Will the Chinese be the first to colonise Mars?
It’s too soon to say whether Mars will be colonized at all, let alone by whom. The moon will be first, since there’s helium-3 there. One kilogram of He3 can be found in a strip of lunar soil having dimensions 140m x 140m x 4m. It can be fused with 2/3 kg of deuterium to yield 6E14 J (at 100% efficiency) or 100 million kilowatt hours of electricity at 60% conversion efficiency. Look at anonymous up there, sneaking in a political ad for World Government, as if this were a good idea. It isn’t. It’s a very bad idea. Governments sour and rot the more centralized they get because of a simple principle that also affects business. The less competition there is in a market, and the less choice customers (or subjects) have about whether to pay up, the worse the service in that market is. It doesn’t matter whether the product is widgets or laws: less competition and fewer choices means lousy service, and in the case of government that usually means dictatorship, loss of freedom, and so on.
