Visions of a Martian Future

As we look beyond our terrestrial boundary to a multi-planetary future for humankind, it becomes paramount to anticipate the challenges of various human factors on the most likely scenario for this future: permanent human settlement of Mars. Even if technical hurdles are circumvented to provide adequate resources for basic physiological and psychological needs, Homo sapiens will not survive on an alien planet if a dysfunctional psyche prohibits the utilization of these resources. No matter how far we soar into the stars, our psychologies for future generations will be forever tethered to the totality of our surroundings. By shaping our environment toward survival and welfare during the voyage to Mars and in a Martian colony, we indirectly shape our psyches and prepare them for a mission of unprecedented alienation and duration. Once on Mars, human factors such as leadership structure, social organization and code of conduct, group size, gender balance, developmental cycle, mobility, length of stay and the ecological settings and type and manner of subsistence, will create a novel Martian culture. The degree that settlers are severed from the Earth will affect how radically foreign this culture will be when compared with cultures on Earth

Can Deep Altruism Sustain Space Settlement?

Space settlement represents a long-term human effort that requires unprecedented coordination across successive generations. In this chapter, I develop a comparative hierarchy for the value of long-term projects based upon their benefits to culture, their development of infrastructure, and their contributions to lasting information. I next draw upon the concept of the time capsule as an analogy, which enables a comparison of historical examples of projects across generational, intergenerational, and deep time. The concept of deep altruism can then be defined as the selfless pursuit of informational value for the well-being of others in the distant future. The first steps toward supporting an effort like space settlement through deep altruism would establish governance and funding models that begin to support ambitions with intergenerational succession.Comment: To be published in The Human Factor in a Mission to Mars: An Interdisciplinary Approach, K. Szocik (Ed.), Springe

Co-operation, paternal care and the evolution of hominid social groups.

Humans are social animals. Human societies emerge from vast networks of cooperative interactions between many different individuals. In this respect, humans are similar to most other primates. However, human societies are unusual among primates in the number of different types of cooperative relationships that are involved. In humans, males and females form strong pair bonds within large multimale, multi-female societies in which many other cooperative relationships are also important. How and when did human social systems arise? Do males and females use different types of cooperative strategies? Under what conditions does paternal care evolve? Do males and females have different constraints, and how do these affect the types of social strategies they employ? How do factors such as environment quality and seasonality modify these strategies? This thesis seeks answers to these questions using computer simulations based on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The hypotheses generated by these models are tested using data from living primates. They are then used to investigate the kinds of societies that our hominid ancestors may have lived in. The theoretical and empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests that sex differences in the energetic cost of reproduction determine the cooperative strategies, and ultimately the types of social groups, that evolve. It is proposed that during hominid evolution female energetic costs increased greatly, in comparison to male energetic costs, due to changes in body size dimorphism, diet and brain size. A two-stage model of hominid social structure is developed. The first stage, at the transition from the australopithecines to Homo erectus, would have involved an increase in female cooperation, especially food sharing. The second stage, occurring between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago, would have involved male care giving, the formation of pair bonds and the sexual division of labour within the context of a wider cooperative network