06/29/2012
When I went to Antarctica, what I was noticing was that when you’re in Antarctica, it looks like you’re in a non-capitalist system, because all the scientists and workers down there are, for the time they’re there, in a non-money economy, where you just are given your clothes, you go into the galley, you eat the food that’s made for you. It’s all non-monetary, except when you go into the post office and you buy some trinkets, perhaps, to send back home. So it was only unnecessary stuff like toys that were in a money economy, and the rest of it was just being provided for you.
And I thought the first space stations possibly will resemble the South Pole, and that’s always struck me very strongly. I feel like, “Gosh, I sort of visited a space station.” Except I didn’t have to mess with the space suits, exactly. I could still breathe the air — because I was at the South Pole rather than in space. So following up that thought, I thought, well, as they develop up there what will happen is — they’re not truly outside of capitalism, because capitalism has bubbles within it, you might say — and I thought maybe that’s how it will develop, the transition to the next economic system, especially if capitalism can’t properly price what we’re doing on Earth and wrecks the Earth, that it might transition in space first and then have to work its way back onto Earth in a tail-wagging-the-dog type manner.
So while many of my space colonies are simply “colonies,” in that very definite meaning of the word, of some Earthly nation state, some of them are semi-autonomous. And Mars, after it declares independence, begins to protect some of the outer satellite colonies from interference from anywhere else. So I ran a history that got into an economic system that was, in space, rather cooperative, and using really fast computers to try to even calculate things outside of a market.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/geeks-guide-kim-stanley-robinson/
In 1948, George Orwell looked ahead to 1984 and imagined a grim totalitarian world. In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke looked ahead to 2001 and imagi...
