The Red Field

Why Mars Presents the Greatest Opportunity for Civilizational Reinvention Since 1776

Strange people will first set foot on Mars. The six month journey and punishing conditions will scare most away. The colonists will have looked at everything Earth offers and decided: not exciting enough. They'll self-select for agency, adventurousness, curiosity, and hardiness. A temperament that builds new worlds.

We did this before.

In the 1700s, a group of colonists living an ocean away from the seats of power decided to build from scratch. They occupied a frontier that felt dangerous, contested, and unforgiving. Disease, starvation, war with foreign powers, conflict with indigenous nations, the American frontier offered no paradise. And yet, freed from the inertia of old institutions, those colonists evolved a system of government that redirected the trajectory of human civilization. The ideas born in that era, democratic representation, constitutional rights, separation of powers, grew into the operating system for the modern world.

Mars will demand more. The frontier will kill the careless. A bad harvest on the American plains meant a hungry winter. A pressure failure on Mars means minutes to live. But history suggests that severe challenge urges the impulse to build new systems. People who survive together develop fierce egalitarianism and low tolerance for inefficient institutions.

New ideas thrive when given space and freedom to take root. Mars offers plenty of both. Unlike the American revolutionaries, who had to invent governance with quill pens and sailing ships, the first Martians will design their civilizations with full awareness of the internet, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and two additional centuries of political philosophy.

What might they build?

Governance from First Principles

If U designed a government today, would U recreate the one U currently live under? Would U convene legislatures in physical chambers to debate bills written in legalese? Would U hold elections every few years and call that representation?

U might imagine something like AI-delegated direct democracy. Every citizen of a Martian city gets an AI agent, a digital representative that deeply understands their values, priorities, and policy preferences through ongoing dialogue. These agents negotiate with one another continuously, seeking consensus compromises on every question of governance, from resource allocation to zoning to trade policy. Citizens stay in the loop, updating their preferences fluidly as their thinking evolves. But the procedural work of governance gets handled by systems that don't tire and remember what their constituents want.

Consider that one possibility. Mars won't host just one experiment. Separated by uninhabitable terrain, each city will function as a laboratory. Some might try direct democracy. Others might attempt technocratic councils, liquid delegation, or systems nobody has imagined yet. Areographic distance will let each experiment run long enough to produce independent results, while contact between cities will let successful ideas propagate. Think of it as governance evolution, a Cambrian explosion of political systems under selection pressure. Over time, the systems that succeed will grow legible to everyone, and convergence will occur.

A Political Economy of Perfect Information

Mars may challenge us to see past the distinction between economics and politics.

Capitalism and communism have opposed each other for two centuries, but they reach toward the same destination by different means. Capitalism wants an efficient market, one with no information asymmetries, where prices perfectly reflect reality. Communism wants universal welfare, a system where no one's needs go unmet. These goals don't contradict each other. They've both remained technically impossible to achieve. When we achieve either, we'll realize their equivalence and enjoy both.

When AI systems mediate economic data across an entire city, we will asymptotically approach an economy with perfect information. Every resource, every need, every capacity grows visible to the system and, through it, to every citizen. Intellectual property becomes an antiquated concept. Ideas propagate through the economy at the speed of light. We won't have financial institutions, because all financial primitives exist as public infrastructure on a city blockchain that also serves as the immutable ledger for legal decisions. Each city can programmatically design its own monetary and fiscal policy, reflecting the desires of its citizens.

A city like this functions as an organism. Information travels fast. Everyone knows that everyone else would feel distraught to hear of a fellow citizen suffering. The system rapidly solves problems because the information architecture makes indifference structurally impossible.

We'll still enjoy competition and ambition. Humans will still desire prestige and standing. In a post-scarcity economy, status competition shifts to the domain where information asymmetry remains irreducible: the moment of creation. For a bare instant, every inventor holds sole possession of a new idea. Even as that idea propagates freely through the economy, the prestige of having invented it persists. A society organized around this principle would innovate obsessively, a culture running a high metabolism for ideas, where the fastest path to standing demands creating something genuinely new.

The Industries of the Frontier

What will Martians actually do?

Two industries will probably dominate the early economy. The first: R&D. Frontier economies generate novel problems at a tremendous rate, and the combination of existential necessity and frontier exhilaration will turbocharge science in ways that comfortable Earth institutions can't match. The Martians solving problems in materials science, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing will build the industrial base that makes everything else possible.

Early Mars will depend on Earth for resupply, and whoever controls the supply line holds enormous power. True self-determination requires material self-sufficiency: mining, manufacturing, fuel production, and eventually an independent space industry. The Martians most motivated to pursue frontier science may act from the understanding that technological independence serves as the precondition for political independence. Every advance in Martian resource use means a step toward sovereignty.

The second major industry: media. People on Earth will find life on Mars captivating. Imagine drama, danger, and sheer novelty. Expect many of the solar system's biggest cultural figures to find their footing on the red planet. Mars content will produce the most compelling storytelling in human history, because the stakes feel real and the setting captivates.

The Corporate Question

Any discussion of Mars must confront the outsized role that a single company will likely play. SpaceX appears on track to hold a near-monopoly on launch and landing capacity for Mars missions, and will likely establish the first bases directly.

We ought to think about how the transition from corporate outpost to self-governing civilization should work. The question doesn't concern whether SpaceX should build the first bases. No realistic alternative exists. The question concerns what principles should guide the handoff, and what conditions should trigger it. The history of successful transitions from corporate to civic governance suggests that the key variables include economic self-sufficiency, population size, and the emergence of a civic identity distinct from the founding organization.

We should ensure that the people building the road to Mars also invest time thinking about what kind of civilization waits at the end of it.

Mars invites us to reimagine everything. How we govern, how we trade, how we relate to one another, how we define prosperity and purpose. I sketched some ideas here as seeds for the imagination. The actual systems that Martians build will form around circumstances we can't foresee.

But we can see a trajectory. For the first time in centuries, humanity holds the opportunity to start fresh. Not on a blank slate, but on a red field, prepared with everything we've learned and built. The revolutionaries of 1776 had parchment and principle. The first Martians will have artificial intelligence, cryptographic trust, and the hard-won knowledge of every political and economic experiment in human history.

How will we shape the future on Mars?