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The Future of Mars
🕑 Added 2023-09-07 13:59:32 +0000 UTCMars. The Red Planet. An inhospitable, frigid desert we’ve only just begun to explore with probes, satellites, and rovers. But if there’s one common rule in human history, it is expansion. Mars is not immune. One day, we will have cities on the Red Planet. So, how will the human settlement and colonization of Mars occur? What will be the FUTURE HISTORY of Mars? Well, this is What Why How, and that’s what the video’s abut.
The colonization of Mars is the central plot of a whole bunch of works of sci fi, including Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. If you like sci-fi, by the way, you should check out it out—and also this sci-fi book too, written by yours truly.
Anyway, the one flaw of the Mars Trilogy—and of Martian colonization in sci-fi in general—is that it assumes human colonization of the Red Planet will occur in the near future, with a vibrant Martian community by 2100, complete with terraforming and major cities. But Martian settlement isn’t going to proceed like the Spanish colonization of the Americas; Mars is much more inhospitable than Mexico.
Besides the fact it takes several months to get there, the average temperature of Mars is minus 80 Fahrenheit, the atmosphere is thin and has very little oxygen, and the only large sources of water are frozen at the poles or maybe beneath the surface. Mars is less like Mexico and more like Antarctica.
So, let’s look quickly at the frozen continent. The first man to step foot there, John Davis, did so in 1821, maybe. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, explorers plunged deep into the frigid wasteland—the so-called Heroic Age of Exploration. As time went on, countries began to establish research outposts. Today, there are less than 100 of those scientific bases with an average of a few dozen people each, for a total of a couple thousand people during the summer months. People don’t stay in these bases too long; just a few months or about a year at most.
We should expect the settlement of Mars to proceed in roughly the same way.
Now, Mars fanatics point out there may be plenty of metal resources right on the Martian surface, including rarer metals like gold, magnesium, and mercury. That might encourage quicker settlement, but it would take a lot of money and fuel to transport those metals to Earth, or to make Martian factories to use those metals on the surface. For a parallel: Antarctica’s resources are buried under miles of ice. What I’m saying is, don’t expect Martian cities, railroads, and space elevators in the next century. Sorry, Kim Stanley Robinson.
But now that I’ve rained out the parade, what will happen?
Okay, so first, I do think we’re going to land on Mars in the next twenty years. My bet is the late 2030s. NASA is devoting a whole bunch of money and effort to bring astronauts back to the Moon by the end of this decade. Once we do so in, say, 2028, a New Space Race will begin between the United States, China, the EU, and India. This space race will be fueled by geopolitical tensions on Earth, including growing boldness by China, who sees the 2030s as a chance to prove itself the new world superpower.
So, after the US lands on the Moon, China announces its plans to land on Mars by the end of the 2030s in order to leapfrog America. In 2033, China lands its taikonauts on the lunar south pole, planting the red banner; China is catching up. This lights the fires under NASA’s rockets—proverbially, and kinda literally too: NASA launches the unmanned Ares I craft to Mars, which brings supplies for a planned American surface outpost. Back on Earth, China and the US come close to war over US arms sales to Taiwan; President Gavin Newsom backs down, humiliating the country.
In 2035, NASA launches Ares II, an unmanned mission to Martian orbit in order to set up a base on Phobos. However, the mission experiences technical failures in Earth orbit in a major setback. But that same year, Ares III reaches Phobos, with remote-piloted drones forging a base on the tiny moon.
The next year, Ares IV blasts off toward the Red Planet. Carrying three astronauts, it treks several months through the solar system before docking at Phobos. From there, the astronauts descend to the surface at Arabia Terra and plant the American flag on Mars in late 2037. The mission captain says the words, “We come to the world of the god of war, to remind us of the path of peace.”
In 2040 and 2042, additional American missions bring astronauts to Mars, exploring different parts of the planet, including Hellas crater, where the astronauts find water brine, but no signs of life. Each of these missions last less than two weeks before the astronauts pack their bags, head up to Phobos, and catch a ride back to Earth. In total, twenty American astronauts and a few buddies from abroad make it to Mars.
While these astronauts are roving about the Red Planet, the scramble for the Moon picks up, with the EU joining the US and China. Notably, MP Minerals, a private American rare-earth mineral company, hires SpaceX to land a probe on the Moon in 2041 too; corporations are very interested in extraterrestrial minerals.
The tensions of the Taiwan crisis aren’t gone, however; in 2039 Chinese taikonauts raid an American lunar base for its supplies; the US demands repayment, but China hides behind the Outer Space Treaty, which suggests that national ownership is moot in space.
However, in the 2040s, the race for Mars dies down; domestic instability within and tensions between China and the US drive governments to refocus funds to conventional armed forces and orbital missiles. In the late 2050s, tensions boil over into war: first between India and Taliban-dominated Pakistan, then next between the US and China over Taiwan. After 8 years of fighting and 300 million deaths, the United States, EU, and India come out as the bruised victors of the Third World War.
From the deserts of Mars, this fighting almost seems insignificant: the tribal squabbles of a distant blue-green speck. But the post-war peace treaties determine the future of Mars. Citing the scramble for the Moon as a cause of the war, ambassadors from the victorious powers gather in Amsterdam in 2070 to rewrite the Outer Space Treaty. They come up with the Amsterdam Forum; a diplomatic channel to process claims to extraterrestrial turf. Basically, if you want exclusive control over a certain region on Mars or the Moon, you gotta land people there.
This agreement begins the Third Space Race. It’s basically a speculative land-grab; the Great Powers send rovers to the Moon, Mars, and probes to asteroids less for the science and moreso to plant claims on what might be exploitable in the future. In 2073, the United States lands astronauts on the Moon again, trying to relive its fading glory days. In 2075, the South American Union does for the first time…. with the other parts of the world ravaged by the war, South America presents the foremost geopolitical threat to the United States.
Mars is no exception. Fearing South America’s ambitious plans for the Red Planet, the United States again marshals immense sums of cash to fund another Mars mission: astronauts return to the Red Planet in 2078, planting the American flag on Olympus Mons. Pooling their strength, Europe and South America team up and bring astronauts to Mars in 2080.
The next twenty years are the Heroic Age of Exploration for Mars: bold explorers, ignoring the dangers, circumnavigate the Red Planet. They discover strange areographic formations, liquid water, and even questionable evidence for ancient single-cell life. These explorers form outposts on the surface and in orbit, trekking along in rovers or in spaceplanes. Not everything is peachy, though; many lose their life in accidents, while many of these explorers are actually employed by rising megacorporations, like Berkshire Hathaway, Glencore, BHP, and Vale.
Allying with national governments and international unions, these corporations invest in the creation of the first long-term Martian bases, including the Anglo-American Aphrodite Station on Arabia Terra, the South American Phoenix Outpost in the Argyre Basin, and the European Helios Station on Elysium Mons.
As mentioned, these bases are all speculative at first; they’re huge money drains, but the countries and corporations spend the money since they believe they’re laying the foundations for a new civilization with infinite profit margins.
In the 22nd Century, these Martian settlements continue to develop, so that by 2123, there are on average about 4,000 people on Mars at any given time. Most of the people there are engineers and trained surveyors, but a large portion are physicists and biologists. That latter category begins laying the foundation for the terraforming of Mars. First, they develop the first Martian farmlands, which are grown in greenhouses. Ignoring any directives from the Amsterdam Forum, the biologists also begin to spread basic organisms like carbon-consuming rock lichen and cyanobacteria to the Martian surface; they hope this will warm the atmosphere and spread oxygen in the long term.
In the 2130s, disaster strikes on Earth: in the United States, demographic and climactic crisis brings about the rise to power of a technocratic military dictatorship. Embodying the worst aspects of the country, the military regime begins an immense bloodletting of the American population. It next targets the South American Union, beginning the Fourth World War. Fifteen years of immense violence follows, including the evisceration of whole cities.
On Mars, about half of the explorers and scientists are left stranded; famine and riots spread, with survivors banding together and proclaiming the Martian Republic in 2137, a century after the initial landing. While founded on idealist and desperate grounds, the Martian Republic soon becomes a dictatorship by the corporate-aligned security forces of the Red Planet, who horde what little food can be found. Famine spreads; most don’t survive.
In 2150, regular contact resumes between Earth and Mars, but conditions on the blue-green world have changed. The US has fallen into a new era of corporate domination and division. The European Federation and the South American Union, also torn apart by the war, have fallen to a secondary status. Instead, the megacorporations, enriched by the conflict, have become the new great powers. Sending security forces to weakened Mars, they cement their control.
The original leadership of the Martian Republic is deported to Earth or purged; the Red Planet becomes a purely fiscal venture. For the rest of the century, Mars is dominated by feuding, pragmatic companies. Investing immense sums into swarming mining drones, the companies scrape across the surface of Mars for anything valuable. The drones then expand the initial colonies into underground cities; beneath the rock, the employees of the corpos are safe, for the most part, from the radiation of space.
Corporate mergers, sabotage, and a series of wars between puppeteered nation-states desperate for cash brings to rise a single supercorporation: Glencore. Mars is no exception; after a quick invasion, Glencore establishes the Mars Division Authority, a single corporate government for the Red Planet. With the mineral resources of Earth gradually being depleted, Glencore supercharges its mining of Mars. While most of the labor is done by AI robots, humans are still needed to oversee processes; the population of Mars gradually grows until it’s about 50,000 by the year 2220.
The rest of the solar system, meanwhile, sees a similar fate. Glencore mines asteroids, scouts the surface of Venus for anything valuable by drone, and even lands astronauts on the twilight craters of Mercury. The gem of the Glencore Empire, though, is the Jovian moon of Titan, whose surface is dense with hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. This fuel is then used for rockets and in powerplants throughout the solar system, including on Mars.
As you could imagine, Earth isn’t doing so well in the mid-23rd century. Climate change has been slowed, but the Earth is still getting hotter, and hotter. Sea levels have grown high enough to sink places like Florida and Bangladesh beneath the waves; massive refugee crises, and therefore radical exclusionary regimes, are especially common. Glencore doesn’t care too much, though; its executive board is filthy rich, and that’s the bottom line.
It does, however, devote effort to creating a backup planet with Mars, just in case it loses Earth. This means constructing dome-cities in craters, complete with expansive greenhouses and vast underground water stores from Martian aquifers.
Over the decades, though, an exile community develops in the wilds of Mars: these are mainly disgruntled ex-employees, who quit Glencore and run off into the desert either for payment disputes or ideological disagreements with the supercorporation. They form makeshift terrariums in underground caves, canyons, or deep craters. Strange ideologies and new religions grow among them: archaic branches of Sufism, anarcho-primitivist-communism, and alien-worshipping cults.
Glencore occasionally launches campaigns to destroy these desert-communes, but for the most part leaves them be. This lets them develop an underground network across the Martian cities, forging alliances with powerful local figures who resent being bossed around from Earth.
And Earth continues to rot.
All empires collapse eventually. Glencore keeps its power not through allegiance, but through cash. So, when a series of worldwide droughts hit planet Earth in the 2290s, bringing the whole economic system into chaos, everyone blames Glencore. Workers across the world go on strike and are soon joined by overworked corporate armies. Puppet countries crumble to revolution, leading to new radical regimes across the world. The Terran Revolutions don’t have any unified ideology—some are democratic, others communist, some are Christian, others Muslim—but all of them are anti-Glencore.
In the face of the immense wave, Glencore shatters apart. On Mars, authority is split between ex-Glencore soldiers, the desert communes, and the employee union. When the soldiers rush to claim authority, the other factions move against them, beginning a Martian civil war. Orbital gun-barges bombard cities, while soldiers force people to march into the deserts with only a few hours’ worth of oxygen. After three years of war, security forces have taken control of the Red Planet. They establish the STATE OF MARS.
At the top of this dictatorship is a junta of security bosses: the Executive Board. For the first few years of military rule, this junta controls all legislation and all governance. However, in 2305, in the face of continuing unrest, the junta passes new legislation to create a more democratic government: the PROPRIETORSHIP OF MARS.
Everyone who works on Mars is given a few shares in the Propriety. All these shareholders have votes based on their number of shares. They determine the Board of Directors, which is kind of like a legislature. The Executive Board, still dominated by the security chiefs, then proposes measures to the Board of Directors for approval. They also nominate a CEO, but he’s basically a puppet. So, 24th century Mars is a fusion between a representative democracy, a company, and a military dictatorship. Even though Earth is in the midst of another world war, Mars at this point has become mostly self-sustainable, with local farms growing enough food to feed the 70,000 inhabitants of the Red Planet. Those Martian denizens aren’t completely satisfied with the government of Mars of course; there is much to be angry about. Maybe one day, they’ll rise up in revolt again.
But what do you think will happen? Will Mars become a democracy one day? Will Mars and Earth fight a war? Let me know in the comments below, and if you like this video don’t forget to subscribe. And also thanks to my patron, userseq. Adios.
