Martian Chronicles Rebooted!

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-08-22 02:28:34

We now know that Mars is nothing like what Ray Bradbury imagined, but suppose it was, really? Mars had no native lifeforms intitially, but one million years ago, the planet was the subject of an Alien terraforming project and sometime between then and now the aliens, not native to Mars mysteriously disappeared. The result of this is that Mars has a viable echo system derived from modified Earth organisms. Apparently the aliens found Earthlife more useful and adaptable for modifying the environment on Mars that their own life forms which they brought with them. Some cousins of the modern human race also call Mars home. Mars is littered with ruins and giant canals that crisscross the planet's surface. There is a huge volcano calle Olympus Mons and several smaller but still huge volcanos that were never seen to erupt. There is the Ocean Borealis in the Northern Hemisphere and a smaller Hellas sea in the southern hemisphere. Puzzling to planetary geologists are all the eroded craters and the short fossil history of the planet. It became fairly evident that the aliens arrived on the planet about one million years ago, but what subsequently happened to them remains a mystery to this day.

It is now 2006 AD, the Apollo program grew into the Aries program, which then expanded into an overall colonization program that started at around the turn of the century. At first massive expendible rockets were used with throwaway stages, later some savings was realized with the flyback booster. Alot of nations joined in the competition to be the first to send men to Mars, and later to establish the first colonies there. There was at first certain apprehension about dangerous Martian microbes, by the competition was so fierce that these concerns were quickly put aside, and the concerns later proved unfounded. To date no useful artifacts were found from the alien ruins, the technology was one million years old and no longer operable. What has been apparent is that the aliens were somewhat large in stature, standing 9 feet tall at adulthood, and they had the capacity to freeze themselves and later revive themselves after a long interstellar voyage and terraforming was complete. No way could their muscles or their skeletons have supported their weight on Earth, they seemed adapted for a low gravity world such as Mars, but they were not from Mars. What happened to them is not know, there are the rusting hulks of millions of alien robots littering the Martian desert, none of them work anymore, they just lie their and rust, the wind and the sand buries them and uncovers some more in return. Even an ancient spaceship was discovered resting on the surface of Phobos, apparently it was a starship at one time. From what we could gather, it was pushed by thermo-nuclear bombs, it had a massive pusher plate, who knows where this starship came from? Certainly we can't use it, it has been partially disassembled and it has suffered a million years of micrometeor damage. What is apparent is that these aliens initially at least weren't much more advanced that we were, but what happened to them? they seem to have depleted the Solar System of most of its short period comets, they have also left their mark on Ganymede and Earth Moon. Well aside form their current absence , there is Mars itself habitable for humans, what shall we do with it?

Robert M. Blevins · 2006-09-13 22:27:08

Some of your story there could be applied to a future Earth... 8)

Also, how long has mankind (in his present form) actually been on the Earth? After you answer that, ask yourself this: How long have say...sharks, been on the Earth?

Explain how we progressed so rapidly and took control of the entire planet in such a short time and you win the Nobel Prize in Science. Unless you believe that Erich von Daniken already gave us the answer a while back.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-13 23:08:09

The trick is to keep the technology comprehensible and society understandable while the humans remain human one million years in the future. I find it very hard to imagine one million years of contiuous technological progress. I have some imaginings of us uploading anf becoming electronic life forms in some type of computer matrix. This would make a kind of sense, because if were were computer simulations of human beings in a simulated universe run on a vast computer network and the program was written just right, we would then be able to control our environment to a much greater extent that we ever could in the real Universe.

For instance, imagine a simulation of Earth with humans on it with an Earth like environment. If a sim-human wanted to travel somewere, he would just have to utter some command words that the computer would respond to, and that computer would simply reassign his coordinates in the simulated world making him teleport to the location he wanted. People could live in houses that would need no doors, they just teleport outside when they wanted fresh air or they could command the computer to make a window appear in their homes and a door when they needed to go outside. When the sim human got hungry, he could simply open the magic cupboard and a cooked steaming hot meal would be ready their waiting for him. Aging would be wholly unnecessary, the computer could simply regenerate the human body as often as necessary to make it stay young, people would be nearly immortal, and as long as their was information about them in the computer, they could always be ressurected from whatever accident befell them. In short life as a simulated human would be much better than that of a real human, but we want real humans in our story don't we.

So where do we get the real humans from?

Perhaps from a Cryonics institute. There are people who arrange to have their bodies frozen after death in hopes of a future technological resurection, perhaps after this happens, the bodies are sent into space, way out into the Solar System in order to stay frozen. After about a million years, the frozen bodies somehow get to Mars and their are machines to resurect them, either by unfreezing them, or using the information from their frozen bodies to make other human body that duplicate the memories and personalities of those individuals frozen, and of course make them all about 18 years old physically. I guess this sort of thing would resemble Riverworld in some respects. People would be resurrected by machines and then the machines would step aside and let the drama begin. The human protagonists would find themselves on a terraformed Mars, and during their journey they will find out why Mars was terraformed, where the people who terraformed it are, and also why they are here. Seems like a fairly decent plot for a science fiction story, don't you think?

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#1 2006-08-22 02:28:34

Re: Martian Chronicles Rebooted!

#2 2006-09-13 22:27:08

Re: Martian Chronicles Rebooted!

#3 2006-09-13 23:08:09

Re: Martian Chronicles Rebooted!

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