More on Utopia

In an alternate life which never happened in this timeline, I wrote a novel (you can see the picture) about the bright (but guilty, with underachievement anxiety) son of Bill Gates type who becomes determined to create a form of utopia. When governmental and societal obstacles prevent him from getting anything done on Earth, he decides to try to create Utopia on Mars. To create this form of Utopia he first, through some very complex personality and aptitude tests) a group of individuals who are very intelligent, wide-ranging polymaths who combine very practical abilities with skills in the most abstract forms of thinking, who also have a pronounced artistic bent, yet are, by nature, basically cheerful and cooperative. Equally important, he brings to Mars the sort of small scale technology (based on developments in synthetic organic machines, which include robot-like (but reproducing) machines) which will allow each citizen to be totally self-sufficient. And the basic rules of the colony require each person to maintain that self-sufficiency. The basic idea is that freedom can be perfected when each person has enough to be his or her own master, and thus a society of equals can more easily come into being, particularly when there is no vast differences of abilities which force social stratification and thus inequality. I won’t go into many details, save that in this colony all leadership positions are rotated by lot, and all major questions taken up in a town meeting.