What will the Mars government be?

Question

We're eventually going to have a Mars colony. Is there any prior art that we can look to for a likely system of governance? Will it inherit the constitution of the founding country?Throughout history, it seems there is a huge opportunity to improve things when you can start fresh in a new place. Will we do that with Mars?

mattwest · Accepted Answer

I'm a huge fan of space exploration - went to space camp as a kid, was a part of a genomics experiment currently being conducted on the space station, etc. But I have to ask...
Why are we going to eventually have a Mars colony?
Overpopulation? Climate change? Lack of resources? I don't see how colonizing Mars would solve or even help that. The same technology that we would use to make Mars inhabitable would probably work much better on Earth to solve our current issues. The amount of effort and innovation required for Mars to host millions of people is massive.
As a thought experiment, though, I don't think we can even conceptualize the form of government that will Mars will have because it's so far off. Perhaps it will be mostly managed by AI

lovelearning · Answer

Being rather cynical about human society, my first impulsive thought was that it's likely to be more like Total Recall's authoritarian evil than Roddenberry's Star Trek utopia (of no greed, no evil, no harm).But more realistically, I think the occupation of Antarctica is a good model, at least for a century. All the big earth powers will carve out their own areas, set up labs, and put up their flags. Only when earthlings start migrating en masse, disputes may start.

warning26 · Answer

Well, if we are to believe Von Braun's 1949 essay, Marsprojekt:
> The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled "Elon." Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

boznz · Answer

Doesnt matter how utopian the first generation of martians are, the second and subsequent generations will look at the first generations as entitled and the spiral will start. Same with any system, once you have different classes, politicians will come out of the woodwork and exploit it until they are at the top of the pileI seriously hate this shit with humans dumping on other humans and I hope it ends up an AI running everything.

gus_massa · Answer

People is lazy and will copy&paste the constitution of the founding country.
The treaty are nice while nobody can make a profit there. Once there is money involve, it will be back to the usual method that depends on who has more weapons there and more weapons here to defend the launching sites.
(Note that it's not always brute force and nuking. Politics is the continuation of war by other means.)

ArtWomb · Answer

https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/out...