New Mars Forums

I personally cannot really conceive of a situation where you have both a significant number of interstellar civilizations and interstellar civilizations that are utterly harmless pacificists. There would be at least one group of known maniacs out there (us) and I strongly suspect that the sorts of technology that let you get into space are so closely correlated with destructive mischief that it's a good bet that anybody cruising the stars is likely to be able to put up a good fight.

Given that, I'm going to say that I think we're functionally alone (no other alien species that are spatially and developmentally near us) because the earth has been a plum prize for hundreds of millions, billions even, of years. While aliens might studiously not settle on a planet with primitive intelligent species, similar scruples probably wouldn't exist for nonsapient complex life. At the very least, I'd expect illegal colonization on the sly.

Well, mathematically Alcubierre's drive works in relativity. So faster than life travel results in paradoxes... it's not like physics isn't screwy enough (quantum physics) so what's one more bit of insanity?

Barley. Hops. Unfiltered beer. There's vitamins created in the fermentation process which is removed from beers nowadays for reasons of look/storage. I suppose sugar beets would make the trip too.

As far as the animals go, aquaculture is nice. If some sort of sea salt substitute could be could be cooked up, fish farming would definitely be the way to go, as they're not very wasteful for food. Salmon, cod... mmm.

And as for land animals, perhaps dwarf strains could be bred on Earth from the calmer breeds of cattle and so forth. Such a breed would be easier to transport, and regression to the mean, or Martian cattle ranchers, would return them to a larger size later. I would definitely bring chickens, though. Probably turkeys as well, and ducks can hang out in the fish farm domes.

Talk about paranoia.

Anyways, while I doubt we're 'alone' in the strict sense of the word, if the nearest intelligent life is in a different galaxy, we're alone for all reasonable intents and purposes. Actually, I find the possibility that we're alone not frightening at all. If we die out, we're a bit to dead to care anymore, and if we don't die out and instead spread through space, the 'alone' part will be wiped out by genetic drift, engineering, and time. Besides, the entire Milky Way would be the empire of man. What's to dislike? The only downside is that we might screw up and kill ourselves. We would face that anyways; the notion that Alien Race X 10000 light years away might soldier on carrying the torch of intelligence if we wipe ourselves out isn't what you'd call reassuring.

So by default I fear aliens more than solitude. After all, who knows what kind of oddballs are out there? The aliens probably think likewise. Sometimes I imagine the following conversation taking place at a distant star:

ALIEN #1: I'm frightened of this planet. Maybe we should drop an asteroid on them or something just in case... look, this group is building nukes, and that group keeps blowing up civilians in malls! What if they joined forces?

ALIEN #2: Well, let's wait and see. Maybe the guys building nukes will get rid of the people blowing up malls.

The first alien is my great fear, that from a distant vantage point, all human cultures sort of meld together in an indistinguishable blur, and all they see is the sum of all evils.

Perhaps you could breed smaller animals of the species you're going to introduce. They'll eventually end up getting big again if you let them roam wild over a terraformed Mars.

Actually, I prefer a small number of introduced species, and neatness be damned. Just get the plants in the ground and let loose a bunch of critters. God only knows what kind of weird ecosystem will result after a few centuries, but it will be distinctively Martian, I can tell you that. Any unoccupied niches will eventually be radiated into anyways, so setting up anything beyond the bare minimum is wasting money on transport.

I certainly would live there, even if I had to live in a dome, and dome failure would be nasty but not catastrophic if sensible precautions are taken. It would have to be a fairly large tear in the dome - I mean someone-drove-the-rover-through sized - to deflate rapidly enough to put you in danger in a large dome. Certainly long enough to get in your house or some shelter in the meantime. I imagine pressurized doors will be part of the Martian building code for a long time.

I believe that the spaceport cities will simply be the industrial cities of Mars I outlined in the first bit. Whatever city is closest to or on the equator will have a geographical (areographical? heh) edge on the others, but the businesses will go where the people are and the people will land where the businesses are. That cycle of reinforcement will drive things.

True, the pride of a Martian city won't be in accomplishments. Gardens and pools would be the symbols of 'big city'... but only a city with significant industrial capacity is going to have the money and population to build those on a big scale.

Heh, Central Park, New Columbia. Has a nice ring to it.

I completely agree with the basketball idea. People would bounce around like they have trampolines in their shoes, it would be nuts, like the old NBA Jam game brought to life. I don't even like basketball and think it would be fun. The 14 or 15 foot height makes sense, but it's likely that the first hoops will be bolted to the side of a hab or something and so the actual 'official' Mars basketball hoop height is likely to be determined by the height of the wall or whatever.

I predict that bowling is a major Martian pasttime, too. If nothing else you can play in a hallway. Same with pingpong and pool. Board games and card games are likely to be a big way to waste time too, same with video games, although those aren't really sports.

However, until they get the rinks set up for hockey, heh, there really isn't a sport that I can think of that allows for the meaningless release of agression and tension. So I predict a Martian innovation here of some form: a contact sport which can be played in a small indoor area with no more equipment than a ball... and maybe your spacesuit minus the helmet.

And Hobbits liked their holes comfortable, and considered a hole in the ground the very best of homes.

I forsee very weird, subterranean architecture to be the norm on Mars for a long, long time. The reason is simple: at first, it will be necessary, and the next generation of people will view it as only the natural and right way to live. Even today, with the same McHousing techniques from coast to coast, floorplans vary wildly from place to place for the simple reason that they echo older plans which echo older plans which in turn echo whatever plans were forced on the original houses by neccessity.

So houses on Mars will probably remain buried or semi-buried, and I predict this will hold true even if they terraform the place, although slight changes will probably be made to the exterior design over time.

I have one prediction/suggestion for Martian home design: an 'inside out' room. Basically, this would be a small greenhouse/atrium attached to or within the home. There would be a small plastic dome to keep the atmosphere in and some sort of plexiglass cosmic ray shield over that. What this room would have is a few plants and some grass and be done up to look like the *outside* of an Earth home. A patch of the old outside on the new world, so to speak. I got the idea from the house an eccentric millionaire built *under* Las Vegas. His house had a room done up to look like 'outdoors'. I imagine such a thing would be easy enough to build for a house, and it might even have a marginally useful purpose - you could grow herbs and flowers there, for instance, or keep a chicken in there.

Let's face it, the big problem on Mars, probably up until the point where serious railroad yardage gets plunked down, is going to be transportation. But just how big a problem is transportation going to be? And how will transportation affect Mars settlement?

As far as I can see, there are - short term - two different ways that will be commonly used to get around Mars. One is familiar and prosaic, the other technologically advanced and does not even exist yet. Those would be the common as dirt truck and the hi-tech NIMF. And I think that both will lead to a largely decentralized settlement pattern, probably conforming to a powers law.

The first thing is that Mars will have three major types of settlements in its early years:

1) Scientific bases. These will be located near sites of interest for geological or possibly biological study, might be temporary, and certainly will be widely scattered all over the face of the planet. These are likely to use NIMF as their primary means of transporting frieght and people.

2) Industrial centers. These would be centralized locations processing metals, plastics, etc. They would have a nuclear power plant and all the other amenities. Likely there would only be one or two "Mars Cities" like this supplying the local needs for machined parts.

3) Farming communities. Given that you have to create, Netherlands-like, your arable land, reclaming it from the Red Planet, farmland is going to be at a premium. Building farms in the immediate vicinity of one of the town/city industrial centers is unlikely to be good due to the fact that they're likely to be slagging the soil for water and doing miscellaneous messy industrial processes in the area. Using NIMF to haul around grain is crazy in the long run - do you really want that many reactors flying through your atmosphere? - so the likely pattern would be a light rail line built to the nearest city, and delivery to this railhead via bipropellant trucks from outlying farms.

What will all this mean for Martian society? The existence of one or two industrial centers placed in the best locations - geothermal power available, etc - which will be far larger than everything else will probably foster an ego, much like New York has an ego. Residents would probably think of themselves, consciously or unconsciously, as being right at the center of humanity's grand new adventure. Earth's cities are far away; after the generation of Earth immigrants passes away, the big metropolises of Earth would be somewhat unreal to them.

Second off, there will be some number of smaller 'farm towns' which appear at the end of the rail lines from those big cities. Basically, these would be places where things are traded, not made, where schools are (or at least the teachers are, if students telecommute), and where whatever government functions for the surrounding area are held. These would very probably fall into a pattern of everone knows everyone small town life long familiar to anyone who's ever lived in such a small town. I think it's universal experience in human settlements of between 150-5000 people, where it's too large to know everyone personally but small enough to know someone who knows anyone. We could term this a Friend Of A Friend size settlement.

But last would be the farm habs themselves. There's no reason to build them right next to the railheads; anywhere within truck range will be fine. And given the sorts of people likely to settle Mars, adventurous people who are mentally capable of enduring more isolation than the norm and signed up to settle a new frontier, it's likely that small clusters of farm domes with a hab or two will be scattered at random across the landscape within that truck range. Probably each one would either be just within or just outside of visual range of the next, depending on whether the particular settler who built it liked to have a constant visual reminder of other people or whether they preferred the illusion that they were Lord Of All They Survey.

Mars being a claustrophobic place in one way and a completely agoraphobic one in another because of the combination of needing to live in pressurized environments contrasted with the vast, wide open desertlike terrain of Mars, the colonists were likely to be a pretty odd bunch psycologically after a generation or two, and I think the traits generated would reinforce the above settlement pattern. The eventual result, I think, would be a kind of clannishness and tribalism on Mars. It could take the form of extended family units, as usually happens on Earth, but it could also take other forms. An interesting possibility is that in a society which starts out with the internet, but is partially isolated from Earth's 'net by distance and the speed of light, might develop a clannishness based around computer groups or societies. With your initial blood ties probably limited to your immediate family, as I doubt entire extended families will move to Mars from today's industrialized nations, these might very well be the most consistent social contacts, and the most geographically (aerographically?) dispersed in all probability.

In any case, I highly doubt socialism, in any real form, is going to develop on Mars. There would be no particular way to force anyone to conform to it; if the people over at Chryse Planitia don't want to do it, what are you going to do, send in the Marines? For that matter, any social engineering of any kind is going to fail. Mars is too hostile, and people too scarce, for anyone to waste time on such projects.