WE HAVE yet to set up home on another world. The sheer logistics of such a move are far from understood, and no one knows if we could afford to go anyway. But that didn’t stop participants at the International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, last week from discussing how such bases should be governed.
Just don’t call people living on the moon or Mars “colonists”. M. Y. S. Prasad, deputy director of the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, says the word “colonies” evokes unpleasant memories of European settlers, so Indian scientists prefer to say “habitation bases”.
“The word ‘colonies’ evokes unpleasant memories of…
