The Future of Martian & Interplanetary Societies w/ Samo Burja

Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, let's do that. What got Martians on your mind?

So this brings me sort of to my first commentary. I think the international treaties on space — that is, that space is the common heritage of all mankind — I don't think those will last. So I think very quickly countries will choose to pursue sovereign territory, and it actually might be the US that is first to go down that path. Listeners and viewers might not be familiar with various treaties on the government of outer space. The basic declared it to be a territory where no one is making territorial claims. It could be analogized to, say, Antarctica, but you know, even the Antarctic Treaty is up for renewal in the middle of the century, and I'm not sure it'll actually be renewed. We might see a scramble for Antarctica, a race between the United States and China, and honestly even surprising places like Argentina that have pre-existing claims that predate that treaty. And the reason for that will be, you know, minerals, resources, and so on.

Space is trickier because essentially there is a military reason to have control of the Earth's Moon. The straightforward military reason is that it is the cheapest place from which to launch things into Earth orbit. As amazing as Starship is, as much mass as it can lift, it can't compare to a so-called mass driver, which is basically, you know, let's call it to simplify, an electromagnetic gun that can launch things from the surface of the Moon into basically not just lunar orbit, but it could launch them into high Earth orbit without the use of any fuels. Now, the reason this is possible on the Moon and not the Earth is twofold. The Moon's gravity is much lower, so if you mine some aluminum there, to lift it actually doesn't take as much fuel. You still need to, you know, to get to a lower orbit would potentially still require the same amount of fuel, but you can use interesting tricks like ion engines that don't require a lot of reaction mass, that require just a constant stream of electricity from something like solar power.

The other reason, the more important one, for why a mass driver works on the Moon is that you have a particle or cargo be accelerated by magnets very, very rapidly and shoot out, and a sort of space gun type rail gun is that there's no atmosphere on the Moon, or that the atmosphere on the Moon, to be precise, is extremely, extremely thin, like just very small amounts, like hydrogen, helium, and so on.

So why does it matter who has the cheapest mass in Earth orbit? Well, it matters for a whole variety of concepts. First, I think having control of a global communications network that provides internet and instant communication — so in other words, something equivalent to Starlink — that pretty much explains itself, especially if you can inflict that. That's like a crushing advantage on the battlefield if you can deny that to your enemy, so like destroying thousands of their satellites with your anti-satellite weapons. Well, that's a crushing advantage. Even something more basic like geostationary satellites and GPS. It had been a US advantage in the 1990s, the 2000s, even today, to have a better GPS system than any other government. Like the Russians don't get to use GPS when piloting their drones; the Ukrainians, I think, get to use GPS when piloting their drones. Now, the Russians have their own satellites, but Russian launch costs are more expensive.

So currently, I think we will see in the next 20 years state effort first by China, but eventually by other rivals such as Russia, to replicate the top efficiency of vehicles like Starship, or even less ambitiously, you know, just vehicles like the Falcon 9. The US has sort of gained a unique advantage because of SpaceX's innovation. This is not to the credit of, say, the United Launch Alliance or Boeing or Lockheed Martin or any of these old lumbering corporations that basically had the same sort of price point that their foreign competitors did. Actually, they were beaten on price by the Russians for most of the early 2000s.

So because of the strategic necessity, they'll go to Starship. But what's after Starship? Well, after Starship is mining and manufacturing stuff on the Moon. If you're mining and manufacturing stuff on the Moon, various weapons concepts, including orbital bombardment, become viable. And bam, there we are. The high frontier is a national security necessity. Nations will try to claim as much of the Moon as possible. You know, there's the — was it written by Mike Solana or just published in Pirate Wires — the Moon should be a state.

It is, it is. And I honestly think, I honestly think it's not a bad idea. It's just the other countries might not recognize the US ownership of the entire Moon. You know, it's sort of like the English did not recognize the Spanish entire claim to the New World and just started making their own claims. So expect as soon as the US does that, the space race is on, and countries will speed up their efforts to claim the Moon. In fact, the US is probably already in a space race that its citizens and even its decision makers know nothing about. The Chinese — the Chinese have launched dozens of lunar probes and have planned dozens of lunar probes. No country is that interested in lunar geology. They're practicing soft landings on the lunar surface, number one. Number two, many people don't know the Chinese have their two-man space stations in orbit right now. There's the International Space Station and the Chinese space station. The reason it's a Chinese space station is because we declined letting them join the International Space Station because we didn't want them stealing good technology. So they said fine, and they developed their own technology, or rather developed it on a basis sold to them by the Russians. The Chinese space station is modern, it works, but it is testing long-term astronaut habitation. They essentially are testing life support systems, return vehicles, and even heavy lift vehicles that for now are not reusable, so they're in a way obsolete, but they would be strong enough to bring astronauts to the Moon if the US is not careful.

You know, let's be real, Eric, I don't believe Artemis is going to work. I don't think SLS is going to work by 2027. So in other words, I don't think Artemis is going to return American astronauts to the Moon in 2027 as is currently scheduled. I think there will be delays. Current statements by Xi and others in China suggest that they are aiming to go to the Moon around 2030. I do believe their statements, and the reason is if you compare it, NASA and Boeing's track record of when they promise something happens by a certain year — because of budget cuts, delays, incompetence, graft — they always make it a few years later. It's been a very long time since you could promise we're going to the Moon before the end of this decade and so we mean it, right? And I'm sure, I'm sure the current administration wouldn't want to be beaten by China to the Moon. So I expect there'll be a last-minute rushed effort just replace SLS with Starship. Starship has already contracted, I think, to handle the landing part. There's just an unclear reason why the SLS system is supposed to launch astronauts to the Starship in, I think, lunar orbit or to lunar Gateway.

I honestly think it doesn't make sense.

So just, you know, let's go to the Moon directly, do what you need to do, maybe have a base on the surface, then go back to Earth directly. There's no reason to do all of this intermediate dancing. But still, you know, quibbling about mission architecture aside, I think that initial space race might be the start of a new era where, you know, the Chinese are just now getting around to replicating jumbo jets, and they're basically catching up to companies like Boeing that we discussed on previous episodes, and also eventually to more functional companies like Airbus. We'll see if eventually companies like Boom Supersonic get into the jumbo jet market. For now, they seem more interested in small planes, and their argument is actually way smaller planes are better for supersonic flight, you know. But if we're eventually facing just full-on Chinese competition, I think that there's room for a new aerospace conglomerate that serves both civilian needs and military needs in the US. So I think Boeing itself is ripe for disruption. It is ripe for creative destruction to replace it with a leaner company that is less captured by its internal division politics, that is less captured by distributed decision makers, that is less tied to quarterly reports that make money quarterly, that lose money on a decade time scale, right? So I think there's a lot of factors feeding into those unwise decisions.

Still, you know, even if the Chinese are number two on the Moon, let alone if they're number one, I think this sets the stage for a Mars race. And you know, at that point, if people are claiming territory on the Moon, if people landed on the Moon, if people understand the Moon is militarily valuable, they're probably going to focus on it quite a bit. But they will also focus on the prestige of Mars, and just because of that, I think people will start claiming territory. It's kind of funny, but in the 19th century, in the Scramble for Africa, the Italians never actually made much money with their colonies. They just felt that they needed colonies to be a respectable European power. So in a very important sense, if the US and China, perhaps, or Russia even, are claiming parts of the Moon, they're just going to start claiming parts of Mars, and maybe that initial kick, rather than any commercial interest, will be big enough to get the first settlements going.

Now, of course, once the first settlements are going, that's where we get to an actually interesting point, because I've always been fascinated by the beginnings of city life on Earth, and I have to point out that, you know, I think sociologically, psychologically, life in these Martian environments will be probably very different than life on Earth. And actually, if you have multiple generations of people born there, it's currently unclear whether humans, without some genetic engineering, can actually carry a baby to term, a healthy baby to term, in under half of Earth's gravity. But let's say for the sake of argument that that can be done, or that people become comfortable enough with genetic engineering that genetic engineering solves that problem. What does Martian culture look like after a few generations? And you know, why does it change? I think that's like a super interesting big picture topic because, you know, in a thousand years, people forget the detail of like the Scramble for Mars and the Scramble for the Moon, but there will be totally new societies there, and those will have multi-millennial impacts on the future of a wider humanity.

Yeah, you know, I think we are probably underestimating Russian engineering at this point. I think they will replicate reusability. Currently, reusability is something that has been achieved by SpaceX, and Blue Origin is well on the way, and I would expect the Chinese will be sort of number two. And at that point, when the Chinese are number two, I think the very same treaties for space technology cooperation that have bootstrapped the Chinese program from Russian technology will probably bootstrap the reusable rockets from Chinese technology. So unless there was a worsening of relations between Russia and China, we should just assume that when China gets the reusable launch vehicle, the Russians are not far behind, and the Russians basically copy the successful Chinese design and implement it. Though probably again, both countries will have worse scale. They'll have these reusable super heavy launch vehicles, they'll be able to go to the Moon, they'll be able to go to Mars.

So let's start talking about a few things here. Now, genetic engineering throws a big wrench in all of this. For example, the simple truth is that if either of us went to orbit for two years, we would not only lose bone mass, we would permanently lose muscle mass. There would be a weakening of our heart muscle, right? And you know, I can go back to the gym, I can get my gains back, but my heart muscle is going to stay weaker permanently. That is actually a really clear indicator that human bodies are not designed for zero gravity. There are a variety of reasons we might want to, you know, full stop in our modern society. Just maybe we should tell our muscles to stop shrinking quite as fast because we're no longer calorie constrained. So like on Earth, you know, you go to the gym. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be? You go to the gym once a year, you work out, and you just don't work out, but your muscles kind of stay functional. I think for a very sedentary life like the kind we tend to live, we're already maladapted. So really, when we're talking about the difference between being, you know, on a laptop or being in zero G, these are both already maladapted situations for the human animal, for the human being.

But like, let's say that we don't genetically solve this. Anyone who grows up on Mars will physically be too weak to ever be comfortable on Earth. Like they'll probably be able to visit, but it's going to be very difficult for them. Like their heart will struggle. They're going to have difficulty, you know, even with weight training on Mars. Let's say if, for example, everyone just wears a 50 or 80 pound weighted suit on Mars as they're growing up, and you swap out the suits as you're growing up, and you go back to Earth, inevitably it's going to be physically strenuous. Now we don't know whether you fully adapt or not, but let's just say that for the sake of argument, the immigration ratchet, the colonization ratchet, is one-sided. How might Americans or Australians have felt about Europe had it been physically impossible to them to ever go live back in Europe?

I think that's not a question we ask ourselves, but I think we might see on Mars a shockingly fast ethnogenesis where the Martians themselves, I think they're going to start saying we don't want anyone from Earth coming much faster than they ever started saying that in Australia or the Americas or whatever. And like even in Australia and the Americas, wouldn't it take like 100, 200 years for people to be even averse to more colonization or more immigration from particular sources, not so much from England? So I do think nationality here matters, and I do suspect that Martians, if you know part of Mars was a US state or if the Moon was a US state, I think they would probably identify as Americans for a surprisingly long time, but the identification would eventually fade. So the relationship between, say, the Earth's Moon, if you have many millions of people, or Mars, and the United States government or any government, I think will be very similar to the relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia. They're going to have a particular favorite country. It's sort of the country that started culturally, politically, economically. They might favor it. They might want to be involved in Earth politics for the sake of it, but they will probably want to limit even migration from that favorite country because they'll pretty straightforwardly say, hey, you know, you're coming to Mars, you can always go back. It's very hard to go back. It's a many-year journey, but you can actually go back. I'm stuck here. The success of this colony is like all we have going for us. If this colony sort of fails, like our descendants don't really get to go back to Earth. Now, maybe they go to the asteroid belt or somewhere else, but still, you know, it's a very bought-in perspective.

And because of this, there might also be a sort of resentment for the wealth of Earth. Now, this might seem a little bit unusual to talk about, but you know, if you imagine the early life in any sort of settlement was usually not that great, and often colonies would be evaluated on Mars. The material expenditures necessary to sustain human life are much higher than on Earth, so I think the Martians will tend to view Earthlings as spoiled. It's like, you know, you don't even need to work for your own atmosphere. The air is just breathable. Like it will seem like Earth is easy mode and they're hardcore. So they will have this sense that we're spoiled by our environment, that the environment's kind of wasted on us, that, you know, Earthlings when they come to Mars, they don't know how to deal, they don't know how to live, they're not serious enough, they're frivolous. And I think you get there after you have something like two generations, let's say, because as long as your parents are Earthlings, you can't really be that anti-Earth or Earth-skeptical. But once you get three generations removed, it starts being you can make the claim pretty straightforwardly, oh, the best people already left Earth. There's going to be a certain amount of pride in this very distinct way of living.

Now, we don't know how rapid future terraforming technology might be. AI really does change this, robotics truly do change this, it's unclear. But I think the likeliest future is that people will live in enclosed habitats. So the social life will also not be like social life in a village or in a city on Earth. It will be more like life on a submarine, if you think about it. The submarine is an enclosed space, it's loud and cramped with machinery. The machinery is there and accessible to humans so that humans can maintain it even underwater. So the same principle applies on Mars. The machinery will often be pressurized so that humans can easily maintain it. The machinery that's not pressurized, well, that's harder to maintain and mustn't fail. Everyone in a submarine is in the same boat, literally, right? A leak can sink the whole submarine. Well, a leak can depressurize a whole Martian colony. And I'm sure there'll be like various fail-safes and various means of like, you know, locking up rooms. There'll be like an alarm, it'll be like a fire alarm, and all the doors close, and one of the rooms is depressurizing, and then we go repair it, and then it's a hassle, but everyone is like, okay, fine, we're now going about our day. The whole colony is not going to be exposed. But I think this will produce a very strong sense of community that we will find unusual.

Now on Earth, if you have a village that does communal farming, like say in West Africa or in some parts of Eastern Europe, there's a different form of communal farming, or China, that over the centuries resulted in a very different family structure than societies where you basically had yeoman farmers. So there's a massive difference. You probably, I don't know, have you ever read anything on the Hajnal line in Europe? It is an anthropological line where on different sides of it there's a practice of like sort of early marriage and cousin marriage is more prevalent, and on the other side of the line, you know, marriage is delayed and cousin marriage is infrequent. So you can have centuries-long consequences to who do people, how is property distributed in a village or city, is it communal, is it individual. There can be centuries-long consequences as to who you are marrying or who do you tend to marry, right? And you know, cousin marriage in the Western world is sort of like the butt of all jokes, it's the butt of jokes, but in a lot of the rest of the world it's like one of the only groups of people who you can actually trust is family. So marrying within a family is a way to keep property within the family, and you know, societies that tend to practice a lot of cousin marriage tend to be very clannish.

So where does this leave us with Mars? Well, and we are of course in the realm of speculation. I'm just speculating off of currently displayed human behavior. Now, assuming that, you know, we saw the fertility question, and let's say that the Martians, even after radiation sickness and low-G pregnancy complications, let's say that somehow eke out a TFR, they have a fertility rate of like, I don't know, 2.4, let's say, which is a bad modern Israel's TFR. I don't think they're going to go much higher than that for a variety of reasons, even if they were hyper-fertile cultures. To be frank, you know, early American colonists were actually known for having unusually high fertility compared to their English relatives back in the British Isles. Well, because the land was very abundant, right? After you defeat the Native Americans, you have a lot of land, it's easy to feed people. On Mars, land will be always very expensive. Like if we mean living space, right? Uninhabited, irradiated land filled with minerals, that will be abundant. Farmland will be rare, scarce, and like intensely cultivated, and habitable space will be at a premium. Because of this, you can't really have families with 10 kids, you can't have families with six kids, probably can have families with two to three kids because people want children. You probably also need to marry relatively late, so I suspect Martians will have children in their late 30s.

I think they will have to work and prove themselves to their own communities because I think these submarine-like communities will actually be surprisingly communal. There'll be surprisingly little privacy. Now, this doesn't mean that they're not going to be an independent people. I actually think different settlements on Mars will be fairly isolated from each other. In a way, the sort of idea of, okay, you have a roommate, well, what if you have an atmosphere mate? Like, someone that you know shares the same air as you do, maybe that will come to be a familial relation. You know, we live in Habitat 17, we all share, we breathe the same air, might become a phrase as relevant as we share the same blood, right? Because we're maintaining the same atmosphere scrubbers, right? We're maintaining the same life support systems together. And if we as a community fail to maintain our Earth, like at best a different community has to save us, and then we're part of that community and we're sort of impoverished secondhand citizens. And they would be secondhand citizens because, like I said, these communities are going to value hardiness, self-sufficiency, if only as a cope for why their life is actually a little bit harder and poorer than it is on Earth in some ways, right? People on Mars will, for starters, like you won't be able to afford a pool. I mean, when I say it like that, it's pretty self-explanatory. But if technology keeps going forward on Earth, well, you know, I wouldn't be shocked if eventually everyone kind of has a pool, or if they don't have a pool, it's because they don't want one, right? Water is cheap, and on Earth we solved water through desalination, as I explained. Water will not be solved on Mars for a long time. Desalination is not easy, and you know, so on and so on.

Right, and of course there'll be more important things to spend the labor on. But seriously, because they value self-sufficiency in their identity versus Earth, I think they will value self-sufficiency from the other colonies. So it's starting to sound, if this is starting to remind you of certain kinds of science fiction, I think that's not a coincidence. There's a very loose analogy that can be played with the Fremen of Frank Herbert's Dune, right, where they come to be obsessed with like water economics and saving water, and the water of your own body in their culture is on loan from your tribe, it's not really yours. I don't think it'll go quite that far, but I think that the Martian culture will turn out to be very oriented towards life in small groups of people. It'll tend to value very hard work, it will tend to value frugality, it will value responsibility, and in some ways it's going to be less compassionate with misfortune per se, or rather it'll be very judgmental of incompetence. It will have high affordances for helping those, you know, who share your air, who share your life support system, but less interested in helping those with a different life support system, with a different city, and even less interested in helping those back on Earth, with the moderating factor that I think for a long time there will be the sense that, oh, we're kind of a state of the United States, or we're a province of China, or we're a province of Russia. But I think just as on Earth, all you need is like one big war and that sort of patriotism starts to fade away. It's no coincidence that when the Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians fought for the British Empire in World War I and World War II, each of these wars ably weakened, not strengthened, their British identity. So say the US and China go to war and the lunar colonies are blowing each other up and they're survivors, I think after the war the lunar colonies, the remaining people in the lunar colonies are less inclined to think of themselves as Chinese or American and more inclined to think of themselves as whatever lunar culture or identity they've picked up. Now, I don't think Mars colonization, by the time Mars colonization is very advanced, whatever possible great power conflict has happened between China and the US will have happened, and at most there'll be like remaining smaller tensions, right? One of these powers is going to become, after one or two hundred years, clearly the greater power. So I don't think we can forecast the geopolitics there of the distant Martian future. Still, I could see them being involved in one great Earth war. I could see World War II being multiplanetary, or World War I being a multiplanetary one, and after that there'll be this kind of period of more isolationist perspectives. And I think that this follows from the limitation of technology, though. Once you terraform Mars, you might actually see a profound transformation of Martian culture, and I guarantee you that there'll be a debate in Martian culture whether they even want to terraform Mars after a few hundred years, because they will come to value this life, and they'll say, well, this is how it's naturally supposed to be, and this is how we cultivate and maintain these hard virtues that we've won over many centuries of struggle, and if we terraform our atmosphere to be Earth-like, we'll be soft like those people back on Earth. I think ultimately practicality will win. Eventually they'll decide to just terraform the planet, but I bet they'll fight a cultural war over it.