Looks like I chose wisely in waiting until next year to visit Iceland:
Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland’s currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country’s three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won’t send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.
The dollar-krona exchange rate has shifted by about 35% since I decided back in February to hold off on going to Iceland, and the drop in the krona’s value recently defines “precipitous”. Yikes.
Of course, the way things are going with the global economy, Iceland might be a great bargain next summer…or it might be a few summers before I get another chance to go.
Relevant to space exploration, though, there is a brief quote from Björk at the bottom of the article, recounting Iceland’s settlement by Norwegians who “couldn’t deal with authority in Norway”. I’ve been reading a selection of the sagas lately, and it’s amusing how true this statement is. Here is a country whose first settlers decided that they were not going to put up with some petty nobleman conquering other petty noblemen, declaring himself king, and then demanding fealty from the free men who wanted nothing to do with his imperial project. Often under the shadow of death sentences for refusing to swear allegiance to the king, they sold off their lands, packed up their belongings in boats only just suitable for the purpose, and took dangerous treks across the sea to a distant, almost mythical, and marginally inhabitable island in order to continue living as free men.
The parallels to libertarian imaginings of space settlement are clear enough, but the sagas go beyond the mere why and how of the settlers’ travels to their “new frontier”. Land claims, legal disputes, the creation of a new (and new form of) government, exploring an alien and often hostile environment, and commerce between settlements and with distant lands form the backdrop – and in many cases significant plot elements - of the stories, describing the growing pains of the new society as the settlers struggled to build everything up from scratch in a previously uninhabited land.
They aren’t quite a user’s manual for space colonies, but they do offer some interesting insights into what to expect and how to — and how not to — handle some of the problems settlers will encounter.
Posted on October 7th, 2008 under Entertainment, Settlement. Comments: 4
