Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/04/galts-slaves.html
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Amazing !
They just need a mecha-Bezos guarding the only bathroom of Mars.
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Was gonna say: who cleans the toilets in Galt’s Gulch?
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This “window of opportunity” idea, the time available to get it done before it cant be done at all… I think its more applicable to permanent nuclear waste disposal than to colonizing mars.
If we wait too long to go to mars, life is no different for the vast majority of humans who were never going to go there even if it were possible. But if we wait too long to bury our nuclear waste, then lots of people will be dealing with the aftermath, for many millenia.
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It’s great, but they did miss the opportunity to include Peter Thiel. No Halloween haunt is complete without a vampire.
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Doom turned out to be much scarier in real life.
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Ian McDonald wrote something books about this recently.
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This isn’t exactly an optimistic dissent; but, barring advances in heavy lift and life support verging on miraculous, combined with surprising stagnation in automation and robotics; I’d be very surprised if a space colony would support a labor market that looks anything like a terrestrial one.
On a basically habitable planet, the floor price of keeping your brute labor proles scraping out a meagre existence is really low. Even that hasn’t made humans cheap enough for some jobs(eg. pick-and-place assembly in electronics, heavily automated open pit and mountaintop removal mining supplanting relatively labor intensive tunneling in many contexts; mechanization of much of agriculture at least in the developed world); but it’s both low enough to be competitive for a lot of applications; and low enough that populations without any formal means of support often manage to scrape by in various margins and informal settlements and such.
In space, that’s not going to fly. Transportation is costly and high latency, reproductive biology probably won’t go any more smoothly with more cosmic radiation and less gravity; and food, water, and space maintained within livable bounds go from being comparatively abundant to very, very, constrained. Those are conditions where the classic maximally-abusive ‘free’ labor approach of recruiting desperate day labor from the sprawling slums and then discarding it would become wildly expensive once you factor in having to maintain enough habidome for the sprawling slums; and even good, old fashioned, slavery is going to have a rough time vs. automation; both because of the high costs of life support and the decreased productivity associated with protective gear for any outside work(also the potentially catastrophic risks of sabotage, you don’t want too many people with nothing to lose in a habitat where throwing a spanner into the right bit of atmospheric regulator could mean that everybody dies; and guard labor will also be more expensive).
This doesn’t mean that I’d expect an idyllic outcome; a space habitat seems likely to be at least as fun as a company town, except that getting kicked out implies ‘of the airlock’; just not one that involves a large menial underclass. Certainly a much smaller menial underclass, to do things that robots aren’t good for(whether a given plutocrat hears this and thinks “concubines and sycophants” or “sycophants and concubines” probably tells you something about them); along with a specialist/technician class made up of anyone who does things critical enough that it’s cheaper and safer to coddle them, to a degree, than to try to control them through outright coercion: doctors, experts in particularly technical maintenance, tutors, maybe a chief or two.
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I was not expecting such an erudite response to our porch! thanks, fuzzyfungus! what i would say is to fall back on that most common truism of sci-fi…it is not about the future, it is a way of commenting on the present by extrapolating to the future. So, we were not really trying to predict the labor market on Mars by making the children stick Mars Rocks into Amazon boxes in the Amazon Mars warehouse. We were more thinking about their near future as workers in the Amazon Warehouse in Philly.
However, what is great about Cory’s story (which I heard on Escape Pod, and thought would make a good theme for our yearly political porch of doom) is that it shows a real danger in the current privatization of the space effort. If you accept the ideology that governments and public institutions are obsolete, and only corporations that are solely accountable to their shareholders to make profit are the only entities left in society that can do anything of any importance: well, we will end up with a Mars run by billionaires. And they will make the laws of that society to reflect their worldview, well represented by the “Winers and Winners” libertarian pablum described in Cory’s story. And that society, with it’s lack of democracy and lack of accounting for market externalities, natural limits to growth, human decency and rights, etc. etc. etc. is going to fail even faster than we have managed to screw up the Earth, since there would be no countervailing power to corporations that can regulate their worst excesses. Those who think of Mars as a “Planet B,” will be in for a big shock if they think techno-libertarians can make something that will work better than what has happend on Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and his new one about the moon ( Red Moon) is great, for posing interesting questions like this…
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Yeah, if your think a billionare mine owner is just going to leave high-powered weaponry just floating behind false walls in case the workers get into trouble with stray demons, you haven’t met their trained sociopaths in the OTPS accounting department.
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Look, nobody is FORCING you to work. You only need to get a job with the company if you intend to breathe their oxygen.
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Listened to the Escape Pod adaptation of Martian Chronicles a couple weeks back. Great stuff. Starts out almost like a Heinlein juvenile, then gets complicated in ways that Heinlein juveniles never did.
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