Well, I'd suggest that some things, like food production, would turn out to fall in the second category on Mars.Ars Lande wrote: ↑Wed Nov 28, 2018 5:11 pmPlanetary colonization would be more economically sensible, if it can be done with a relatively small number of colonists -- it's awfully expensive to send people there.
Not exactly a homesteading model, then, but one in which Joe Selfstarter can do a substantial amount of the work by himself.
You have a pretty good question though. The way I see it, we are beginning to figure out when a market is the best tool for the job(food production, cars, cell phones) and when it should definitely not be used (health insurance, law enforcement, health and safety standards). 22nd century colonists would be aware of that -- presumably, even more so. Hopefully we'll have learned something about economics then!
On Earth, we can let the market decide if we need to produce more rice, or more beef, or more candy.
On Mars, creating a space for growing rice, vs. one for rearing cows, is expensive and hard to change. You probably don't want Joe setting up the water and sewage for the cows, and requisitioning/buying grain, and then decide that he's going to use the space for growing potatoes or hosting web servers instead.
For a long time, the colony is like the International Space Station... in fact, it is a space station. There's some room for individual initiative (Chris Hadfield makes a music video, someone does a favorite science experiment), but not at the level of adding a new habitat.
There's a reason we don't charge the ISS astronauts for going up there.In a sense, the colonists would not have surrended all their possessions to get there -- but a million dollars are going to last you a couple of months at most.
(If you do want a "give us your tired, your poor" destination, maybe you can put it on the moon...)