Martian Chronicle

Mars may well be the next great frontier. But what kind of world should we make there?

John Tierney from the February 1999 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Once the cost of transport to Mars dropped, real estate speculators might begin to see the planet's potential. One member of the Mars Society, Richard Allen Brown, has proposed that a private company divide Mars into a million plots, each 25,000 acres, and sell bonds giving a 100-year option on each plot. By charging $20,000 for each bond, the company could raise $20 billion. It would invest this capital conservatively and use the income, about $1 billion a year, to finance the exploration and settlement of Mars over the course of a century. If you bought a bond and the land eventually became valuable, you (or your heir) could exercise the option to trade in the bond for a deed to the land. If after 100 years the option still hadn't been exercised, your heir could redeem the bond for the original capital investment of $20,000.

Mars bonds would not be for the timid investor. Even if the land did become valuable, there's no guarantee that your deed to the land would be recognized, because for now there's no internationally recognized method of claiming land in outer space. The vagaries of space property law make a another great topic of discussion among Mars Society members. (See "A Little Piece of Heaven," November.) But then, the first investors in the New World did not have secure property rights either.

"People in England were buying and selling Kentucky back in the 1600s, when it might as well have been Mars," Zubrin says. "No British citizen had been there, and it wasn't clear that British law would prevail--the French and Spanish had claims there too. But the king of England would sell patents to a nobleman, who would sell pieces to capitalists willing to speculate on the British. They'd hire someone to survey it, and then, if there were good prospects, they'd sell the land at a profit or start developing it by sending in settlers."

It's conceivable that the interplanetary version of the French and Indian War would be a conflict between rival companies or countries trying to claim Martian real estate. Perhaps more likely, the war could pit speculators against those who wanted to preserve Mars from capitalist development. Already a handful of countries (not including the United States) have signed a treaty declaring all extraterrestrial bodies to be "the common heritage of mankind," as Antarctica is treated today. The scientists who are now fighting to keep Antarctica pristine--which generally means excluding every money-making activity except for their research projects--would probably try to preserve Mars for themselves too. Environmentalists who now demand the preservation of malarial swamps and frozen tundras probably would find reason to preserve Mars in its "natural" state.

In fact, Zubrin's development plans even provoked some opposition at the founding convention of the Mars Society. Environmentalists in the audience rose to object when he declared it our species' Manifest Destiny to terraform the Martian environment. But Zubrin managed to quell the opposition, and get another ovation, by explaining that the Red Planet would become a green haven for terrestrial species whose habitat might one day be endangered.

"We must protect billions of our fellow creatures," he said. "Raccoons and maple trees can't get to Mars on their own. We have to help them there. Humans have eaten a lot of fish, and now we're going to repay the favor by taking fish to Mars. It's our duty to the biosphere."

It was a lovely moment, a developer outgreening environmentalists by nobly espousing the largest real estate project in history, and it illustrated why Mars is a no-lose proposition for libertarians. If colonizing the Red Planet ever becomes a practical possibility, we should be ready to get there before anyone else starts writing the rules. And even if colonization never becomes practical, even if Mars never becomes a free new world, just imagining it is good for the libertarian soul.