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> allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer

It wouldn’t be super productive if it were self contained. Integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms.




Right, which is why I said it would be _extremely_ difficult to do. Consider this: any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment, dealing with the extreme lack of raw materials, and dealing with any specialized materials or equipment being months/years away and costing an exorbitant amount of money just to ship it over. Any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony.

Again, I don't think we're anywhere close to being able to create these Sciencevilles, but that just goes to show how far away we are from creating a Mars colony, even if we are able to overcome the numerous technical issues.


> any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment…any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony

I’m arguing those constraints are what will drive ingenuity. In large part because pitching smart, ambitious on a Scienceville is dubious. In part based on the history of settler civilisations outperforming their home countries.


I'm not sure how we can square the idea that integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms, yet somehow that if hermit kingdoms became isolated to the extreme they'll actually start to become very productive again. You have to believe that a hermit kingdom would both be more productive if it was more open, and simultaneously believe that it would be more productive if it was even more isolated.

I don't believe settler civilizations outperform their home countries across the board. Certainly there have been many that failed. Successful ones tend to be in places that offer a lot of natural resources, often even surpassing the home country. But of course, the opposite would be true for Mars.


> yet somehow that if hermit kingdoms became isolated to the extreme they'll actually start to become very productive again

A Mars colony wouldn’t be a hermit kingdom. It would be isolated, but there would obviously still be dependence on followed by trade with Earth. Recreating that mix of semi-isolation and adversity on Earth strikes me as silly. Even if you got the mechanics right, what’s the attraction for the denizens? What keeps them there when the going gets tough? What are they doing and seeing that they fundamentally couldn't in more comfort?




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