Money for Mars
WHAT IT IS
A card-based design exercise that asks participants to invent financial systems for space environments. Players draw three cards—a location, a persona, a type of financial tool—and have to make something that would actually work there. A mining consortium accountant on a Jovian moon needs a way to borrow. A retired habitat technician in the asteroid belt needs to protect savings from a regime that no longer exists. The constraints are specific enough to block hand-waving but strange enough to block importing familiar solutions. The point isn't to predict what space finance will look like. It's to surface the hidden assumptions in how Earth-based finance already works by breaking them.
DESIGN DECISION
Financial literacy isn't a prerequisite. We tried earlier versions that front-loaded concepts—explaining what a derivative is before asking players to design one. It didn't work. People either already knew and got bored, or didn't know and got intimidated. The current structure flips it: the scenario creates demand for the solution. Players invent credit systems or insurance mechanisms because the situation requires it, not because they understood how those things worked going in. The learning happens in the debrief, when the facilitator names what they just built. The exercise teaches finance by forcing you to need it.
ONE OBSERVATION
We built a section of facilitator notes around time. Earth's financial systems are quietly synchronized to planetary rhythms—trading hours that follow the sun, settlement windows measured in Earth days, quarterly reports pinned to a single orbital cycle, annual compounding tied to one trip around one star. Everyone on Earth shares a clock. Even when markets are global, the reference frame is common.
In space, nobody shares a clock. A Martian sol drifts against Earth time. A station in Jupiter orbit has no meaningful "day." Light-lag means a transaction confirmed "now" might be disputed twenty minutes later by someone who hasn't received it yet. We expected this to be one theme among several—interesting, but parallel to questions about jurisdiction or scarcity. It turned out to be the crack that opened everything else. Once participants see that time itself is a design choice embedded in money, they stop treating any of it as natural. Interest rates, contract enforcement, the entire concept of "settlement"—all of it suddenly looks like a bet on synchronized clocks.
Interated: 2017–2026
