[ExI] Space governance

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 8:47 AM John Grigg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Just wait until we are all living together inside a giant hollowed out
> asteroid! How will we rule ourselves then?
>

 I was thinking about this very topic just yesterday.

Let's say we capture some decently large asteroid to GEO, with a high
enough metal content that we can mine it and (relatively gently) toss
chunks down to Earth to pay for the whole operation.  Not all of the
asteroid will be useful; the cast-off bits can be formed into habitats.

If these habitats are, say, cylinders 2 km wide, to allow them to be spun
up to 1 G, that's enough of a technical (and imposed-by-human-biology)
standard that people might not want to mess with it.  2 km wide suggests
maybe 5 km long maximum, for structural stability.  This gives an inner
surface area (not counting the end caps) of roughly 31.4 square kilometers.

At a maximum density of 20,000 people per square kilometer - roughly the
upper end of the most densely crowded cities in the US today (there are a
few more crowded in the world, but let's avoid the extremes) - that's about
628,000 people living in such a habitat at most.  Obviously, we can
construct more habitats as needed.

If one were to create a bicameral legislative body to cover a union of such
habitats and model it on the US, one might have a House-equivalent based
solely on population, and a Senate-equivalent where each habitat gets one
representative.  This creates a representation problem in the US today -
but, let's say, within tolerable limits (whatever one might say about
recent politics, most people will agree it was at least somewhat functional
before 2000, and the population ratios have not changed substantially since
then).  As of 2010, California had a population of 37,253,956 and Wyoming
had a population of 563,626, roughly a 66:1 ratio between the highest and
smallest population.

If 66:1 is tolerable, and a given habitat will likely be able to support
less than 660,000 people due to physical limits (unlike US states, where
every single one could take more people today), then if the law says a
habitat becomes a full equal member politically (as in, gets legislative
representation) so long as it has at least 10,000 people (anything with
less than 10,000 - whether it's not there yet, or it's losing people for
whatever reason - is a territory/dependency of the rest of the collective,
governed by federal laws set up to handle small habitats), the habitats are
unlikely to grow too far out of balance.

This means the "local" politics never get beyond moderate city sized.  Try
to ban political associations beyond a single habitat, unless they are
collective-wide, to keep political aspirations (beyond the local) focused
on serving everyone rather than just some large minority.  Doubtless this
will happen anyway - e.g., high-density older habitats vs. growing newer
habitats vs. those habitats still being/about to be constructed (but there
will likely always be enough demand for more habitats to win public money
to build them - and it is quite possible to build enough land to support
over a trillion people, plus several habitats just for parks and "wild"
life) - but the scale can be limited.

One drawback is that, by the time you get to 100,000,000 people, even the
"upper"/per-habitat legislative body will have hundreds of members, and the
"lower"/per-census legislative body will probably have thousands.  There
will be pressure to group up, maybe to create a Senate-of-Senate with a
population no more than 100 where all the members can at least try to speak
to each other on a one-on-one basis.  But then, jockeying to be part of
that body will strive to represent some large minority to the exclusion of
the rest of the collective.  There are ways to limit this - maybe start
grouping habitats depending on how they are laid out (say, in a hexagonal
tessellation, the core 6 habitats get 1 senator, and then figure some
pattern such that every group of 5-6 habitats get 1 more senator based
purely on location relative to the core, with no politically-motivatable
district mapping) - but the ones I can readily identify seem like stopgap
measures on the way to representing billions of people.
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