Human Rights for Prospective Martians
Mars One is a crowdfunded space exploration project that plans on sending humans to Mars. The trip is one-way, and after they have arrived the explorers will be expected to set up their own rules of governance and social organization. While the spirit of exploration and experimentation is admirable, certain ethical, legal, and political questions arise. These have been discussed somewhat in the news, on blogs, and now in a paper by Clare Tsimpourla, an LLM student at Strathclyde University, on the rights of the prospective Martians. (via Bookforum)
i’ve been using the mars one project for the last two years as a case study in my first lecture for second-year political philosophy! it works pretty well in getting a discussion going… (did you know they initially planned to fund the trip using a reality tv show broadcasting the lives of the martians? all reference to this has now been removed from the website and it’s currently funded by an indiegogo campaign. there’s a list of total donations by country, and some of the numbers are fairly hilarious (i.e. they’ve got a long way to go…)