Elon Musk and the Adventure of the Troublesome Martian Daycare
How do you run a Mars colony with a declining birth rate?
Apparently, we are going to get a private Mars colony?
Well, Elon Musk seems pretty determined to start one, and since he’s now build-my-own-space-society-and-stock-it-with-my-minions rich, he might actually manage to pull it off. If he can just get his pesky rockets to stop exploding.
Presumably if Musk fails the next billionaire in line will start their own colony. Whoever gets to plant their corporate flag, they’ll shuttle in people – there’s got to be at least tens of thousands of people on Earth who fit into the Venn diagram where “very smart and technologically competent” and “so full of the romance of space that they want to live out their days on a freeze-dried rock” overlap.
And then what? Musk has said he wants a million people on Mars to make it self-sustaining. Do you ship them all in? That gets pricey.
In fact, Musk, who has never been overly-optimistic about anything, ever, suggested the best they might be able to do in the near- to mid-term is $100,000 per person.
Hmmmmm… let me see… carry the three…
So that’s $1 billion to transport 10,000 human beings to Mars. I mean, Musk can do that, he’s got the cash, but obviously, to meet his goal of a million people on Mars, at some point you’re going to have to switch to the old-fashioned method of making new colonists – making babies.
That’s a problem, because humans aren’t really doing that anymore.
Obviously, people are still having children. But in most of the world, the birth rate has been trending downwards for decades, part of the most recent stage of the demographic transition. The key number is the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR. The average number of births per woman (where woman is shorthand for “person with a uterus”) has to be about 2.1 to ensure replacement levels of humans are born in each generation. The 0.1 is insurance for early deaths – if there are a lot of explosive decompressions and faulty spacesuit valves, the Mars TFR might have to be higher just to tread water.
Almost all the world nations with a TFR over 2.1 are developing nations – places where subsistence farming remains common, where access to birth control and health care is limited, and where education and opportunities are limited, especially for women. (And birth rates in those nations are also falling fast, as economies and education improve and more people move to cities.)
It seems as soon as you get that trifecta of urbanization, education, and opportunity, the birth rate drops like a rock. This is not immediately apparent on Earth, because pretty much every country in the world had high population growth a generation or two ago, and this has left us with a powerful population momentum. But countries like Italy, Japan, and most recently South Korea are starting to see actual declines in population.1 Some countries, like Canada, are planning to defer any problems2 from this with immigration – about one in five Canadians was born elsewhere, and it’s a neat hack if you’re a small, developed nation.
Mars can’t do that, unless space travel gets cheaper by multiple orders of magnitude.
If the overlords of Mars want a colony there to continue, how do they ensure a birth rate of 2.1?
If they want it to expand, how do they drive a birth rate of 4.2, to ensure the population will double in a generation?
In industrialized nations with low birth rates, the traditional methods tried so far have included baby bonuses (i.e. cash for kids), enhanced daycare and maternity/paternity leave, and those… haven’t worked, for the most part. Kids remain expensive, and parents are busy because everyone works all the time now, and something something urban capitalism. A few nations have gotten close, like France, but not up to even replacement levels.
And what would a baby bonus on Mars even look like? You get an extra 20 cubic inches on your pressurized underground box? You get real sugar in your annual birthday cupcake? It’s not going to be a cash-driven economy, in the early days.
Okay, so then we get to the really creepy options for a Martian baby boom, which include:
• Only allowing colonists who are under 35 to immigrate
• Relentless pro-family propaganda
• Requiring new colonists to sign pledges to have a certain number of children
• Fertility testing of all colonists
• Banning birth control
• Banning abortion
• Shipping in a class of women to be designated baby-havers, each giving birth to 15 to 25 children, who will be raised in créches
• As above, but with artificial wombs, because technology marches on
• Make 60-90% of early colonists female, mandatory minimum of childbirths
• Various combinations of all or some of the above
Hoo boy, that got grim really fast, didn’t it? I should also note that none of those ‘solutions’ are technically eugenics, but any system that rigidly controls human reproduction can tip into eugenics easily. That’s not to mention how a system that requires expansion-via-birth is likely to look at anyone with a uterus – including nonbinary people and trans men – and classify them as women.
So the worst case scenario is basically The Handmaid’s Tale with a red-dust filter. The best case is an intrusively natalist government that’s constantly bugging people to have more kids and fiddling with various punishment/reward scenarios.
Why isn’t “everything works fine, but people choose not to have kids?” a scenario we see a lot in fiction about Mars colonization?
Demographics is boring to write about? It doesn’t provide a ready plot-adhering surface for a genre where we’re constantly told that protagonists must have agency. What is your protagonist supposed to do in an adventure story where the enemy is a TFR of 1.37?
Aside from that, both for SFF and the wider world, there’s a powerful cultural inertia. For the last century, we’ve been absorbing and regurgitating stories about frontier settlement, and transplanting those narratives to space. People take covered wagons west and the Little House on the Prairie is full of kids. People take spaceships to other worlds and they fill their geodesic dome with kids, right?
It doesn’t hurt that the Golden Age of SF took place just before and then during the Baby Boom years, when birth rates, having bottomed out during the Second World War, shot up and stayed well above replacement rate for more than two decades. Boomers and their predecessors were used to the idea that if you could plant a colony anywhere it would get larger because that’s what people just did.
In fact, most stories from the 1950s through to the 1990s were worried about overpopulation. The oft-cited non-fiction book in this case is Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, which argued that in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and nothing could be done to stop it. (Malnutrition may remain a problem, but a mass die-off obviously did not come to pass.) But SF had been using overpopulation tropes for decades by then, with Heinlein’s juveniles about space colonization using an “overcrowded” Earth as justification for settling the new high frontier. (China was often used as a faceless Yellow Peril in the background of these stories, their vast, teeming, and utterly anonymous population a sort of worst-case-scenario for readers to gawk at.)
Physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, of the famous O’Neill Cylinder, also saw space colonization as a way to reduce overpopulation pressure. O’Neill saw himself pushing back against Ehrlich’s pessimistic Malthusianism with techno-optimism, but neither actually thought that the population would simply stop growing on its own.
But by the time O’Neill’s The High Frontier was released in 1976, it already had in the U.S., barring immigration and population momentum.
It’s notable that one of the most popular science fiction series about space colonization in the last couple of years has been Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut of Mars sequence. They’re set in a an alternate universe in which the space race gets into gear properly in the 1950s, because a great whacking meteor has smashed into the earth, and the environment is in slow-motion collapse. Escaping to the moon and Mars for her world is a necessary lifeboat, not some kind of colonizing mission – but even so, that colonizing storyline seems to fit better in the era that birthed it.
We don’t actually live in a world of rapid, constant population increase and large families anymore. In industrialized nations, we haven’t for almost 50 years now, but we haven’t caught up with that culturally.
There are very few SF stories that present a future of natural, slow population decline, but that seems a reasonable guess for the next century or two. Presumably, in the long run our economies and cultures will alter to adapt to the new reality, and human populations will stabilize, or start going up again; I am not worried about human extinction. But the future of Earth is one that hits about nine to 12 billion people, and then goes down again, slowly but surely. Our descendants are more likely to re-colonize the deserted suburbs of our era than another planet.
Elon Musk is famously enamoured of science fiction to the point where he plucks the names for his launch vehicles and projects from the works of Douglas Adams and Iain M. Banks.3 I am not surprised that he absorbed this colonizing ethos – we all did as kids! But the big question for Mars colonization – and for SF writers in the next decades – isn’t going to be “Can we colonize Mars?” it’s going to be “Who can you recruit from an emptier, quieter Earth to go there?”
Self Promotion Corner
My story is out! The Acheulean Gift is in Analog this March/April! I am terrified people will hate it! I am filled with existential dread because I have no other stories on sub right now! Read the story, if you think you would like a story about summer camp and stone hand axes and mysteries and stuff! If you liked it, you can leave a review on Goodreads, or you can go and explain your feelings on the story to the nearest seagull. They’re good listeners. Give them French fries, they’ll listen to anything you have to say.
Israel has a TFR of 3.0 and is an outlier, but no one seems to know what the special sauce is.
The “problem” is that during the next phase of the demographic transition, we get a large number of old people for a small number of young working people, and economists worry about having to use more resources for elder care instead of, say, everyone buying a new flatscreen TV. Which really tells you a lot more about economists than abut what a “problem” it might be.
I’ve long thought you could generate enough power to light up all of Scotland by attaching magnets and copper coils to Banks’ coffin. The socialist writer must be spinning in his grave to have his work associated with Musk.