Rambling: Society of Solar System colonizers

[PeZook]

I have for a long time now been running an on/off campaign set in a vague and ill-described future setting where mankind spread around the solar system like cockroaches thanks to invention of cheap fusion drivers.

A recurring problem with this are social issues, the way societies of colonists are organized, ruled and how their economies work. That might be material for some more coherent setting, so I've decided to dump whatever comes to mind here, so that people can look at it, offer input (or criticism) and maybe something good will come out of it.

Now, it's a bit of an excercise in futurism, but from a social standpoint more than a technological one, although of course technologies impact living, so...

Economics

So what drives people to set up an actual human presence on other worlds? Generally, it's either ideology or a search for resources, or sometimes a search for resources to support a given ideology. The difference between going out to America to set up your religious commune freedom-loving society is that it requires little resources to actually establish a colony in a place that can feed you and provides oxygen and water basically for free.

It also doesn't fry you with deadly radiation, cause bone loss and such.

HOWEVER, that same issue could be a start of an orbital economy. So we have people going up in government-produced sardine cans to live in space so that they can do science on overpriced space stations ; These stations, wherever they are, require supplies and maintenance etc.

At the start, this is provided by the government which set these stations up, but as the number of stations and outposts grows, and space access becomes cheaper, it becomes economically sensible to set up things like fuel depots in orbit and sell the fuel. If, say, the Moon has a number of scientific facilities, some sort of centralized support/rescue station might be established eventually to aid with equipment failures, provide medical services et al.

So, I figure colonization is done in several steps: first, a government push for establishing manned bases ; Then, extremely wealthy enterpreneurs move in to make use of the limited infrastructure with government help ; Then you get an influx of people due to space tourism and/or ideology who take advantage of the services provided to accomplish their own goals ; Finally, the local economy takes off and begins to serve the needs of the populace using local materials ; Develop advanced industries (to avoid shipping things from Earth), which require specialists ; Thus, schools ; Thus, hospitals and social institutions and finally local government to take care of this mess.

But that's rambling and nothing really new or mind-blowing. The main and most interesting and challenging question was supposed to be, what sort of social structures will arise out of that colonization scheme?

The principal colonists will be astronauts (surely the heroes of the era) and technical specialists working to support their presence (servicing the fuel depots et al). Then I figure we could see an influx of ideologocially driven folks with money who want to get away from it all, but here's the question: how will they pay for the oxygen and water in order to support their little Martian utopia?

Why, the most obvious answer is that they'll do it by trade ; They can trade either skills or resources.

I must say the image of Martian water traders is pretty awesome. If ideologues set out to found colonies, you can also have dead towns, which failed to locate resources necessary for survival and died out, or people who resort to raids and theft to sustain themselves.

Water, oxygen and food are valuable commodities on such a world. Early-colonization Mars could have a very postapocalyptic vibe, except vastly more technological than usual, because technology=life.

I'll add more to this later, and maybe organize it a little better.

[Siege]

The thought of a Martian 'wild west', with the Old West gold mine replaced with ice or helium harvesting and roving bands of high-tech marauders as the Red Injuns, certainly is hella evocative. You could have big-ass pipelines acting as the railroads of yore, too.

"Barsoom Bob! I heard you was dead!"

"I thought I was dead too, until I realized it was just that I was in Valles Marineris."

[PeZook]

You can have all sorts of Wild West imagery, but also scifish corporate dystopias of sorts in the more developed regions, including de facto indentured servitude of small "family" companies that take out loans to buy equipment and go prospecting for rare earth and fissiles in the hope of making it big!

And marauders, yeah. Cultists driving around in their nuclear-powered habitats in search of settlements to rob, being hunted by corporate killbot swarms and UN peacekeepers and adopting weird imagery and ideology that justifies their raiding lifestyle. The Sons Of Olympus! The Red Suits!

And the whole "hard-boiled oil driller" is an archetype that would fit PERFECTLY into that place, except they'd drill for water

All that time, gleaming orbital stations zip across the heavens, full of hope and wonder: the Mars Orbital Patrol academy which youths across countless water drillsites watch with their telescopes every day in the hope of one day making it there, the UN Colonial Authority headquarters full of no-nonsense administrators that try to direct resources where they're needed ; Satellites and loading/unloading terminals for supplies...

Okay, okay, rambling again. Let's try to figure out something about society:

How does one grow up in a colony? Obvious answer is obvious, it depends on the colony. But some things are universal: imagine a life in a place where oxygen conservation is actually an important thing drilled into every young person from the youngest age. Same for population control: resources are limited, wherever you live. Would a Martian society be big on sex education, or prefer social controls? Imagine, say, a religious group that fled to Mars in order to establish a new, pure, Biblical society, which then runs straight into the wall of limited resources which suddenly means they have to make some really hard choices. Huh.

Funny how much a place like Mars is like Arrakis

So kids growing up on Mars (or any other colony really, that RP actually took place on the orbit of Saturn which I designated the Wild West by fiat) would be drilled in conservation of all sorts, and I imagine pretty tech-savvy, like nine-year olds knowing how to suit up for EVA, possibly acquianted with metabolic processes related to breathing (Daddy, why is it important to monitor blood saturation levels while outside?).

Note: Equipment designed for transporting and/or protecting toddlers and newborns would logically exist in some form.

How would toys look? School? Probably accomplished with telecomms in places that are too small to have a school. Shipping people in is expensive, so lots of pressure for one teacher to be able to serve as many students as possible - kind of like in the old west.

Not much opportunities for playing outside, really - large places would have parks for oxygen production, but I'd guess hurting trees would be SO taboo and highly illegal.

I'm not sure if the society would be that stratified, although of course status etc. is always going to be there, but most of the people who actually get to Mars are probably going to be decently educated, even the ideologues: you need some sort of skill to sell to the people who can provide you with equipment necessary to survive. That, or a huge family fortune.

[Siege]

Way back in the days of yesteryear I had a 'verse not entirely dissimilar to this, and a large part of the motivations and so on of people depended on their genetic background. You had baseliners on Earth, Martians able to walk about without much more than a rebreather on Mars, military spacers adapted to extreme high-G acceleration and zero-G conditions and so on.

In addition there was a lot of cybernetics and after-the-fact modification by means of magical RNA injections (it wasn't that hard after all), but the basic gist of it was that your heritage mostly determined what you'd want to set out to do: most of the people born into a spacer background just wouldn't get people living on a planet. Why would you want to give up the freedom of the big black? And on the other hand you'd have people comfortably living on planets who would find it utterly baffling to find out that there's folks who like living in spaceships constantly undergoing accelerations they'd experience as agonizing and utterly crippling.

High tech, I think, certainly has a strong potential for driving people apart. And that's before you get into zaniness like AIs and whatnot. Stratification I don't think would play that big a role -- you might have the occasional weirdo zillionaire helium tycoon living in a series of cloned bodies or whatever, but I don't think such eccentricities would have much influence on the greater world. Mostly I suspect the staggeringly vast nature of the solar system would play its part in dividing humanity into nations or clades or sects or whatever you want to call them just like Earth did before we had jets: it's pretty damned hard to understand what makes people living in radically different environs to your own tick when you've barely got the time to scrape by in your own.