability to manufacture all the goods it requires, including construction materials for expansion so future missions would only require transportation of people, animals, scientific equipment, etc. In terms of society of course each and every person on the colony should have a useful skill, and have to work well with others, and of course have to be good parents, which leads to the next thing.
Thirdly, colonists would have to initially be picked from a broad group of genetics free of the vast majority of bad recessives. As a slight aside its kind of interesting that would of course mean that a decent number of the people there will not be attractive by today’s standards because as a society most of the united states and Europe have been breeding women that can not truly have children, actually there is a theory that is one of the reasons the Neanderthals died out.
Finally, the problem with having an isolated colony is the fact that everything coming to the colony would have to go though some sort of biological contaminate cleansing, as well as the fact that nobody would ever be able to come back to each for two reasons, the first being it would be far too inconvenient and economically infeasible to transport people back and forth and because after time the colonist immune systems would not be able to handle all the diseases that breed on earth.
Well that’s just a rough list of the ideas I had, the of course require a substantial amount more work.
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