What kind of government/economic system would be needed in a space habitat?
This is a very popular question. The interesting thing is that anybody’s answer tells you more about their own personal ideologies than about space settlements. Space habitats seem to be a kind of political Rorschach Test. Regardless of anybody’s opinion now, the future reality will probably be that we will see every conceivable kind of political/economic system tried out in space habitats, plus a few surprising new ones we haven’t even thought of yet. In this sense, space settlements may become ideal political experimentation laboratories. If one’s society ultimately fails, it would have to be a result of its underlying philosophy. In a space habitat, one could hardly blame resource depletion, an energy crisis, population pressures, a crop failure, or inconvenient location.
