Hypothetical - Moon Station Government

nick012000

You are now in control of a habitat on the moon. It has no ties to any government; its creation was funded by a wealthy philanthropist who just wants people to emigrate from Earth. The cost of doing so is within the reach of a middle-class family if they sell their home; you can therefore expect a decent number of immigrants.

What sort of government do you establish? How do you go about ruling so that your new settlement on the moon will survive and thrive?

What sort of tech level is available? Are we talking a very early colony with not much higher tech than we have now? (ie, need to be super strict because it would be very easy for a malicious or even clueless individual to seriously screw everyone) or way beyond that so that's not so much a worry?

Hard science fiction, pretty much. Hydroponic farms, meat-vats, and algae-vats for food, more-or-less modern life support systems (possibly assisted by cracking lunar rocks for oxygen), et cetera. Good enough to be self-sustaining, but no magic nanobots, FAI, or anything like that.

0blogospheroid16y

I agree. The tech level is a pretty major consideration. Government is also essentially a set of rules. A set of rules that will depend on the technology level. Giving the actual question some thought. What are the colony's foreseeable needs in the future? What are its threats? Any governance mechanism setup will have to be one which tries to rationally minimise dependencies and threats. My personal preferences are for some kind of a mutual credit money system, so that people's preferences dictate the flow of goods and services. i'm also certain that David Brin's transperent society idea is somewhere in the ballpark of right. Radical transperency will help. Otherwise, not very sure of what structure might help. Some kind of debate graph kind of mapping for arguments with assumptions laid out and having a separation of values and methods to achieve them (like in futarchy) seems to be a good structure.