{"id":136,"date":"2020-10-12T06:22:32","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T06:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marshallbrain.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=136"},"modified":"2020-10-12T17:42:03","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T17:42:03","slug":"mars-preface","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marshallbrain.com\/mars-preface","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Elon Musk’s Million-Person Mars Colony – Preface"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Imagining Elon Musk’s Million-Person Mars Colony – The greatest thought experiment of all time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Marshall Brain<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Preface<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Creating a new economic system that benefits everyone<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elon Musk has announced his plan to send one million people to Mars to establish a huge new Mars colony (see Chapter 1<\/a> for details). And this is utterly fantastic \u2013 imagining a technological feat of this magnitude is a great thing for humanity. Musk has discussed the rockets, the capsules, the refueling systems and so on he plans to use to get a million people to Mars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing that is interesting to me is the socio-economic-political system of the new Mars colony. This is the part that will really matter to the one million colonists once they arrive, because the socio-economic-political system will determine the prosperity, happiness, purpose, meaning, togetherness, etc. of the Mars colonists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The socio-economic-political system of the Mars colony is fascinating because Mars offers a blank sheet of paper. Mars gives us the opportunity to imagine significantly improved social, economic and political systems that work well for all of the people living on Mars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this book, I am inviting you to think about the U.S. economy and the world economy as they stand today… and to imagine a new economy for Mars that is much, much better for everyone. Why? Because “the economy” has skewed to the point where is has become harmful\/destructive to most people. In America, for example, Half of the U.S. is now poor or low income<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the forces of inequality, the concentration of wealth<\/a>, and the stagnation of rank and file wages, the U.S. economy has devolved to the point where tens of millions of working people are no longer reasonably able to support themselves in the United States. One recent article puts it this way:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rich are money-making machines. Today, the top mega wealthy — the top 1% — earn an average of $1.3 million a year. It’s more than three times as much as the 1980s, when the rich “only” made $428,000, on average, according to economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.<\/p>

Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the American population earned an average of $16,000 in pre-tax income in 1980. That hasn’t changed in over three decades.<\/p>

As if that’s not depressing enough, living the American Dream is also getting harder to do. [ref<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here is another take on the same idea:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2010 report titled \u201cMiddle Class in America,\u201d the U.S. Commerce Department defined that class less by its position on the economic scale than by its aspirations: homeownership, a car for each adult, health security, a college education for each child, retirement security, and a family vacation each year. By that standard, my wife and I do not live anywhere near a middle-class life, even though I earn what would generally be considered a middle-class income or better. A 2014 analysis by USA Today concluded that the American dream, defined by factors that generally corresponded to the Commerce Department\u2019s middle-class benchmarks, would require an income of just more than $130,000 a year for an average family of four. Median family income in 2014 was roughly half that. [ref<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

At the global level it is even worse. Eighty percent of the people on planet Earth today make less then $10 per day, or less than $3,700 per year [ref<\/a>], [ref<\/a>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there are headlines like this one, which show that the economic system in use today has become completely unhinged:<\/p>\n\n\n\n