Today the life expectancy, healthcare, nutrition, available resources, and standards of living in the world’s poorest countries largely exceeds that of the world’s wealthiest countries at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, writes Tony Morley on the eve of 2020.
Our Martian Moment
On October 21, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that he foresees NASA will land astronauts on Mars by 2035. “We need to learn how to live and work in another world,” he told lawmakers. “Mars is the best place to prove those capabilities and technologies.”
The articles that follow comprise the first instalments in “Our Martian Moment,” a multi-part Quillette series in which our authors discuss what kind of society humans should build on Mars if and when we succeed in colonizing the red planet.
How should an isolated settlement (such as a Mars colony) govern itself? Shipwrecks provide many examples of small societies, some of which flourished, while others ended in murder and cannibalism, writes Michael Shermer.
