From: John Marlow (johnmarlow@gmx.net)
Date: Tue Feb 06 2001 - 02:11:08 MST
I'd call you a raging optimist.
"And if you wanna breathe you gotta buy his air..."
Also, keep in mind any earthside government could nuke the whole
works with relative impunity--nobody's gonna start a nukewar on earth
over a bit of slagged Martian real estate.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing."
Food for thought.
jm
On 5 Feb 2001, at 23:54, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> Spike Jones wrote:
> > So, that goes right back to private funding, which can be raised
> > only if there is some way to earn the money back, which leads
> > to tiny single astronauts because we only have funds for one
> > launch vehicle, outrageously high risk and attemtps to earn back
> > the money by selling the astronaut's email. Most people find
> > one or more of these results distasteful or unacceptable. What
> > am I missing in this analysis? spike
>
> Any company that can demonstrate the infrastructure to reach to Mars,
> when even large governments can not, would likely be able to set its
> own rates for access to this new land - for explorers and terraformers
> alike. ("You wanna get away from it all, and literally build a new
> home for humanity? Or maybe just flee from [random_large_government]
> because of its [random_oppresive_acts]? We can do it - but you're ours
> while you're up there. We own and operate the life support systems,
> and the info pipelines to anyone you'd like to keep in touch with back
> here. Which means you're working for us - either terraforming, or
> doing science missions, or a few other things that can be done better
> there than here, or simply creating intellectual property for us to
> sell back on Earth. We'll try to be benevolent dictators since a slave
> revolt is the only thing we really fear from you, but someone's gotta
> earn the food shipments and pay off our stockholders until you guys get
> self-sustaining. We've already made arrangements for security: since
> the governments of Earth couldn't be bothered to go there, the weapons
> we've built there are for our use only, to shoot down any
> competitors...or to harrass anyone who makes a big enough stink about
> it on Earth, possibly trying to interfere with our Earth-side
> operations.")
>
> ...or maybe I'm being too pessimistic here.
>
John Marlow
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