There's a weird sort of fear of potential corporate dystopias that just ignores all the actual government dystopias that have existed throughout history. Plenty of government colonies were dictatorships, fiefdoms, attempts at building bizarre and broken societies. Many people reading this live in nations that originated in exactly that fashion.

> ignores all the actual government dystopias that have existed throughout history

I think my fear of potential corporate dystopias is informed by my knowledge of actual government dystopias.

There have pretty bad corporate dystopias in history too. The East India companies, Belgian Congo etc.

Many nations with dystopian origins are fine now, sure, but there was a lot of suffering along the way; I don't think it's unreasonable to want to prevent that.

The point is that there have been plenty of purely governmental dystopias -- far more than there have been even pseudo-corporate ones like the ones you describe -- but we don't have people fretting about how we shouldn't have the government run Mars colonization due to that.

Dystopian colonies run by national governments yes. Dystopian colonies run by democracies of which the colonists were citizens no.

Weren't Algerians citizens of France? Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.

> Weren't Algerians citizens of France?

I'm not ever so familiar with that history, but a quick look at the wiki suggests very much not; some of the elites were (and, at certain periods, the non-muslim population), but never the regular population, and indeed this was a major point of contention leading up to the war.

> Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.

Musk is explicitly talking about a "public-private partnership". I think any project on the scale of Mars colonization is necessarily going to be intimately entangled with one or more governments.

It's not like NASA or anyone else is going to make it happen anytime soon if this weren't happening. If anyone else wants to take a shot at Mars, they're more than welcome to. Even long after SpaceX's plans come to fruition (assuming they ever do), Mars is a big place and there will be plenty of room for other organizations to do their own thing.

> Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.

It wasn't the "earth dream" I grew up with either, and yet, here we are.

International law (i.e. the Outer Space Treaty[1]) does not cease to apply in the event that it's a corporation that does the exploring.

[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...

> Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.

i see the possibility, with corporations there is always the option of quitting the job - that's the limiting factor, so that it can't get really totalitarian as it doesn't have the teeth for that. However you don't have the option of quitting up on Mars. There will probably be shortages and huge problems during the initial stage, so you might end up with a highly stratified society (provided that there are no robots that could do all the work for us).

Now there is always the option of a benevolent dictator who will actually quit after two terms; it has happened before. They might just as well put up reasonable institutions of government given that we have this tradition down here on earth.

i guess the colonists will not just silently comply with a dictatorship (that's a key requirement for keeping this system), just because they are not used to this sort of governance.

> Rich people remaking society in their own image

If that were actually the case, then there would be no poor people, and we can all at least agree that all other things being held constant, a society where no one is poor is better than one where some people are poor, right?

Your concern is that a billionaire is driving a private project that will cost billions of dollars?

In the talk, Musk says that he plans on selling the ticket, not building the colony. The colony will be a product of the different interests paying to send people to the planet. Who those interests will be is anyone's guess.

Any of these is possible, but the character of the founders really does matter.