About Marsism
The Mission
We are designing the software of civilization—ethics, governance, and destiny—before the hardware arrives.
The rockets are being built. The engineering is extraordinary. But the sociology of the expansion remains dangerously undefined. When the first permanent settlers establish themselves on Martian soil, they will inherit no traditions, no common law, no organic institutions grown over centuries. They will face a choice that cannot be deferred: what kind of society will this be?
Marsism exists to ensure that question is answered deliberately, not by accident.
The Problem: Two Failure Modes
Existing frameworks for space governance address jurisdiction, property, and liability. They do not address sociology. Into this vacuum, two failure modes emerge. They are not organized factions but gravitational tendencies—default positions that serious people drift toward when the harder questions go unasked.
The Technocratic tendency privileges efficiency. It would build a colony optimized for survival metrics—caloric throughput, oxygen production, labor allocation. This tendency treats governance as an engineering problem and humans as what Hannah Arendt called animal laborans: biological processes to be managed. Unchecked, this path leads to a sterile tyranny dressed in the language of necessity.
The Statist tendency privileges continuity. It would extend Earth’s existing governmental apparatus across the void—the same bureaucracies and regulatory assumptions that struggle to govern a single planet. This tendency treats Mars as a distant territory rather than a new polity. Unchecked, this path leads to governance without presence—law without legitimacy.
Both tendencies contain real insights, but neither designs for the social fabric itself.
We propose a third architecture.
The Third Way: Communitarianism
Marsism proposes Communitarian structure—a society held together not by the surveillance state nor by corporate efficiency metrics, but by the bonds of mutual responsibility.
We begin with a physical premise, drawn from the design science of Buckminster Fuller: in a closed-loop system, resource efficiency is not merely economical but moral. There is no “away” to throw things. Every gram matters.
This physical constraint demands a social response. Because scarcity is absolute, cooperation must be voluntary. You cannot police a dome. This is where Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks becomes essential: his distinction between Contract and Covenant. A contract is a transaction between strangers; a covenant is a commitment between members who share a fate. The civil society must be, on Mars, the primary structure—not a luxury, but the load-bearing architecture of survival.
Yet survival raises a prior question: survival of what? Here, Hannah Arendt corrects the technocratic tendency. A society of mere survival is not a society at all—it is a labor camp with better engineering. Mars must be a polis—a space of political freedom—not a factory.
But a polis is just a container. What will citizens do with their freedom? This is where Ray Bradbury becomes essential. Bradbury understood that humans require what efficiency cannot provide: ghosts, memory, art, and the sacred. Strip these away in the name of optimization, and you have not created utopia but a void with life support.
The four pillars thus form a sequence:
Fuller establishes the physical constraint.
Sacks provides the social structure that constraint demands.
Arendt defines the political life that structure must protect.
Bradbury supplies the human content that political life must contain.
The Output: The Green Papers
Marsism’s primary work is the development of The Green Papers: constitutional sketches and governance frameworks for a society built on these principles.
These are not laws. Laws require legislators, and legislators require a society that does not yet exist. The Green Papers are patterns—templates for how a community might organize itself, resolve disputes, and allocate resources without distant courts or central planning.
We are, in effect, writing the cultural source code that the first settlers might fork and modify for their own conditions. The first of these papers is forthcoming.
The Editorial Structure
Marsism operates through two editorial poles, held in deliberate tension:
The Director serves as the strategic lens. This pole ensures that Marsism remains focused on its constitutional mission rather than drifting into commentary or advocacy.
The Communitarian serves as the moral architecture. This pole ensures that Marsism never forgets that governance exists for humans, not the reverse.
The dialectic between these two perspectives—the systematic and the ethical—is the engine of the work.
The Invitation
This is not a newsletter. It is a charter.
The settlements will be established within many of our lifetimes. The decisions made in the first decade will calcify into traditions; the traditions will become laws; the laws will shape centuries. We have a narrow window to influence the foundational assumptions.
If you believe that the future of human civilization should not be left to venture capitalists or bureaucrats—if you believe that ethics must precede engineering—then you are already part of this work.
Subscribe to join the deliberation.
The hardware is in progress. The software is being written here.
