A Note about the blog posts from the future [CE 2224]: In January of 2021, with Perseverance due to land on Mars the next month, NASA activated their experimental Quantum Transmitter. The transmitter was designed to communicate with Perseverance, without regard to location and at faster than light speeds—near real-time. Unfortunately, they lost the connection after the initialization routine was completed. However, as an unintended consequence, NASA connected with a specific locus in the space-time continuum located on the Moon in 2224. That locus was the storage device of the quantum computer of a popular blog site. It is from that blog site that these blog entries are extracted. I hope you enjoy a peek into our future, and hopefully, I’m not violating some temporal directive. So far, no visit from the time cops.
Guest Author: Kimber Abubakar, Communications Director, Mars Organics
Originally Posted: Monday, October 4, 2224 (Earth Standard Calendar)
The current move by the officials on Luna to subsidize organic waste processing is an affront to the cooperative and egalitarian culture the off-Earth settlements have fostered for 150 years. The current regulatory environment that has built a robust, self-sufficient, net export economy is in jeopardy.
Luna and Mars have benefited from the AI regulatory, compliance, and ethics ecosystem that a collaborative partnership between the two largest non-Earth economies built over the last 100 years. Retaining the government’s hands-off stance and minimizing the intrusion of government regulation has proven a boon to commercial enterprise across the system settlements.
Embodied in the Lunar Cities Consortium collective actions, Luna threatens to upend that partnership by introducing non-compete subsidies. Luna recyclers have convinced the Lunar Cities’ mayors that as Martian organic recyclers and Mars Organics, in particular, become competitive in pricing and services, Luna recyclers are at a competitive disadvantage. They contend that longer transport distances from the Asteroid Settlements to Luna than to Mars put them at a competitive disadvantage. The Lunar Organic Recyclers Association, itself an affront to open and fair competition, cites instances of transport companies bypassing the Luna off-loading stations and retaining their waste cargos until the following passage to Mars to capture a higher price. This argument ignores the offsetting higher fuel cost and is misleading, more a consequence of orbital mechanics—not economics.
This campaign to position themselves as disadvantaged is patently manipulative. The Association ignores the reality that Mars is farther from the largest belt facilities than Earth for almost half its orbit. The Association further ignores their practically exclusive control of the near-Earth facilities and the Luna orbital facilities, most notably the construction hub at the Pointe. It is doubtful that any transport company would find it profitable to ship wastes from the Earth-Moon sources to Mars for processing.
Mars Organics opposes this move by Luna to favor their domestic processors to the disadvantage of Martian commercial interests. If Luna continues to pursue these subsidies, Mars Organics will have no choice but to file a complaint with the InterSolar Trade Court.
For more information, please visit us at MarsOrganics.ag.Mars/WasteProcessing.
[Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual institutions or actual events is purely coincidental.]