Imagining Governance of the Red Planet

Democracy Goes to Mars

Living on Mars is going to be hard. To do so we are going to have to implement technological systems on a scale never done before. But far more difficult than the technological challenges is the uncertainty. The complexity of Martian living means that we won’t know which technologies work best until we actually try living there. This uncertainty would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but dealing with uncertainty inevitably leads to mistakes. And mistakes on Mars are deadly. If you pick the wrong material for your habitat, the cost could be in thousands of lives, not just money.

Today Japan has the lowest claimed rate of homelessness in the world. With fewer than 3000 people who the government counts as unhoused, Japan’s homelessness rate is 0.2 people per 10,000. Of course these numbers are controversial, but if true it would be practically an economic and political merical. In a Martian city of 1 million, however, it would mean 20 dead people. Many similar problems, which on Earth policymakers can ignore or merely minimize, are deadly serious on Mars, and require a level of perfection we have yet to achieve here. It is clear that solving the problem of uncertainty is, therefore, not just a technological problem, but a political problem as well.

The existence of any sizable population on Mars is tenuous. The operation of the technical systems of such a city will have to be very precise, and there is little room for error. Moreover, the lifestyles of its citizens will have to be very different from Terrestrial lifestyles due to the difficulties of maintaining life on Mars. The social, cultural, and political institutions of Martian society will also have to be organized to reflect these challenges.

Citizens will have to organize together to make a variety of different sectors of Martian life function well. The governance structure of the Martian city will have to organize technological development, the economy, community life, and systems for developing rules and resolving conflicts. We don’t necessarily need some kind of all encompassing government to make these decisions. Why would the same body make decisions about which technologies to implement and how firms should be organized? A Martian society will certainly need a variety of organizations to conduct the business of governance. But however many there are, and whatever their delineation, democracy, rather than centralization, is the best political system for dealing with the uncertainty and the small margins for error.

The key to a successful, much less surviving, Martian city, is to simultaneously balance the need for experimentation with the need to minimize the severity of consequences. A martian settlement should be divided into individual and isolatable “pods” of roughly 30-50 people, each utilizing different technologies for necessities like oxygen, water, food production, and the development of economic goods for export. Any particular technology would at first be used by at least a dozen or more pods, to ensure a diversity of experience, and will be supported for as long as feasibly possible. This reflects the strategy used during the Manhattan Project. It was unclear which uranium enrichment technology would succeed, so project managers explored all the options simultaneously. Every pod will include emergency and rescue equipment and sufficient space to host some of their neighbors in the case of technological failure. Pod groups will share their findings and meet periodically for scientific and engineering conferences, where breakthroughs can be shared and, eventually, the best technical designs determined.

Governing Technological Development

The semi-autonomous pods will be the primary site of technological development. They will enable development which is experimental while still being cautious and incremental to discover what the best blend of technological systems will be to make a Martian city as successful as possible. But once the cselections of technological systems have been made, how will the city govern these systems and ensure a continual stream of path-breaking but safe innovations?

One existing system that is targeted at creative policy innovation used throughout the European Union is an Enquete Commission. These commissions consist of half subject-matter experts, half citizens and are tasked with considering alternative solutions to thorny technological problems, such as nuclear power policy. Similarly, in the Martian city, technological problems will be broken down into a number of subcategories. These may align with the technical categories we already discussed, or include others depending on the needs of the city. Each category will have its own inquiry commission. These commissions will determine policies such as which technological developments to pursue, how much funding to provide for each potential pathway, when to increase the scale of a particular technology, and when a particular technology is not worth pursuing. The membership on these commissions will rotate periodically and members will be fairly compensated for their time to ensure that anyone can serve but prevent career politicians. 

Such a system will improve the intelligence of technological decision-making and therefore reduce both the frequency and intensity of technological mistakes. By incorporating citizens, it includes a wider variety of interests and ideas that may not be included with only experts deliberating. It organizes development by starting at small scale and scaling up slowly to maximize flexibility, as well as including ongoing institutional evaluation to learn from trial and error. It serves much the same purpose as the Institute of Nuclear Power Organization does in the United States. The INPO incentivizes firms to share information, set their own high safety standards, and sanctions firms that don’t conform to them. On their own, firms are incentivized to do the opposite, but the consequences of a catastrophic accident are such that it is better for all firms to coordinate in this way. Likewise, this level of technological coordination will be necessary on Mars, where mistakes are also likely to be catastrophic.

Governing Economic Development

We will discuss how a Martian economy might be organized in a later post. For the time being, suffice it to say that the failures of centrally managed economies likely requires the economy to mostly consist of autonomous firms. Of course how those firms will be run and interact with one another still leaves a lot of economic options on the table, but that still leaves the question: how will the Martian government coordinate those firms? All firms will require infrastructure, a financial sector must regulate the currency, some system for investment needs to exist, and wholesalers will have to be organized to ensure efficient and timely distribution of goods. And each of these tasks has the extra challenge that, unlike in Terrestrial markets, supply chain, infrastructural, and financial failures can result in the loss of function of life critical systems. How will all of these subsystems be governed?

Infrastructure

In the same way that Terrestrial manufacturers rely on publicly funded roads and rail to get their products to market, Martian industries are likely to require some form of support from the broader Martian public. While individual firms will best know their own needs in this regard, support from other Martian citizens depends on the latter having a substantive say. 

We propose a confederation system in which representative bodies from firms and the general citizenry form a system of checks and balances for public infrastructure investment decisions. Martian firms will self organize into councils based on common infrastructural needs, i.e. oxygen companies together, mining companies together, research groups together, etc. They will have proportional representation within those councils, which in turn will provide infrastructural plans for the city as well as cost estimates and associated taxation estimates. Economic councils then evaluate these plans. These councils are formed out of a random selection of Martian citizens and advised by a diverse group of experts on the industry in question and on finances. They will approve taxation levels to fund infrastructure programs. This system provides an easy avenue for firms to coordinate the construction of infrastructure in a way that targets their specific needs, but also checks against the potential for offloading costs to all citizens without their representation. This system utilizes the checks and balances of systems of confederation used to some success both in the United States and in earlier societies, like the Haudenosaunee. 

Financing and Investment

Financial institutions have often created negative outcomes in Terrestrial economies. One need only look at the 2008 financial collapse to see how the decisions of a few powerful financial executives were able to sink many otherwise productive and healthy industries. Just as firms can be self governing (i.e. cooperatives), we propose that financial institutions follow a similar model. Take the Mondragon cooperative group in Spain as an example. This cooperative group also runs their own bank, the Labor Credit Union (Caja Laboral). Jointly run by the workers in a variety of different interrelated cooperatives which are part of the group, their credit union can engage in independent investments, but its charter requires a certain percentage of funds be invested in the Mondragon group or in the community i.e. home loans, and minimum percentage of value kept in liquid capital. These practices helped see growth during the 2008 recession. Establishing similar joint financial ventures on Mars is likely to help maintain financial stability and protect against the collapse of essential industries without having to expend public money on bailouts.

Market investments, along with recruiting new members are two ways that self-governing firms could raise capital, but occasionally firms require public funds to conduct business with broad benefits that might not otherwise be profitable. In such cases we recommend that these public funds be given to firms under the same conditions as any other investments in them would be. Public entities will simply buy memberships in accordance with market value and be endowed with equivalent voting rights for a predetermined period to ensure that public funds serve public interests.

Wholesaling

In traditional economies, producers often sell to wholesalers rather than directly to retailers. On Mars, wholesale organizations will be made quasi-public. Such an organization will not be concerned only with economic considerations, but will want to take into account public considerations, for example overuse of necessary resources, impact on quality of life, or risk to the city’s viability. They would then use their economic position to alter production patterns via market mechanisms rather than state mandates. For example, if a product contained a potentially harmful material that was cheaper than the safer alternative, a democratic wholesaler could selectively order only products with the safer alternative whereas a private wholesaler has little incentive to do so. Such an entity could be run by elected representatives or randomly selected citizens or could, itself, be a self-governing firm reviewed by public councils.

Governing Community Development

Many Martian citizens are likely to be involved in areas of life that are outside of technological and economic development. Care workers, community garden organizers, and others who serve more social roles within communities. Moreover things like public spaces, schools, and recreation spaces are important but fall outside of the purview of economic activity or technical development. How are these spaces and people to govern themselves?

We recommend that community oriented development be organized in similar ways to the other categories. While local communities can govern themselves through deliberative mechanisms such as New England town halls, such deliberations would need ways to operate on larger scales in order to foster coordination. We suggest for these purposes a series of nested assemblies that each deliberate over community development. Groups of neighbors will collectively select one from among them to go to a local assembly, which selects a single member to represent them at the district level. Each assembly will focus on the relevant problems of their level. Perhaps the local assembly simply chooses who to send to the district assembly, but the district assembly might determine resource allocation between member neighborhoods, decide policy regarding green space, or organize social events between member neighborhoods. If each assembly consisted of a mere 10 people, a city of 1 million people would only need five levels of assembly to be fully represented, and each representative would have only 9 constituents. This cuts out many of the potential pitfalls of intractability due to loyalty to one’s political “team.” It ensures that community development is also supported at a variety of different scales. Mars is a particularly hostile environment. If 1 million people are going to be convinced to live underground, isolated with one another for their entire lives, they will need democratic mechanisms to build levels of community support that are absent in most places on Earth.

Making Rules and Resolving Conflict

Living underground, with limited green spaces, in a hostile, if not outright lethal environment, is bound to be stressful. Much of what will make life on Mars pleasant comes from the company of fellow citizens. But the high stakes are going to result in serious conflicts that citizens will have to be able to resolve without killing one another and without polarized gridlock. The various democratic systems that we have already suggested for other areas of governance are necessary for this. Democracy in general is a uniquely suitable form of governance for dealing with conflict. In general, Martian citizens should establish governing institutions that conform to the rules of democracy:

1. Equality: when making decisions, each citizen should have an equal say in determining the outcome.

2. Effective Participation: Throughout the entire process, each citizen should have adequate and equal opportunity for expressing their preferences.

3. Enlightened Understanding: Given the limitations of information and time, each citizen should have adequate and equal opportunity to consider and make their own judgement about the most desirable outcome.

4. Control Over Agenda: All citizens should have equal and exclusive authority to determine what matters are or are not decided by democratic processes.

5. Inclusion: Citizens should include all people subject to the laws/outcomes of its democratic processes except when those interests are opposed to its existence.

But it is not enough that only governing institutions be more democratic. Citizen participants must, themselves, be more democratic. Given that any Martian colony will teeter ever so close to the precipice of existential destruction, Martian citizens must be able to tolerate and productively resolve disagreements far better than people on Earth currently do. As we have already noted, the overall culture of the Martian colony needs to support high reliability organizations and high levels of political community. What can help Martian citizens to act democratically? What supporting institutions promote these outcomes?

Democratic Schooling

Martian citizens will have to be trained to participate in governance to ensure that no talent goes to waste, and disagreements do not result in catastrophic consequences. This training must start early in each citizen's life. Education needs to be a means of apprenticing children on the processes of negotiation, compromise, and unencumbered explorative thinking that will be necessary for the functioning of the city’s political institutions. Citizens must be educated so as to avoid the polarization death spiral that plagues many terrestrial countries today.

The curricular structure of Martian schools will be substantially more open than traditional schools. Students will be expected to take responsibility for their own learning. Attendance will be optional. Formal courses will not be the basis for learning and will be optional as well. Teachers will act as fellow learners using their experience and expertise to guide students along in their inquiries. But primarily students will be expected to learn from each other through play, exploration, socialization, and working together. Students will also create their own curriculum.

The administration of Martian schools will reflect these practices. They will be run by members - the staff, students, and parents - who will meet periodically, perhaps once a week, to make important decisions about the school, such as policy and staffing decisions. Each member, including students, will have an equal vote at these meetings. Of course the members will delegate particular tasks, for example budgeting, to smaller groups with relevant expertise.

These schools have often been highly successful on Earth, in the limited capacity to which they have been tried. Their benefits are not just theoretical. Democratic schools have been shown to foster traits such as personal responsibility, initiative, curiosity, communication skills, especially the ability to communicate well with a large diversity of people from many backgrounds and situations, and generally a greater appreciation and practice of democratic values compared to traditional schools. A longitudinal study showed students in the most well known of these schools, Sudbury Valley School, had no difficulty in adjusting to the demands of higher education or employment in a wide variety of fields. Moreover, those students found that their democratic education advantaged them compared to their traditionally educated peers. These are precisely the skills each student will need as they enter adulthood and contribute to the survival of the Martian city.

Governing a Martian City

A common misconception about democracy is that it is inappropriate for high risk or high complexity situations. Both left leaning technocrats, and right leaning libertarians who want a government run like a business fall into the same trap: leave it to the experts. Of course they are always the ones who seem to know who the right experts are. In reality, the complexity of managing even just one aspect of complex technological society is more than any individual, even the most intelligent and highly trained, can fully comprehend in detail. Everyone makes mistakes, and relying on any form of central coordination, whether the cleverest scientist or the nimblest businessman, will eventually screw up. A place like Mars is just too unforgiving for that.

Democracy, on the other hand, offers dual benefits. First, by including the greatest diversity of partisan positions, democratic deliberations ensure that obvious problems get addressed. The political opponents of any one group will always be quick to point out the problems with their policies. While this does minimize the ability to implement radical policies, it also dramatically reduces the chances that political policies will fail or backfire. Democracy reduces errors. Second, democracy constructs legitimacy. Simply put, when people feel like their voices are heard and their values are reflected in their government and its policies, they accept and respect policy decisions more, even when those decisions don’t align with their preferences. The stability offered by the legitimacy of democracy along with its superiority over more centralized decision making lends itself to the kind of complex and risky endeavor that would be living on Mars.

While the forms of governance we have outlined here offer only a fairly approximate outline of what democratic governance of the red planet might look like, that is, in part, by design. Just like how the precise technologies that will be best is uncertain, so are the precise political mechanisms. Providing a general outline of the goals and processes for the organizations in charge of Martian governance leaves future citizens the flexibility to alter the specifics of those organizations to meet their needs, which we don’t yet know!

But there is still much more to discuss about what our civilization might (should) look like when it gets to Mars. How will the economy work? And what will the communities there look like? What will trade, production, and finances look like? And what about the daily life of work and leisure for the everyday Martian? Spoiler alert: democracy sneaks into those too. Keep an eye out for future articles which will cover those topics.