All astronauts, cosmonauts and everyone in between, when they travel in space, are paid for doing so. They are typically paid some salary in their own country currency. But what happens for you, if you’re the first child born on Mars, future Martian crew?
What will your financial future look like? Will it even matter in the same way that it does on Earth? How much is your life impacted by the swing of the Dollar, or interest rates in the Eurozone? And will Dogecoin really be the currency of Mars?
In this article I will explore the themes behind currency for colonists, how this worked on significant colonies in human history and how currency would matter on the most remote human settlement.
Basis of Currency Transactions
Martians will have very little time to work on personal finance, having a need to prioritise development on systems critical to survival and return home. This will be the case for some years as the build-out and scale up takes centre stage for the first 5-10 cycles of human transfer to Mars. As a result, the finance for these pioneers will likely be automated, or managed by others while they are away from home.
However, once New Martians, and new-born Mars Natives arrive, there will be a pivot of focus to commerce, and a local economy on Mars. After-all, transfer of goods between earth and Mars will be a one-way trip - to facilitate set up of the colony. Later this will crystallise as in-situ resource utilisation with any materials generated locally on Mars, being consumed in the build-out.
However, there will emerge a market for services, goods and data produced locally to further personal missions, satisfy personal needs and to expand entrepreneurial business on the Red Planet. For this, there will be a need for crypto currency (already confirmed by Elon Musk). This will have a manifold utility:
Trust-free commerce
By using a decentralised ledger, the Martians can have trust in the payment processing. They can have confidence that when someone opts to take up a service, and to pay, the recipient will receive it.
To scale this concept further - smart contracts offer frictionless, time-bound systems to enact ones wishes in a legal capacity. Remember- the first waves of colonists for a long time will only be engineers, scientists and fabricators. It does not make sense to send lawyers or attempt to manage legal matters back-and-forward with Earth because of the indirect asynchronous manner of doing so. As a result, the colonists need a light-weight option to manage contracts, and sending finance here and there during day-to-day operations.
P2P payment systems
There are some companies encroaching and disrupting the current payments system - particularly with the use of - these include:
CashApp - parent company Square.
Venmo - owned by Paypal
Paypal itself - prides itself on integrity and support for business transactions - such as Ebay business.
There are other players: Transferwise, Payoneer, Paysend, Zelle.
Other players dominate in other regions: WeChat - owned by Tencent, and its rival AliPay, from Jack Ma's Alibaba are the dominant payment handlers in China. Because of China's desire for a home-grown champion - these are likely to remain the dominant players for some time, with resistance to outsiders. This does not suggest nefarious activity - rather that China is ahead of Western markets because of the greater level of integration of payment apps into social media. This is probably best demonstrated by a review of the features included in the WeChat platform.
Remember this is just the start - once public confidence grows in the use of crypto, more and more providers will become crypto-native companies. This will in-turn usher in the use of smart-contracts and legal-tech to cut the hassle and lag in provision of appropriate legal services.
The Switch-Over
In the near term, it could be likely that the human crews will continue to be paid in their home currency. This is important because the crew will return home to Earth.
Picture the scene: The crew do a shift on Mars, return home to Earth, and are paid for their time on the mission at the colony. While on the colony, the New Martians will have all their meals provided for, as pre-packed, hermetically-sealed meals to last for some decent months while the crew establish food production. The basis of which has already been in place on the ISS since its inception. This isn't extra salary as it is required for the crew to conduct the work they have been asked to do.
However, after time, the colonists will switch over to dealing with the local Mars economy, with their payment and income coming from the colony. I will deal with more detail and some high level calculations to try and frame this more clearing in an upcoming article.
This is where there will be a cut-over, where the amount of economic activity starting to generate locally, vs the amount of economic activity related to inbound shipment of people and material to Mars will start to even out. This balance will then tip heavily in favour to the Martian colony, as the numbers of colonists swells and new industries develop to service the needs of all those people.
We can make some estimate of this by looking at the numbers of people returning home. If fewer people are returning home than arriving, this means that more work and business is being done locally and people are staying to attend to that. However, we must also consider the value of the work being done. If there is exploration, data gathering, infrastructure project construction, delivery of developmental gene-editing technology (to help colonists adapt and survive in the harsh Martian environment long-term in an artificial habitat) this could be high value work. However, even in a Martian colony, growing and preparing food could still be considered a relatively low value occupation.
The projections from Venture City put this about 5 transfer cycles into the colonial journey. This approximates to 10 Earth years. However, to make a real imbalance in the economy locally versus imports, I think we would need to double that. The reason for this is simply the value of the labour imported to Mars. It is skilled labour and lots of it.
You can reach me on Twitter: @Ronnie_Writes
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