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The best Mars colonization story is PKD’s “Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge”: Mars has been colonized and… it’s like the worst 1950s suburb ever: since there’s nothing to do, after work, the colonists all take drugs that let them have out of body experiences of… life on Earth.
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There's never going to be a meaningful amount of space colonization and the human race is going to die out right here at home. I mean, how long are we supposed to put up with this charade?
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PKD is wrong on this one. It’s a mistake to analyze the psychology of exploration with the psychology of settlement. Visions of colonies are just placeholder stubs for whatever actually unfolds. I read “colony” the same as “widget” in econ literature.
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The point is that whole future premise is silly. Nobody would randomly build the sort of suburban space colony where that would happen. So a story exploring the psychological effects of that is kinda silly. If many people live on Mars, there will be better reasons and settlements
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Vegas is a decent earth approximation. A city that shouldn’t really exist does. In a hostile waterless desert. Began with railroads, then nuclear tests, then found a raison d’etre in gambling. Not the greatest place on earth but psychologically self-sustaining.
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