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It's not being given out to everybody, just the people who make less than a certain amount of money.
I found out about something called the negative income tax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
In economics, a negative income tax (abbreviated NIT) is a progressive income tax system where people earning below a certain amount receive supplemental pay from the government instead of paying taxes to the government.
Maybe a Martian government could be the first to implement it...
3D printing can only be good for the Mars economy I would say. Essentially it means you have limitless engineering and design expertise available on the planet without having to import thousands of engineers and designers on to Mars at vast expense.
I doubt it would go that far. Sure it might reduce the number of people needed to make something, but you'll still need experts to help design things robustly.
There has been a plethora of news about 3D printing (if you're unfamiliar with the topic, read the Wikipedia page). No doubt that there will still be limits to what you can reliably print out, but 3D printers are becoming more powerful by the year.
But what would it mean for a future Martian civilization?
There is no reliable way to prevent piracy. Indeed with the creation of mesh servers like Freedom Box it might become impossible to prevent it in the near future. This would be highly disruptive to traditional economies. And we don't even need to invoke piracy as something disruptive considering the idea of open-source hardware, something disruptive to existing economies would be bound to happen eventually.
What new economy would emerge from this? I'm not an economist, so I can't say for certain.
The main problem with powering VASIMR engines via solar is that you'd need a prohibitively large array to power it (assuming you put the array on the spacecraft and not use beamed energy). That implies current efficiencies. A company called Redwave is working on a nantenna based design for solar panels which could be far better than the best commercial cells today. If/when high efficiency nantenna based solar power becomes feasible, then you could reduce the array size to one-third of a traditional solar array. Still big, but much better than before, and potentially feasible.
Oh, and a source would be nice. You know, there have also been innumerable reports of the end of the world.
Sadly, it looks like the sites that talk about it seem to be cold fusion sites. So my statement is probably untrue. I'll look for other sources, but I can't guarantee anything.
There's a paucity of nitrogen on Mars. Even if we managed to find pure nitrate beds in the Martian crust, it still wouldn't be enough to make both a buffered atmosphere and rich soil. One alternative is to get nitrogen from Titan, but transporting that much is problematic. In the end, nitrogen would be a limiting factor in a future Martian ecosystem.
Or would it be?
In the book Manifold: Space by Stephen Baxter, the protagonists used a device to drill deep down into the mantle of the moon to reach water and volatiles. The idea being that comets and asteroids delivered them billions of years ago and that some of them would still be contained in certain minerals.
The book called it a "Paulis mine" but here I'll call it a Baxter mine.
What implications does this have for Martian nitrogen? If sometime in the future a Baxter mine is possible, then we could prospect for nitrogen in the Martian mantle and release it. Considering the volume of the mantle, there might be more than enough needed both for an atmospheric buffer gas and soil nutrition.
This is just speculation on my part, but if it's true, it could make terraforming Mars much easier than it would otherwise be.
There have been reports of a replication of LENR results by Toyota of a Mitsubishi reactor design. I don't think E-Cat is real, but I'm more open minded about LENR.
I was reading a book called Maelstrom by Peter Watts and I heard of a nucleic acid called pyranosyl RNA. According to the book (this chapter) the microbe that utilizes pRNA can withstand one megarad of gamma radiation (!).
Watts is is well known for basing his biology on real life research so it's possible that the high radiation resistance of pRNA could be true. So far I haven't found anything in the way of radiation resistance levels of the molecule, I'll talk about it when I find something.
This may have consequences for martian life. Could Martians have utilized pRNA? From what I can tell, pRNA needs water as a solvent, so the dry environment of Mars might not have any live martian microbes. But, if the high radiation tolerance is true, then there might be dormant martian microbes waiting to be discovered in frozen water deposits; the high rad resistance could mean they're still viable after a long time. Even better, if the theory of flowing water on Mars is true, then the microbes could become viable long enough to repair damage they could have sustained.
This is all theorizing; but if it's true, then Martian microbial life could be alive today.