Kissing the Natives Might Be Construed As A Declaration of War

[danieldwilliam]

I am reminded that one of my fondest fantasies was shattered by a bit of spreadsheeting I did a few months ago. 

 

More detail will, eventually, be available elsewhere but I did a basic net present value analysis of terraforming Mars and discovered that at no point was terraforming Mars NPV positive, even if you lived there. 

 

In fact, especially if you lived there.

 

In essence, terraforming Mars is an all or nothing exercise. The alternative is living under a dome and expanding it gradually, as you need the extra space. 

At no point until it is substantially complete does terraforming confer any economic benefit. The number of people who can live on the Martian surface when terraforming is 90% complete is still nil. Anyone who immigrates to Mars has to live in a Dome until the project is complete. These Domes need to be self-sufficient and self-contained biomes. A bit like Centre Parcs but on Mars.  

Terraforming will take a long time. Conservative estimates are several hundred years with other estimates looking at thousands or tens of thousands of years. 

The alternative is living in a Dome, permanently. Given a choice between expanding your Dome (and gaining more living and working space) and putting effort into terraforming a rational polity would choose to expand their Dome. Eventually, you extend your Dome to cover the whole planet. I think this probably takes about 250 years. The key thing is that at each point you are better off expanding the Dome that you live in rather than putting any effort into terraforming because you are better off immediately and have little prospect of benefiting from the completed terraforming project. 

Furthermore, as you essentially have to build a self-sustaining habitat to any volume of people to Mars in the first place and can’t land said habitat on the surface with ease you would be best off (if you chose to leave Earth) just building a self-sustaining habitat and enjoying living at 1G instead of some fraction of 1G. 

From the point of view of a push from Earth to export surplus populations, given that you have to build a self-sustaining habitat to move people in large numbers you might as well build the a self-sustaing habitat in orbit and just leave the thing in floating near Earth. 

To summarise, in order to terraform Mars you have to have access to technology that means that not only do you not need to terraform Mars but, economically, it would be unwise to try. 

This saddened me, but will filter through in to some economically literate science fiction.

Comments

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I'm pleased to hear that.

What did you like about it?

[andrewducker]

I enjoy people thinking things through and working out consequences sensibly. Seeign that the end result of many small sensible decisions is different from the result that people think we might otherwise have achieved if we'd thought long-term, and explaining why we might not get the "optimum" result because it's too expensive in time/money/effort to do something that might otherwise appear the right thing to do.

I appreciate idealism when it comes to fiction, but I'd rather have pragmatism in real life.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed doing the thinking.

Funnily enough the same logic applies to something I take a professional interest in. The same kind of optimal for me, sub-optimal for all applies to building the offshore electricity grid needed for offshore wind farms.

I'm pottering away at some short sci fi stories with an economic twist. But NaNoWrMO comes first.

I was a bit surprised at the outcome but then not surprised when I thought about in retrospect. It's kind of obvious that people will act in their own best interests and that their own best interests won't be served by a project that only pays off long after they are dead.

[andrewducker]

The same type of thinking tends to lead to all sorts of suboptimal things. Like many computer systems, which are built on kludges, on top of kludges, on top of kludges. Makes my life a joy :->