tater

Not really, Star Wars after the first 1-2 film was just bad writing. First movie was good vs evil, and the next 2 followed that line—ignoring a huge plotline about the droids, IMHO (they're clearly sentient). The prequels ruined everything. Making "the force" heritable means that the story is no longer good vs evil—it's evil vs evil. The non-force capable galaxian citizens—the bulk of the population—are to be ruled by their betters, whether they like it or not. "Good" branded Jedi, or "bad" branded Sith. Both are magical beings who have power over regular people. Even if the "good" are in charge right now—all that needs to happen is for one of the good guys to get angry... it's rule by hereditary kings, and you might get a great one, you might get a maniac. I'd argue having set up hereditary force nonsense, the new movies should have not had the First Order as the bad guys, vs Jedi—it should have been all the regular people vs the first order AND the Jedi! Death to the totalitarian wizards! The regular people rise up with their allies: the abused, chattel slaves—the droids!

Rates of death due to direct human action (homicide) have been decreasing over time. It is possible for stone-age (no metal tools) civilizations to exist, I never said otherwise—those are "state" societies as far as I am concerned. Central power results in fewer homicides. This is hugely tangential (as was slavery). My only point is that "alternate economic systems" that may or may not have existed in small, pre-literate societies (hence cultures with no actual history we can interrogate) are not really useful for technologically advanced societies on Mars. <shrug> I think population size has an obvious impact, particularly among people who share nothing going in. We're talking about transplanting people who have all sorts of different backgrounds—some of which might have demonstrated themselves to be mutually exclusive so far in recent history in terms of living in harmony—a "tribal" system likely goes sideways. Note that many tribal systems had methosds of interpersonal problem-solving that we might find abhorrent. Violence, for example (most societies had some form of dueling, often described as "ritual warfare"). While the total casualties are low compared to modern warfare, the populations are far smaller, so the %s are high. A "raid" that satisfies itself with a single opposing member killed is a big deal in groups of 50 people.

https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/uploadedDocs/meetings/docs/2441-DISTRO A LunA-10 LSIC Performer Binder.pdf Lunar base stuff in PDF form with the plans from many of the players.

(height actually a feature here because of shallow angle sunlight in polar regions)

That's just for full citizenship (the right to vote), not for actual existence—"Get to work, hippie, or out the airlock you go!"

B13 went to the Massey site for cryo testing.

I was using "pre-state" to mean tribal or other smaller groupings of humans. The specific label doesn't matter. This is a term Pinker has used. Bottom line is I'm talking smaller units (largely kin based) where I think different rules apply. Regardless, peoples here (the Americas) were stone age. For the science fiction novel, interesting to explore I would have to assume that there's some sort of social contract where you have to at least try to do something useful, at which point disease/accident is a hardship the society copes with. I'm thinking more like people who have never contributed anything useful to society. I can drive through parts of ABQ in the middle of the day and see many such people. For trained, but useless people... politicians fit the bill .

^^^ All the examples of pre-state human societies are tribal groups, and don't map to what we're talking about at all, IMHO. Things that work for an extended family group (a tribe), do NOT work for even just 100,000 people, much less a million. Same with @SunlitZelkova's claim of slavery being exclusively modern. You can't make an argument that a virtually universal practice did not commonly occur in societies that have no history to interrogate. It's fair to say we don't know, but since we DO know even biologically that our close relatives (chimps) kill singleton males from other troops, but will take their females as mates—it seems likely something like slavery happened. It happened (happens?) in some isolated tribal cultures in very recent history as well (the SW Pacific, I think). A huge tangent, anyway. It would be really, really interesting to see a fully fleshed out sci fi take on this thread. Like a better version of Red/Green/Blue Mars.

This would require a pretty strict IQ test on all colonists (I'm fine with this, might as well start the gene pool in the best possible way) to require everyone to be cross trained in multiple modern technological specialties. You have to be able to write code, do mechanical engineering, genetic engineering, and do a kidney transplant, depending on the day? Seems... nontrivial. Managers... we'd all like to see them replaced with pretty much anything. Maybe a wastepaper basket? (OK, there are in fact good managers, but the manager to worker ratio should be grossly lower than it is here) The idea of a truly self-sufficient colony is a long, long pole. It requires: all the engineering specialties medical sciences (bio, physics, chem—all with subspecialties) farming or construction? These both seem like sci/engineering adjacent as much will be done by tech, not humans with shovels. Lower skilled work? This is likely mostly robots. No need for a grocery checker, for example, or shelf stocker. Systems to generate more of the above (education/training) in perpetuity (which requires enough kids that their personal interests align such that covering the needed jobs happens organically). It will be even harder to tease this out on Mars, as I assume that decently autonomous robots are in the mix from day 1—as well as competent AI systems. Doesn't need to be "AGI" or Culture Minds, just narrowly useful AI tools that are well integrated enough to be a labor multiplier for both physical and cognitive work. Not really sure what people will DO on Mars, honestly. Clearly farming is a thing, but it's not gonna be picking season in southern CA style farming that just needs "pickers," it will be more technical I imagine. At the very least not as labor intensive. Construction? Yeah, I guess, but are they building new pressure vessels, or using delivered ones? Or are they 3d printed? Food prep/service? Medical. Bottom line is that people work partially out of a desire to do something, and partially because they have to to live above a bottom of the barrel level. The point is why would any new, bespoke society allow this at all? Criminality, for example. Violence, stealing? Out the airlock (body to then be picked up and composted, obviously, least their carbon has value).

Thinking of the science fiction describing such a colony got me thinking about colonist selection...

If someone on Mars is a deatbeat, maybe they don't deserve sustenance. In a necessarily closed system like a small domed colony (whatever shape it takes ), the resources are much more obviously finite than on Earth. If everyone needs to pull their weight you're stuck with a market punishing them somehow, or them eventually tossed out the airlock. A very "hard sci fi" take on this sort of future would be an interesting one.

On topic for a Mars—or deep space— colony and related to humans forced to do labor ^^^ what happens when there are people who do not meaningfully contribute, but take resources? Ie: The Cold Equations (https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/), alternately TANSTAAFL! from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. We see such people here all the time now (far more than in even the recent past, least here in ABQ, or last time I was in LA or San Francisco). They are effectively allowed to expire outside, it just tends to be in slow motion compared to chucking them out the airlock on Mars (or an O'Neill colony). If instead there is such a thing as a free lunch! for all, what happens if too many stop doing the work required to survive?

I should add that I get that a space society has a necessary for of collectivism that Earth lacks—you can't easily hang out outside, so infrastructure is literally life. I suppose you could simply build a tunnel/whatever elsewhere at some point once the colony is more mature. I honestly can't imagine wanting to move to Mars.

At gunpoint. I want a market (imaginary me on Mars ), so "we" can organize it some other way, but I will sell stuff—how does Mars stop me from this unsanctioned economy? Throw me out the airlock, or disallow my choice? That's the thing, in a market, if a group wants to live collectively—go for it! More power to them. I'm unaware of other economic models that can exist without prohibiting a market. Regardless, they might want stuff from Earth, so I hope dank memes sell well, dunno what else they do for money sans sandworms and spice

That's like saying there should be some other way to find truth than the scientific method. Even in prison people use markets (oddly enough, the most free economies are "black markets"). Markets automatically assign value to scarce resources. In some made up system ("Do what we say, or we throw you out the airlock!") I imagine a market forms anyway. Also, they might want to buy stuff from Earth, so solving the trade issue is something they'll have to come up with if they want literally anything not home grown on Mars. Like I said, I'm not a Mars person, I don't actually see it closing. The old O'Neill ideas were predicated on a workforce in space building solar power sats for Earth needing someplace to live—but I tend to think automation ends much of this. I wanna see some cool SF future, just not sure how it ever works out.

There's nothing beyond existing economies I'm interested in being part of, least until post-scarcity—automation makes everything in space at ~0 cost in human labor, so "cost" has no meaning. In a scarcity economy, the system that automates the value of scarce resources most effectively (markets) is fine by me. That's what Starlink is supposed to be for, that and little contracts (launches, HLS, etc) to offset raising the TRLs they need. The above regarding scarcity is ALSO relevant to Mars colonization. 10 years ago, I'm sure the idea was send people to Mars, where people then do work on Mars to make the new city (New Donner?). I'd say now, they might want to send some people to Mars (because people on Mars is cool), but instead of 100k people a year for 10 years, I'd think sending 66k robots a year makes more sense. (1/3 charging any given time, the other 2/3 working, so working 25 hours a day (erm, Sol)). Solar panels? Check, they have a company making those. batteries for night? Yep. Tunnels? Yep. Regolith moving vehicles? Check. Robots? Check. Send everything automated, and a few people around to run the robots.

The cost DOWN the gravity well is actually pretty low. I think it's only possibly economical for certain manufacturing, not everything, and ALL the inputs for whatever that stuff is need to come from space. for those. Finished product deorbited to parachute down (winged return vehicles?).

They need to stay alive, the launch business will never make anyone meaningful amount of money right now. The total global launch market is chump change. Anyone thinking they are pushing Mars for money, this is underpants gnome level nonsense... It took a "skilled" reporter to figure this out? Starlink has a nonzero chance of making more money than the launch market, which can NEVER make large amounts of money until something like mass tourist spaceflight is a thing (airline level prices and airline level traffic volume—so incredibly unlikely). Total available launch market is on the order of $10B. That's it, about a week of Amazon revenue—so of COURSE "anything else" would be a revenue stream. The goal is to make money to pay for Mars. Of course. It's crazy. But if they wanna spend money on Mars, good for them—I'm happy to watch. If it's not economical to do it, it's not going to happen unless someone does it with their own money. I tend to think it'll be a combo of stuff like SpaceX, and the somewhat more prosaic goals of Bezos. Moving some industry to space, getting resources from asteroids, etc. This creates some economic incentive for capability in space, which can bootstrap efforts to move humanity off Earth (any who wish this) assuming such a move makes economic sense. The longer such a move takes, the less required people are, however—automation. Course what comes with intelligent automation is the ability to build stuff so that humans need only show up. Companies have to exist to make money at all, which requires cleaning house sometimes, and optimizing.

There is no economic case for Mars at all. Or the Moon. At some point maybe space resources become important—but not down a gravity well, that will be asteroids. SpaceX is not doing Mars for profit, it's a way to SPEND profit. Assuming they can make a self-sufficient city (again, I'm no Marsbro), then maybe they charge people to move there to at least break even on new arrivals vs whatever input is desirable (self-sufficient doesn't mean they won't want Earth stuff).

There's a lot to be said for a smaller lander, actually. In the dystopian world of 1-stack missions to the Moon, or 1-stack PLUS architectures (anything looking like SLS at this point), bigger is better—because at least something about the mission shouldn't suck (and we're stuck with SLS/Orion for a bit). Moving past SLS/Orion, if I was in charge of Artemis sans SLS, I'd push my contractors for a tug/ferry architecture with lots of refilling in LEO. Starship in various forms: HLS cause that's already contracted, but a orbital depot version (also sorta on the table already), and a tug/tanker variant. The new versions I would suggest? A 1-way version(s) as pre-placed habitat designed for long duration on the surface. A smaller version—meaning: shorter—where you have a lander that only holds props for a RT from lunar orbit to the surface and back (with large margin). This is effectively a third stage on SS version 3 where the total vehicle height is the same (ie: SS divided into 2 stages). A short lander based on SS—just the payload section, plus a few rings below—would house 1 Rvac, and the landing engines, plus the crew section (HLS-like). Such a lander masses maybe 30-35 tons (dry of props, but with crew consumables, etc). With just a couple small tanks (a couple rings) for ~100-200t of props, the thing can RT to lunar orbit easily (in fact 1.5 round trips). Same with the smaller BO lander. With pre-placed habs, no need for a giant lander. Land, move to your Moon house, work from there, go back to lander to go home.

in progress entry burn Perfect landing Landing number 300

this one in ~20 min, and a Starlink 2 minutes later.

To scale.