by Ed Finn
Wekesa’s staring at her, and Myrna belatedly realizes she’s frozen as still as the cranes on the Martian horizon, captured body and soul by a sudden thought. “What is it?” he asks, concerned.
“We’ve been looking at this all wrong,” she says in wonder.
“What do you mean?”
“Wekesa, you and the others are in trouble because your partners’ interests aren’t aligned with your own, right? Business wants to maximize its profits, so it’s poised to abandon the long-term investments here. And Government has no stake in Martian territory. You need a partner that has a stake, and whose interests run parallel to your own.”
He crosses his arms and snorts at the sharply drawn horizon. “Nice idea, but where are we going to find a partner like that?”
Myrna smiles, raises her hand and points at the ghost.
“You’re looking right at her.”
“Welcome to the United Nations, Ms. Hayward. If you’ll come this way?”
It’s three months later, and she can barely believe she’s here. The halls of U.N. headquarters are bustling with suited diplomats, sharp-eyed translators, and scurrying pages. Security bots hulk in the corners, tiny drones zoom paper envelopes over the heads of the crowd, and wall screens, holographic kiosks, and wall-writing lasers dazzle the eye with the latest news. Myrna’s not used to the heels she’s wearing, but manages to make it to the conference room on time. There are about 30 people milling around, none ready yet to commit to a place at the long table.
A bear-like Slavic man approaches her. “Ms. Hayward! So happy to finally meet the mother of the ghosts!”
“I didn’t create them,” she protests, for the thousandth time. “I just made some upgrades.” She actually met the original programmer online just a few days ago. He’s not happy with what she’s done with his code, but has prudently retreated to the shadows now that the ghosts are becoming prominent.
Her words are drowned by a loud clap from the Chair. People start to sit.
There are more than 200 nations represented at the U.N. these days; Myrna’s sleep has been disturbed for weeks imagining them all at this meeting. Most are, but only virtually, and others have sent trusted common reps. Even so there’s a lot of money and power in this room, however casual it may appear.
Once everyone is seated, the Chair rises. “Welcome,” she says. “We’re here today to discuss a novel proposal for the governance of space resources. We have the good luck to have the woman who proposed it with us today, Myrna Hayward.”
There’s an actual round of applause. Myrna shrinks a little in her seat. The Chair runs through introductions, gives thanks to sponsors, and everything else that weighs down a public meeting—but with admirable speed. Aside from the government officials, there are corporate reps from the launch companies and supply chain consortia—and those few homesteaders who could afford to come. “I think,” the Chair finally says, “that it might save us a lot of time if we let Ms. Hayward go first. Because I know we all have questions.”
“Um.” Myrna stands, acutely aware of the tremble in her knees. Luckily, Hartney’s been coaching her for weeks on what to say. Opening line, he’d be saying right now. What’s your opening line?
“How do you govern the use of a common resource?” she says, a little too loudly.
“Divide it up and let the market take care of it,” says one of the businessmen dismissively.
Myrna nods. “Works great for mineral wealth—on Earth. But even here, it’s not always the best way. What about fisheries? The fish come and go. What does ‘ownership’ even mean in that case? Or, take air. Earth’s ecosystems are still a mess despite 20 years of efforts to fix global warming. Why? Because we’re still trying to use market and regulatory forces to govern a common resource—the air itself. Carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, they work to a point. But they’re an awkward fit.
“We’ve run into the same problem on Mars. Colonizing a planet gives us a clear goal and, at every step along the way, some things need to be done and others need to be delayed, stopped, or even reversed. The whole effort’s one big machine and all the parts have to work together, over generations of time. We don’t leave that sort of project to the market, because things constantly have to be done that profit no one in the short term. The market’s great for some things; for the rest we rely on the state.
“But which state?” She nods to the Chair. “That’s been the problem with global warming from the start. Even before the ‘teens, the oil companies were admitting climate change was a problem and said they were willing to help solve it—as long as somebody else made the first move. It was a global problem, but there was no global actor who could take responsibility. Who owns the air? No company, and no state. So we’ve floundered forward, barely keeping ahead of the disaster.”
“Okay,” says a representative of one of the launch companies. “Who does own the air?”
Perfect. She smiles at him. “It owns itself.
“Historically, it is known as a commons. More than two billion people make their living from commons arrangements even today. The commons is older than the market and the state, but it’s also as new as the internet, open-source software, Creative Commons artwork, and public 3D printer model archives. And the thing is, space is already a commons.
“In a commons, the stakeholders who are affected by the use of a resource come together to form a set of rules for its use, sanctions for cheating, and so on. There are pastures in Switzerland that have been governed this way without a hitch for over 700 years. You might have heard of something called the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ where everyone taking what they need from a commons depletes it. It’s a myth—what that cautionary tale is really describing is an anarchy. By definition, a commons is governed and its resources managed; it’s just not owned. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for showing how commons are governed.”
“So? Well that might work for fisheries and pastures, but we’re talking about a whole planet here.”
“But you’ve answered your own objection,” she says. “If the commons doesn’t scale to planetary size, neither do markets. Or governments. We need all three.
“The commons isn’t a replacement for the market. In the past, commons arrangements were always local and unique to the particular resource and the particular stakeholders affected by it. You can make money universal, and the state can reach anywhere, but commons don’t have that capability. At least … they didn’t.”
She turns to a wall screen displaying the bleak Martian plain. “In any case, to explain what all this means for Mars, I think it’s time to turn things over to one of our new friends. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Kasei Valles.”
Kasei no longer resembles Wekesa’s ex-wife. She’s still female, but has adopted the bronze-skinned, racially ambiguous features of an Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian. Wrapped in a bright green sari, she blazes in contrast to the russet land and beige sky as she walks up to the virtual camera.
The Malaysian rep leans forward. “Is this the famous AI we’ve been hearing about?”
“I am not an AI,” says the Martian. “I am Kasei Valles.
“I am a region of the Martian surface, including its groundwater, perchlorate, and iron deposits—and its human inhabitants, their tools, and the things they are building. There are artificial intelligences involved in managing me, including the one that is having this conversation with you now, but I am not them. I,” she says, sweeping her arm to encompass the entire vista, “am this.”
“That’s really what she thinks she is,” Myrna says. “From our point of view, Kasei is a token in a blockchain. Like the original Bitcoin, this blockchain is an autonomous decentralized peer-to-peer network, not run by any central authority, not owned by anybody. Unlike Bitcoin, however, the tokens in this blockchain don’t stand for money, but for the resources of the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system. This is my, uh, contribution. I replaced the original ghost program, which was
a kind of spambot, with a legal interface to a DAC I programmed. Then I set the DAC running and stepped back.”
“Why?” It’s the launch company rep again, looking puzzled now but a little intrigued.
“By using a blockchain we can universalize the benefits of a commons. Firstly, the resource’s stakeholders manage it directly, using smart contracts. This is faster and more efficient than going through state actors or markets. Commons-level rules of access ensure that the resources are not depleted, and the smart contracts interlock to guarantee that the whole system fulfills its goal.”
“In your case,” interrupts Kasei, leaning forward a bit to smile into the room, “the contracts can coordinate all the colonization efforts, private, public, and individual, as well as those taking place on the Moon and planned for Ceres and the other worlds. I and the other systems form nested commons, as in Ostrom’s vision, that make a trusted third party such as the state unnecessary, and function more efficiently than a market.”
The rep crosses his arms, frowning. Myrna can picture the thought balloon over his head, which probably includes the word communism. But the commons isn’t even socialism, and now that Kasei has given her annunciation, Myrna’s pretty sure the rest of the day is going to be spent educating these people about this fine point. She’s already tired, but she smiles at the Martian anyway.
“Welcome to the world of self-governing common pool resources,” she says. “Kasei’s not here to dictate terms; she’s just an interface to make it easier for us to figure out how to use Kasei Valles’s resources. She’s just one of many, of course. I hope I can introduce you to some of the valleys, rills, craters, and mounts involved in the colonization effort. I know I’m talking about them as if they’re people; it’s kind of irresistible after you’ve spent any time with them. So I want to make sure you understand right from the start that they’re not people, they’re interfaces to a resource blockchain.
“This blockchain is the answer to the question of how to manage space resources; it’s the trusted arbitrator that the U.N., the individual countries, and commercial interests could never quite be. The blockchain is there to arbitrate disputes and render judgments fairly. It can do it because it’s not owned by or beholden to anybody, and its code is transparent, unhackable. Kasei Valles and the other ghosts are literally incorruptible. She was never possible before the blockchain. Now, though, she’s our future.”
The launch company guy glowers at Myrna. “Fairly, huh? So now that this thing’s on top, where does that place you, Ms. Hayward?”
She shrugs. “After I set the DAC running I stepped back. I’m just a shareholder now, like you, and I have no backdoor to the code. It’s all open-sourced on the blockchain, you can check it if you’d like. Beyond that … I’m just what I was before.”
“And what, Ms. Hayward, is that?”
“A concerned friend.”
The Martian dawn bears no relation to the Earthly one; for one thing, the streaks and smears of light spreading across the East are blue, not red. It may be day or night back home, and when Myrna takes off her VR glasses, she may see sunlight or rain. Those seem fictitious now, a kind of fever dream or parallel universe. The dawn she awakes to every day is this, the blue one, and its constancy makes it the real morning.
Myrna laughs, and in bounding strides, goes to join Wekesa and Hartney—and yes, Kasei, who stands to one side watching as the Martians inflate their first livable dome. A sizable arc of future colonists is watching the raising ceremony and among its members are some of the regulars from her bakery.
“It’s still two years before anybody lands,” she points out, but they’re in no mood to pay her any attention. They, like her, are scattered around Tampa and other cities, souls posing alone in empty apartments. Yet they see past those walls and these, looking beyond today to something grand that could be. The Mars colony launchers, currently being assembled in factories and hangars, are curiously unreal compared with this dome, though Myrna could drive to visit one of the assembly sites, and no human eye has actually beheld the structure that looms over her. This disconnect, like the day, has become normal to her.
So she folds metal arms and grins with the others while the dome goes up. When it’s about halfway inflated, Kasei saunters over. “If I were to invest now,” says the Martian, “I’d invest in you.”
Startled, Myrna pulls her gaze from the (real, but millions of kilometers away) dome to the (virtual, but literally right here) avatar of the Kasei Valles landscape. “Why do you say that?” she says.
“You’re not a miner, or a smelter or renderer or construction worker,” says the ghost. “You’re a community advocate for a community whose members include non-humans.”
Myrna shrugs. “It’s what I did on Earth too, half the time. It just took the form of bringing lunches to these shut-ins.” She nods at the dusty, vaguely humanoid robots that are hopping up and down, slamming each other on the shoulder, making other emotes. “They’re just as helpless without me on Mars as they are on Earth. I’m not a baker anymore, or even a coordinator,” she concludes mournfully. “I’m a den mother.”
“Now that,” says the ghost, “we have in common.”
Myrna laughs. The ghosts have obviously gotten another upgrade; this one’s learning to be funny. It’s true, though: she takes care of the boys and gals here in the city, yet they’re just as absent-minded and foolish on Mars. Somebody has to make sure they’re fed on Earth; on Mars, somebody has to bring them their battery packs, blasting charges, and drill bits.
Of all these people, she alone has no claim in the valley itself—but it hardly matters. Such “claims” are now understood as what they always were: declarations of a relationship with the land. She has one of those, it’s just not expressed in hectares or tonnes.
“Will you be joining us?” asks the ghost. “When the colony ships come?”
Myrna shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“I’m already here.”
Acknowledgments: I would like to acknowledge the staff at Arizona State University, particularly Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, and Maciej Rebisz, who did a fine piece of art for my story.
Exploration Fact and Exploration Fiction
by Lawrence Dritsas
Exploration comprises all kinds of interesting activities and resources, but two are absolutely required: people and money. Every aspect of a successful expedition—relevant technology, supporting institutions, transport logistics, effective methods of observation, and effective communication systems—all require human labor and financial capital. The goals of exploration are equally various, but can be reduced to one thing: knowledge. In the fourth century BCE, Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseilles) sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and turned north, seeking the northern limits of humanity.[1] He was an explorer, but he was also seeking the sources of tin, amber, and gold that southern Europeans desired and that he could sell at profit. More than a millennium later, over seven voyages in the early fifteenth century, Zheng He was sent by the Ming emperors of China to explore the Indian Ocean and solidify their control of established trade routes that stretched from Java, via India, to Kenya.[2] From 1485 to early 1492 Christopher Columbus visited the courts of Portugal, Genoa, and Venice, proposing his idea to sail west to reach the East before finally convincing the Iberian monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to fund his audacious voyages across the Atlantic; Columbus spent nearly as much time looking for money as he did exploring the New World during his four voyages from 1492 to 1504.[3] Vasco da Gama’s voyage to Calcutta in 1498 was motivated by the search for new trade routes, and the subsequent century was marked by repeated clashes between Portuguese and Ottoman explorers in the Indian Ocean seeking new routes and sources of wealth.[4]
Clearly, among the many skills that explorers need to be successful, one of the most important is the ability to persuade others to provide the money necessary to undertake their journeys. There are very few hi
storical cases of intrepid individuals paying their own way to simply “see what’s out there.”[5] Indeed, the second expedition of the famed Scottish explorer David Livingstone into central Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century cost the British government around £30 million over six years. The purpose of his “Zambesi Expedition” was to identify new supplies of natural resources for British industry. When this outcome proved unlikely, the British government recalled the expedition with the foreign minister, Lord John Russell, noting that, “there is little to show that the results actually obtained can be made presently serviceable … for the interests of British Commerce.”[6] Even where immediate profit is not the goal, money remains a factor. In Washington, D.C. on 20 July 1989, U.S. President George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, with the goal of landing humans on Mars by 2019, 50 years after Apollo 11. But Bush’s bold initiative foundered within months when a potential price tag of $540 billion scared off most supporters.[7] In this second decade of the twenty-first century, the United States is once again on a “Journey to Mars,” but the exact details of “how?” and more importantly, “how much?” remain unanswered.[8]
In the United States since 2010, a blend of public and private funding has been used to support outer space travel. Alexander MacDonald argues in his recent book that this phenomenon is not new, but has deep historical roots in the United States, citing private support for observatory building in the nineteenth century and early rocketry.[9] Not everyone agrees with the public-private model for funding exploration, but it has significant precedents beyond MacDonald’s focus on space-related activities. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke explored East Africa in the 1850s using largely private money and only minimal support from the British government. Later in the nineteenth century, prospectors scoured the Pacific Northwest, the Yukon, South Australia, and the Zambian Copperbelt looking for minerals with colonial government encouragement but risking the money of private investors. Robert Falcon Scott led his British Antarctic Expedition to its fatal end in 1913 supported mainly by private donations and commercial sponsorship, only latterly topped up by a government grant.[10] On the ice, Scott and his men ate Huntley & Palmer’s digestive biscuits spread with Beach’s blackcurrant jam with as much “product-placement” gusto as when explorers Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere successfully retraced Scott’s route in 2014, sponsored by Land Rover and Intel.[11] In Britain it has become a tradition to eat Kendal Mint Cake while hillwalking, the same energy-boosting treat that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ate on Everest in 1953. These are just snapshots, but the history of exploration and all its varieties of funding models may teach us a thing or two about how to move forward to Mars.