Mars

Section II: Mars

She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hands. Her gloves broke through the duricrust. It felt like a layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more brittle. Like hardened mud. And cold! Their gloves weren’t heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn’t enough insulation when actually touching the ground. It was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wow! Around 215 degrees Kelvin, she recalled, or minus 90 degrees Centigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at its worst. Her fingertips were numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements like their boot soles. That would make the gloves thicker and less flexible. She’d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.

 She had been laughing. She stood and walked to another freight drop, humming “Royal Garden Blues.” She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal crate. One John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semiautonomous, fully programmable. Prostheses and spare parts included.

She felt her face stretched into a big grin. Backhoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump trucks, construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plain.

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

The Baker of Mars

by Karl Schroeder

The flapjacks fry up quick; Myrna can tell they need to be flipped when the batter’s rim dulls and the bubbles across its top burst like little fumaroles. Craters on a Georges Méliès moon.

“Hey, Myrna! Is your coffee good?” She looks up from the grill to see Hartney holding up his cup. The new guy standing next to him seems embarrassed, but Myrna’s not about to let Hartney scare away a potential customer. She grabs the box of grounds and sidles down the galley kitchen to the front counter. “Check it for yourself.” The doubtful customer holds up his phone, which sees the box, scans it, and checks its provenance in the global fair exchange blockchain. “Chavez Farm, Costa Rica.” He leans into a trapezoid of sunlight and reads whatever the Chavezes have to say about their family-run operation, or maybe checks where their coffee is roasted, how it’s distributed, how the chain is audited—whatever might influence his decision to drink this particular brew in this particular diner. Finally he shrugs. “S’okay. I’ll have a latte.”

Hartney laughs. “Awful lot of fuss for a cup of joe.”

Myrna starts to multitask between the latte and the ‘jacks. “What do you know? You live on Mars.”

New guy does a double-take; Myrna can see him realize that most of the people in the little corner diner are eating breakfast. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, not even a sane time for a shift change. “You guys are homesteaders?”

Hartney sits up straighter, trying to shine past his thinning hair, polyester shirt, and pasty complexion. Myrna loves him for it. “I’m already a billionaire!” he proclaims, to guffaws and jeers from up and down the joint. “It’s true. I’m one of the Thousand.”

The First Thousand on Mars. Sounds more impressive than this corner diner in Tampa, crowded with a dozen other Thousands. “‘Jacks are up,” says Myrna, then, “here’s yer latte.”

“So what’s it like living on Martian time?”  

“Adapt or die,” somebody says before Hartney can. Hartney’s seamed face falls a little, but he adds, “How are we gonna survive there if we can’t do it here?” Most of the breakfast crowd look like they’ve been moving one time zone a day for the last five years. Which they more or less have. The Martian day is 40 minutes longer than Earth’s.

“Hey, Myrna does it,” says Grace from the front window, where she’s soaking up the sun. “And she’s not even a Martian.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Myrna objects. “I have a stake.”

“Yeah? What stake?”

She laughs. “You guys.”

And it’s true: who else is going to feed these dreamers—these soft rebels and temporal exiles—their breakfast at their real breakfast time, their lunches at their lunchtime? They can barely take care of themselves, telecommuting to a whole other planet. Someone needs to watch over them.

“Well, good luck,” says the new guy, in a tone that causes Hartney to look up sharply.

“It’s a sound venture,” the brave settler objects. “Pioneers always hit some bumps on the road.”

“Some?” The new guy snorts, and everything goes quiet. “Sorry,” he adds quickly, “but having the Feds and Russia threaten to pull out isn’t just a ‘bump.’ If your assets get stranded, you could lose your whole stake.”

“We’ll weather it,” insists Hartney; then he turns away. Conversation over.

A few minutes later Myrna rings a bell on the counter. “Closing in ten,” she announces. The diner is just a sideline. She’s got a secondhand Baxter boxing her deliveries, but even with drone service she hasn’t been able to fully automate. There are pork and coconut buns for a restaurant down the road, cupcakes for a kid’s party, and lots of full meals for Martian shut-ins. She’s not about to tell the new guy that Hartney is one of her more high-functioning customers, but it’s true. 

She hurries them all out the door. Myrna’s mind isn’t on the new deliveries, as it should be if she wants repeat business. One particular bag, stuffed with white boxes still radiating heat, stays atop her mind’s inventory as she shuts down the ovens, locks the cabinets, and powers down the register. He hasn’t eaten properly since last year. This is his first order in three days.

As half her orders float off under drones, each a little wandering cloud, Myrna calls a car and gathers the straps of the remaining bags into two knotted handfuls. She shouldn’t worry. But she’s going to make Wekesa her first stop.

She leaves the car by the curb, advising it to lock itself. The air conditioning’s running to keep the cakes cool. It’s not her car—in fact, she has no idea who owns it—but it’s quite visible on the autosharing blockchain. This is a trustworthy vehicle. It’s not going to steal her cakes.

Myrna trots up three flights of steps since the elevator is out. There’s no air conditioning in the halls here, and it smells of vinyl, carpet glue, and unsuccessful cooking. She hears voices and TVs even though it’s the middle of the workday. That’s normal; a lot of people are unemployed. 

After all the hurrying to get here, the long intermission after she knocks on Wekesa Ballo’s door makes her self-conscious. She feels like a video game character on pause. Just as she’s raising her hand to knock again, the door opens a crack.

“I texted you,” she says to the bleary eye that punctuates the strip of black. “And what are you doing with the lights off? It’s 9:00 a.m. in Kasei Valles.”

“Ten, actually.” He opens the door and the smells that waft out are of electronics, bleach, laundry soap. “But I’m not at Kasei right now.”

Myrna frowns around at the dark in Ballo’s apartment. “Where are you, the other side of the planet?”

“Practically.” He’s a hunched black shape eclipsing computer monitors as he takes the bag of food to his bare little kitchen.

“Wekesa, that’s crazy.” First there’s the 40-minute permanent jet lag, and now he’s shifted time zones? There are only a few places he could be, and none make sense. “Why aren’t you working your claim?”

He’s not even bothering with plates, just wolfing down the food while standing at the counter. Hasn’t asked her to sit. As if her question was time-delayed like his systems on Mars, he suddenly glances up. “I had a visitor. After that … I dunno. I was angry, I guess.”

“Angry? What kind of visitor?”

“A ghost.” 

She can’t tell if he’s joking; in the dim light his face is a black cutout save for faint crescents the monitors cast on his eyes. “Want to see?”

“You’re starting to creep me out.” Reluctantly, she goes to the playpen—her private name for the round, padded region of Wekesa’s living room that’s been given over to his VR rig, which is centered on an omnidirectional treadmill. There are bungee straps hanging from the ceiling that you can hook yourself to, but Wekesa never uses them. When Myrna first started playing VR games, the rigs had been big goggle affairs. Using them was like strapping a bowling shoe to your face. As she steps into the rig today, lasers paint a Martian landscape on her retinas; she’s there instantly and seamlessly. She hears Wekesa approaching and moments later his avatar appears next to hers.

Myrna cranes her neck at the sky. “Shouldn’t it be morning at Kasei Valles?” 

“This isn’t live, it’s a recording. Watch.”

In the grand old cathedrals of Europe, the pipe organs have up to a second’s delay between your pressing a key and the note venting through the brass flutes. As you play, the sound washing around and through you is already in your past, unmoored from your actions. She’s often thought that the homesteaders, miners, and builders of Mars must experience their world that way.

Her shadow is short under the butterscotch sky. When she starts walking, the shadow remains behind, pinned to the ground. Turning, she sees that it’s not actually hers, but is being cast by the tall, spindly telepresence bot that Wekesa is struggling to pay for through his prospecting work. There are thousands just like it all over the planet. Like most, this one is accompanied by a little rover that can carry rocks, and a half dozen or so drones with huge fans. It’s part of the private-public venture that is building settlements, industries, and life support in advance of a hoped-for human landing. Wekesa has sunk all his money into buying this bot and getting it transported to another planet, in the hope that what they build there will someday attract clients and customers beyond the launch companies and speculators.

On a normal day the drones fan out around Wekesa’s bot, recording the whole landscape in LIDAR and high-definition video. This 3D environment gets beamed back to Earth, and Wekesa can wander around in it as if it were a game level. When he finds something interesting, he’ll go through the motions of investigating it, though of course he’s just a virtual pip in the game and isn’t—yet—affecting anything real. When he’s recorded a set of actions he’s satisfied with, he uploads the sequence to Mars and the bot plays it out on the real planet: walking, kneeling, turning over a rock, splitting it with a hammer. This happens anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour after Wekesa’s done the commit, and meanwhile he’ll have moved on to something else of interest. Then, in a flash, the results of his last command play for him. He can rethink his next course of action, or simply commit immediately. His Martian counterpart is smart enough to pick up fumbled objects, to improvise in simple ways. Usually he doesn’t have to redo anything.

Thus, by halting turns, is Mars explored. Somewhere over the crisp horizon, work gangs are building cities, though no human has yet set foot on the planet. Like organists, the workers play 10 minutes or a half hour ahead of reality, picking up girders from ground onto which they haven’t yet been unloaded, committing as a team. They achieve that focus which, in the flow of the fugue, demands they experience not what exists now, but rather what they are summoning into being.

Hartney claims that it’s actually easy to do. Mars isn’t like a place, it’s like a sepia-toned photograph. A half hour from now, everything will be exactly where you expect it to be unless you moved it yourself. Nothing but you changes or transits the uneven landscape, except the imperceptibly tilting sun.

So Myrna swears and almost falls down when she turns and sees a tall, imperious woman striding toward her over the rocky red dunes.

“Wekesa Ballo, we must talk!” the woman shouts. “You are taking too much!” She raises one arm dramatically to point at the tumbled rocks.

“Who are you to wear that face?” snarls Wekesa—not here and now, but in the recording.

The figure tilts its head. “I am Kasei Valles. I am the place where you stand. I am the thing you steal.”

There’s a confused sound from Wekesa. The tall woman raises her chin and says, “Are you listening to me? You have sold too many well concessions on this land. You are draining the brine faster than the aquifer can be renewed.”

There’s a long silence, then a fumbling sound. The beige landscape comes apart like a cough of smoke, and there’s Wekesa, glowering in his apartment with his arms folded. 

“Wekesa, what was that?” 

Myrna’s worst fear is confirmed as he says, “She was my wife. Eloise.” 

Myrna has a strange double-moment now: on the one hand she’s feeling for Wekesa, who is still mourning. It’s concern for him and the darkness of his mind that makes her come here. 

At the same time, a long-dormant part of her is running inventory on the hacks you’d need to get this effect. VR ghosts aren’t unusual; this isn’t even a particularly offensive one, but it is the first she’s heard of to affect the Martian homesteaders. To make such a ghost, she’d have to break into Wekesa’s system (and she’s been keeping up her skills, she can imagine several ways to do this), then inject a worm to ransack his image files for a face common enough to use to stitch together a 3D avatar. Then the worm would open an external port and become the interface to this … walking propaganda piece.

“It must be the Pristines,” she says. There’s a sizable movement aimed at leaving Mars untouched. It started back when they thought there might be life there. Now the movement just taps into people’s romantic longing for “untouched nature.” 

“It’s shocking that they gave it her face, Wekesa—though that might be an accident. I mean—sorry, I know it’s been hard for you to move on …”

There’s a moment’s pause, then he laughs. “It’s not that. I figured it was some Pristiner trick. I’m not angry because it looks like her. I’m angry because what it says is true.”

They leave the playpen, and sitting with his hands folded, Wekesa tells her the rest. “It pestered me. Followed me about for the next three days. And not just me. This … thing, has been chasing other homesteaders too.”

She thinks of her cheerful morning crowd. “Nobody’s talking about it.”

“They’re embarrassed to admit they’ve been hacked. Our contracts say we’re liable for security breaches.”

“Aaah.”

“Whatever this is, it takes on the form of the person you’ve got the most pictures of in your library. For some, it’s one of their kids. Others, a favorite movie star.”

“It says it’s Kasei Valles? The place?”

He nods. “Depends on where you are. There’s Sacra Fossae, Mawrth Vallis. Some of them just watch the homesteaders, squatting on a boulder like vultures. Others demand we leave.”

“Why hasn’t anything been done?”

Wekesa splays his hands and rolls his eyes. “The communications company says they’re harmless. The VR equivalent of spam. In fact, they said since the ghosts have assigned themselves to features in the landscape, like the hills and plains, that means those are taken now and nobody else can spam them. So … better these ghosts than something else.”

Myrna knows this is bull. She could have written the code to do something like this—back when computer programmer was still a job description. She knows if you can get through to the VR interface, you might be able to do more. “But are they just virtual? I mean, are they just in your interface here at home, or are they on Mars too?” If you could upload a virus or worm to the actual bots on Mars … “Wekesa, has there been sabotage?”

“There are rumors, of crawlers gone missing, things unbuilt in the night ….” He shakes his head. “But there are always rumors of ghosts on Mars. The point is, as long as the ghosts are just yelling at us, the company has no incentive to chase down the perpetrator. 

“The problem, Myrna, is that the ghost is right. We are draining the aquifer too fast. Before we’re even able to build the settlement, the resources to run it will be gone.”

Myrna’s heard nothing about this either. “But the settlement plan—”

“Is just a plan. There’s no one to enforce it. The U.N. treaty says nobody owns the land, but we do own what we take from it. What kind of behavior do you think that encourages?”

“Huh. But the corporations can’t recoup their investments unless the settlements are built—” 

He’s nodding. “—And the politicians don’t want to guarantee their loans, because they see what’s happening to the resources but have no powers to set policy for land use. The governments are pulling their funding. Some homesteaders are rushing to sell raw materials while there are still buyers, while others build anything they can while the corporations are still paying. But the plan has turned into a race to the bottom. By the time they’re built, the settlements won’t be fit to live in because we’ll have stripped their hinterlands of the resources needed to run them. The corporations don’t care because they only need to show a profit in the next quarter. They’ve shifted from actually planning the settlements to selling the dream of Mars here at home …” He sighs heavily. “To people like me. And to TV and VR investors. In the short run that’s the only way they’ll make money. And there’s no long run for them. 

“Nobody’s saying it yet but … there will be no colonists.” 

“Wekesa, this is terrible! When did you—?”

“We all bought into the dream,” he says with a shrug. “Literally. I think everybody believed in it, at first. But if the governments can’t own the land, they won’t play, and if the corporations can’t make a profit, neither will they. So we burn up the resources building cities that will never be lived in, until it’s all done. Mars will be the next Easter Island, covered in monuments, empty of people.”

Myrna has no answer to that, so she falls back on reminding him to clean up his place, eat more regularly. “Think about the things you can control,” she says, but it’s a weak rebuttal to his depressing scenario.

She has her rounds to complete, so she leaves Wekesa to his double jet lag. She’s going to need an extra hour of light therapy herself to make up for the darkness in his apartment. As she makes her other deliveries the face of Wekesa’s ex follows her, as if wagging its finger at her, too. She gets madder and madder.

By the time dinnertime comes (at midnight local time), she’s made a decision. She opens the bakery and Hartney strolls in, her first customer, regular as clockwork. Before he’s had a chance to sit down, Myrna’s at him. “Give me her picture.”

“What?” He blinks at her. 

“Your Martian ghost. I know you’ve got one. Everybody does, right?”

He looks shifty, slides into a booth. “I dunno—”

“I don’t even want to see her up close. Or him, or whatever form it’s taken. Long distance is fine. Blurred. I just need some screen grab of the thing.”

Reluctantly, he meets her eye. “What are you going to do with it?”

“For starters? Make a Wanted poster.”

Though nobody will admit to giving it a serious look, Myrna’s included a sign-up URL on the poster that promises anonymity. The back end of her server shows 10 people registered on the first day, 20 by Day 3, and 100 shortly thereafter. The poster (and her bounty offer) has moved online and gone viral within the homesteader community. 

If Myrna can catch a ghost live, and not just on a recording, maybe she can trace it, shut down the source. To her surprise, Hartney is proving a valuable aide. It seems he’s realized that there’s more notoriety to be had in being a Martian rebel than just a Martian, and within days he’s tapped unexpected contacts to become a community advocate for “taking back the planet.” 

He tells Myrna what he wants to do over coffee. “Look, nobody can own space. That’s part of the 1967 treaty and everybody who’s up there right now is a signatory to it. We,” he waves at the bleary-eyed troops shoveling Myrna’s hash browns into their faces, “do whatever we do up there under the jurisdiction of our own governments, but those governments don’t own the land we’re working.”

“I know,” she says. “I hate to say it, Hartney, but doesn’t that doom this whole venture from the start?”

“Depends on what you think ‘ownership’ means,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. “It’s like the whole ‘sharing economy’ flap back in the twenties. Where the ride-sharing companies and the automakers tried to claim they owned idle time on any self-driving car?” She remembers the maneuver the car companies had tried: discounted leasing arrangements that gave them the right to use the car when you weren’t. This was quickly becoming the only way to get a car, until the courts had intervened.

“Even before that, John Deere said farmers didn’t really ‘own’ its tractors because of the proprietary software in them. And before that, file sharing. Yeah, it’s all about ownership, but that’s not nearly as straightforward a concept as we pretend it is.

“Take our bots.” He steeples his hands and raises his eyes to heaven. “They’re our second selves. Our great hope for the future. Except we don’t own them. We’re all leasing-to-buy, because they cost millions. Hundreds of thousands to make, and the rest of the cost is the price of getting them to Mars. Still less than 1 percent the cost of sending a live human, but who’s counting? There are no live humans on Mars. So, we prospect, we dig, we build, we sell, but do we really own any of what we find if it can’t be returned to Earth? And do the companies that build the settlements ‘own’ them? Are they paying us with real money? It’s all economic activity taking place on a planet with no humans on it, and with no exports. It’s potential money, potential ownership, none of it’s real.”

“But if there’s nothing to own …”

“Then maybe the Pristines are right, and we should just leave it all alone.” He jabs a thumb at her poster. “But if you followed the news, which you don’t because you have a bakery to run—on Martian time no less—you’d know there’s pressure in Congress for us to back out of the Space Treaty. If we do, then all these ownership issues become so much clearer. The U.S. can claim Mars, or whatever part of it isn’t being pounced on by the Russians, the Chinese, Europe, and India. Then we’d parcel it up in the traditional way, auction off the pieces and voila! Problem solved.”

“So why don’t we?”

“Because doing so would piss off, oh …” He peers into space for a moment, calculating. “Just the Rest. Of. The. World. Every other signatory to the treaty. Not to mention that the instant it happens the big money kicks in. We homesteaders will get shoved aside in the rush. You and I could never make the minimum bid for even the tiniest ditch up there. It’ll be game over for all our kind.”

“Then what can you do?”

He shrugs. “Be what we say we are. Show the world that we really can build a shining city in the sky that’s just waiting for residents. It’ll be the single most valuable piece of real estate in history. Everyone will flock there. If nobody else is going to sit up and show leadership, then the homesteaders have to. All we have to do is keep it together long enough to complete the first neighborhood. That means not letting these ‘ghosts’ and other scare tactics get to us.”

She thinks about that while she takes care of a couple of other customers. When Myrna comes back, Hartney’s getting up. Only now does she see that the slant of his shoulders has more dejection than exhaustion in it. She imagines Hartney’s apartment or house, windows blacked out like Wekesa’s and him, a larval Martian curled up in his VR rig, dreaming of a day when he steps onto the planet for real. His determination is a façade, she realizes; he knows the homesteaders are no more in a position to run Mars than the governments or the corporations. Secretly, he’s certain that either his day will never come, or that when it does he’ll be living in somebody else’s city. Somebody who started with billions and has now made trillions without lifting a finger.

She walks him to the door. “It’s funny,” she says. “When I opened this place I had such grand plans. And then I lost money, more and more every month. I thought I was going to go bankrupt. Then I found you guys.”

Hartney smiles, a little uncertainly. “You okay, Myrna?”

“I’m fine.” But she’s not. She has buns and bread to bake, deliveries to make, but she can’t stop thinking about her customers and their situation. 

By the time it’s late afternoon for her, the streets are dark and silent except for the buzzing of her drones. Supper will be at 5:00 a.m. this time, but she’s used to the constant shifting. As long as you avoid sunlight and total darkness, keep focused on your inner clock and on staying in sync with the customers, you can almost—almost—normalize time.

Still, these extreme time shifts can make Myrna feel like she’s been cast off the grand stage of Earthly life. Like Hartney, like Wekesa. She clings to them and her other customers. Only they understand what it’s like to become unstuck in time, to look in on this planet’s concerns as if you were an alien.

She does pay attention to the news, but she observes it through the sepia lens of Martian time. The stars in Myrna’s night are streetlights and glowing windows—not those of time-shifters like her, but of ordinary people who don’t have to get up for work tomorrow because there is no work. Half the city is unemployed, living on the various social assistance, guaranteed income, or job-sharing programs that have replaced the old labor market. Resource-sharing Internet of Things bots have taken all the blue-collar jobs, and the Distributed Autonomous Corporations of the global processing blockchain have gobbled up all the white-collar ones. It was the global processing blockchain that took her own career, but she’s been lucky. She has the bakery. People still want the human touch for some things.

All the people in those lit apartments need to belong to something. They’re trying to find some stake in the future, to participate, help build something bigger than themselves. It’s not about a job. It’s about belonging. They’ve been told they no longer belong on Earth.

So they turn their eyes to the heavens. Golden cities rise on the plains of Mars; Cloud 9 spheres will fill the skies of Venus, and the oceans of Ceres, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto await new navigators. The United Nations treaty guarantees a stake for all in these new worlds, for no nation can own another planet.

There is a viable business model in there, but it’s Hartney’s nightmare. It starts with letting the homesteaders fail. Then, when they’ve “proven” that a cooperative space venture will never work, the governments will pull out of the treaty, declare sovereignty, and parcel up the planet. They’ll sell it off piecemeal to the highest bidders, and those bidders won’t be Hartney or Wekesa or the other homesteaders. 

Enclosure. She remembers reading about this tactic in university, how the British lords used it to grab all the commoners’ land. But this time it’s happening on a scale those commoners could never have dreamt of.

At 3:00 a.m. she’s sprawled on her couch, binge-watching a cop drama where, bewilderingly, everybody’s awake in the daylight at the same time. Tired as she is, it takes her a second to realize that the phone that’s ringing is not on the TV, but on the side table next to her. 

She grabs it up. “Marvin’s Diner.”

Wekesa says, “She’s back.”

Wekesa has come home. The long, stately mesas of Kasei Valles stand guard on the horizon as Myrna steps into VR with him. The Martian plain is thatched with tracks, and vehicles sit frozen in mid-roll, dozens of them between here and the jumble of bright white and blue curves that will be the Martian town. It nestles under the uplands, empty of life yet strangely animated with its posing cranes and angled satellite dishes. 

“Here she comes,” says Wekesa. His ex’s ghost strides across the photo-still landscape. Her cold smile is directed at Myrna in real time, which means that this connection is local; the “ghost” is a process running on some Earthbound server. Myrna has signed in as root in Wekesa’s interface, and now starts the diagnostic programs he allowed her to install last time she was over. Once they’re running, she walks out to meet it. “Why are you here?”

The ghost tilts its head. “You must leave this place.”

“So you keep saying,” Myrna replies distractedly. She’s watching her packet sniffers track down the origin of the ghost’s feed. It doesn’t take long, and it’s not hard to do, though she can see why none of her boys have caught the ghost yet. The user-friendly, high-level tools they doubtless deployed to trap it aren’t good at diving deep into the communications protocols that it’s spoofing; it takes a live programmer to conduct that kind of art. Hartney and the others don’t really know their systems on the machine level. 

There are few people left who bother with such knowledge, just as there are few people nowadays who can fix their own car, or grow their own food. 

Now that she’s traced its origin, she can see that the ghost is little more than a chatbot. It’s being driven by a DAO, a Distributed Autonomous Organization written in Solidity and running on Ethereum in the peer-to-peer computing blockchain. Nobody owns it and no particular server is running it, it’s smeared out across the whole internet. Whoever wrote the ghosts’ routines didn’t buy much “gas” to run their algorithms, so the ghosts are pretty stupid. 

“Hartney talked to some Pristines,” she says to Wekesa. “They told him they made the ghosts, but they haven’t gone public about their stunt. I don’t think they did it. Apart from the hacks that got it past your firewalls, it’s a pretty amateurish production. Probably some hobbyist with Pristinist leanings.

“So it’s nothing?” says Wekesa hopefully. 

They both know it is not nothing; simple it might be, but the ghost is a wake-up call to a deeper problem.

The apparition says, “You must leave me. Leave Kasei Valles.” —And that’s a funny thing to say, Myrna suddenly realizes.

She explores the Ethereum code some more. There have been no updates since the process started running; whoever made it started the ghost service and just walked away. Like Bitcoin, the ghosts own themselves now. There are plenty of DACs and DAOs just like that. 

“Well, this is interesting. The DAO creates accounts, one per physical resource on Mars. The code that runs each ghost identifies it as that resource. So, insofar as it has any identity at all, this one,” she nods at the impatient apparition, “really does think of itself as Kasei Valles.” 

“Thinks? So it’s an AI?”

Myrna shakes her head. “Sorry, I put that the wrong way. It’s not sophisticated enough to be an AI. You can tell that just by watching it. A real AI that thought it was Kasei Valles would do more than just yell at you to leave. If this thing had any social capabilities at all, it would negotiate, it would try to bribe you or threaten you in some specific way. I mean, if it had any real brains it would use them to actually look after its own interests ….” 

Wekesa’s staring at her, and Myrna belatedly realizes she’s frozen as still as the cranes on the Martian horizon, captured body and soul by a sudden thought. “What is it?” he asks, concerned.

“We’ve been looking at this all wrong,” she says in wonder.

“What do you mean?”

“Wekesa, you and the others are in trouble because your partners’ interests aren’t aligned with your own, right? Business wants to maximize its profits, so it’s poised to abandon the long-term investments here. And Government has no stake in Martian territory. You need a partner that has a stake, and whose interests run parallel to your own.”

He crosses his arms and snorts at the sharply drawn horizon. “Nice idea, but where are we going to find a partner like that?”

Myrna smiles, raises her hand and points at the ghost.

“You’re looking right at her.”

“Welcome to the United Nations, Ms. Hayward. If you’ll come this way?”

It’s three months later, and she can barely believe she’s here. The halls of U.N. headquarters are bustling with suited diplomats, sharp-eyed translators, and scurrying pages. Security bots hulk in the corners, tiny drones zoom paper envelopes over the heads of the crowd, and wall screens, holographic kiosks, and wall-writing lasers dazzle the eye with the latest news. Myrna’s not used to the heels she’s wearing, but manages to make it to the conference room on time. There are about 30 people milling around, none ready yet to commit to a place at the long table.

A bear-like Slavic man approaches her. “Ms. Hayward! So happy to finally meet the mother of the ghosts!”

“I didn’t create them,” she protests, for the thousandth time. “I just made some upgrades.” She actually met the original programmer online just a few days ago. He’s not happy with what she’s done with his code, but has prudently retreated to the shadows now that the ghosts are becoming prominent.  

Her words are drowned by a loud clap from the Chair. People start to sit.

There are more than 200 nations represented at the U.N. these days; Myrna’s sleep has been disturbed for weeks imagining them all at this meeting. Most are, but only virtually, and others have sent trusted common reps. Even so there’s a lot of money and power in this room, however casual it may appear. 

Once everyone is seated, the Chair rises. “Welcome,” she says. “We’re here today to discuss a novel proposal for the governance of space resources. We have the good luck to have the woman who proposed it with us today, Myrna Hayward.”

There’s an actual round of applause. Myrna shrinks a little in her seat. The Chair runs through introductions, gives thanks to sponsors, and everything else that weighs down a public meeting—but with admirable speed. Aside from the government officials, there are corporate reps from the launch companies and supply chain consortia—and those few homesteaders who could afford to come. “I think,” the Chair finally says, “that it might save us a lot of time if we let Ms. Hayward go first. Because I know we all have questions.” 

“Um.” Myrna stands, acutely aware of the tremble in her knees. Luckily, Hartney’s been coaching her for weeks on what to say. Opening line, he’d be saying right now. What’s your opening line?

“How do you govern the use of a common resource?” she says, a little too loudly.

“Divide it up and let the market take care of it,” says one of the businessmen dismissively.

Myrna nods. “Works great for mineral wealth—on Earth. But even here, it’s not always the best way. What about fisheries? The fish come and go. What does ‘ownership’ even mean in that case? Or, take air. Earth’s ecosystems are still a mess despite 20 years of efforts to fix global warming. Why? Because we’re still trying to use market and regulatory forces to govern a common resource—the air itself. Carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, they work to a point. But they’re an awkward fit.

“We’ve run into the same problem on Mars. Colonizing a planet gives us a clear goal and, at every step along the way, some things need to be done and others need to be delayed, stopped, or even reversed. The whole effort’s one big machine and all the parts have to work together, over generations of time. We don’t leave that sort of project to the market, because things constantly have to be done that profit no one in the short term. The market’s great for some things; for the rest we rely on the state.

“But which state?” She nods to the Chair. “That’s been the problem with global warming from the start. Even before the ‘teens, the oil companies were admitting climate change was a problem and said they were willing to help solve it—as long as somebody else made the first move. It was a global problem, but there was no global actor who could take responsibility. Who owns the air? No company, and no state. So we’ve floundered forward, barely keeping ahead of the disaster.”

“Okay,” says a representative of one of the launch companies. “Who does own the air?”

Perfect. She smiles at him. “It owns itself.

“Historically, it is known as a commons. More than two billion people make their living from commons arrangements even today. The commons is older than the market and the state, but it’s also as new as the internet, open-source software, Creative Commons artwork, and public 3D printer model archives. And the thing is, space is already a commons.

“In a commons, the stakeholders who are affected by the use of a resource come together to form a set of rules for its use, sanctions for cheating, and so on. There are pastures in Switzerland that have been governed this way without a hitch for over 700 years. You might have heard of something called the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ where everyone taking what they need from a commons depletes it. It’s a myth—what that cautionary tale is really describing is an anarchy. By definition, a commons is governed and its resources managed; it’s just not owned. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for showing how commons are governed.”

“So? Well that might work for fisheries and pastures, but we’re talking about a whole planet here.”

“But you’ve answered your own objection,” she says. “If the commons doesn’t scale to planetary size, neither do markets. Or governments. We need all three. 

“The commons isn’t a replacement for the market. In the past, commons arrangements were always local and unique to the particular resource and the particular stakeholders affected by it. You can make money universal, and the state can reach anywhere, but commons don’t have that capability. At least … they didn’t.”

She turns to a wall screen displaying the bleak Martian plain. “In any case, to explain what all this means for Mars, I think it’s time to turn things over to one of our new friends. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Kasei Valles.”

Kasei no longer resembles Wekesa’s ex-wife. She’s still female, but has adopted the bronze-skinned, racially ambiguous features of an Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian. Wrapped in a bright green sari, she blazes in contrast to the russet land and beige sky as she walks up to the virtual camera.

The Malaysian rep leans forward. “Is this the famous AI we’ve been hearing about?” 

“I am not an AI,” says the Martian. “I am Kasei Valles.

“I am a region of the Martian surface, including its groundwater, perchlorate, and iron deposits—and its human inhabitants, their tools, and the things they are building. There are artificial intelligences involved in managing me, including the one that is having this conversation with you now, but I am not them. I,” she says, sweeping her arm to encompass the entire vista, “am this.”

“That’s really what she thinks she is,” Myrna says. “From our point of view, Kasei is a token in a blockchain. Like the original Bitcoin, this blockchain is an autonomous decentralized peer-to-peer network, not run by any central authority, not owned by anybody. Unlike Bitcoin, however, the tokens in this blockchain don’t stand for money, but for the resources of the planets, moons, and asteroids of the solar system. This is my, uh, contribution. I replaced the original ghost program, which was a kind of spambot, with a legal interface to a DAC I programmed. Then I set the DAC running and stepped back.”

“Why?” It’s the launch company rep again, looking puzzled now but a little intrigued. 

“By using a blockchain we can universalize the benefits of a commons. Firstly, the resource’s stakeholders manage it directly, using smart contracts. This is faster and more efficient than going through state actors or markets. Commons-level rules of access ensure that the resources are not depleted, and the smart contracts interlock to guarantee that the whole system fulfills its goal.”

“In your case,” interrupts Kasei, leaning forward a bit to smile into the room, “the contracts can coordinate all the colonization efforts, private, public, and individual, as well as those taking place on the Moon and planned for Ceres and the other worlds. I and the other systems form nested commons, as in Ostrom’s vision, that make a trusted third party such as the state unnecessary, and function more efficiently than a market.”

The rep crosses his arms, frowning. Myrna can picture the thought balloon over his head, which probably includes the word communism. But the commons isn’t even socialism, and now that Kasei has given her annunciation, Myrna’s pretty sure the rest of the day is going to be spent educating these people about this fine point. She’s already tired, but she smiles at the Martian anyway.

“Welcome to the world of self-governing common pool resources,” she says. “Kasei’s not here to dictate terms; she’s just an interface to make it easier for us to figure out how to use Kasei Valles’s resources. She’s just one of many, of course. I hope I can introduce you to some of the valleys, rills, craters, and mounts involved in the colonization effort. I know I’m talking about them as if they’re people; it’s kind of irresistible after you’ve spent any time with them. So I want to make sure you understand right from the start that they’re not people, they’re interfaces to a resource blockchain. 

“This blockchain is the answer to the question of how to manage space resources; it’s the trusted arbitrator that the U.N., the individual countries, and commercial interests could never quite be. The blockchain is there to arbitrate disputes and render judgments fairly. It can do it because it’s not owned by or beholden to anybody, and its code is transparent, unhackable. Kasei Valles and the other ghosts are literally incorruptible. She was never possible before the blockchain. Now, though, she’s our future.”

The launch company guy glowers at Myrna. “Fairly, huh? So now that this thing’s on top, where does that place you, Ms. Hayward?”

She shrugs. “After I set the DAC running I stepped back. I’m just a shareholder now, like you, and I have no backdoor to the code. It’s all open-sourced on the blockchain, you can check it if you’d like. Beyond that … I’m just what I was before.”

“And what, Ms. Hayward, is that?”

“A concerned friend.”

The Martian dawn bears no relation to the Earthly one; for one thing, the streaks and smears of light spreading across the East are blue, not red. It may be day or night back home, and when Myrna takes off her VR glasses, she may see sunlight or rain. Those seem fictitious now, a kind of fever dream or parallel universe. The dawn she awakes to every day is this, the blue one, and its constancy makes it the real morning.

Myrna laughs, and in bounding strides, goes to join Wekesa and Hartney—and yes, Kasei, who stands to one side watching as the Martians inflate their first livable dome. A sizable arc of future colonists is watching the raising ceremony and among its members are some of the regulars from her bakery.

“It’s still two years before anybody lands,” she points out, but they’re in no mood to pay her any attention. They, like her, are scattered around Tampa and other cities, souls posing alone in empty apartments. Yet they see past those walls and these, looking beyond today to something grand that could be. The Mars colony launchers, currently being assembled in factories and hangars, are curiously unreal compared with this dome, though Myrna could drive to visit one of the assembly sites, and no human eye has actually beheld the structure that looms over her. This disconnect, like the day, has become normal to her.

So she folds metal arms and grins with the others while the dome goes up. When it’s about halfway inflated, Kasei saunters over. “If I were to invest now,” says the Martian, “I’d invest in you.”

Startled, Myrna pulls her gaze from the (real, but millions of kilometers away) dome to the (virtual, but literally right here) avatar of the Kasei Valles landscape. “Why do you say that?” she says.

“You’re not a miner, or a smelter or renderer or construction worker,” says the ghost. “You’re a community advocate for a community whose members include non-humans.”

Myrna shrugs. “It’s what I did on Earth too, half the time. It just took the form of bringing lunches to these shut-ins.” She nods at the dusty, vaguely humanoid robots that are hopping up and down, slamming each other on the shoulder, making other emotes. “They’re just as helpless without me on Mars as they are on Earth. I’m not a baker anymore, or even a coordinator,” she concludes mournfully. “I’m a den mother.”

“Now that,” says the ghost, “we have in common.”

Myrna laughs. The ghosts have obviously gotten another upgrade; this one’s learning to be funny. It’s true, though: she takes care of the boys and gals here in the city, yet they’re just as absent-minded and foolish on Mars. Somebody has to make sure they’re fed on Earth; on Mars, somebody has to bring them their battery packs, blasting charges, and drill bits. 

Of all these people, she alone has no claim in the valley itself—but it hardly matters. Such “claims” are now understood as what they always were: declarations of a relationship with the land. She has one of those, it’s just not expressed in hectares or tonnes. 

“Will you be joining us?” asks the ghost. “When the colony ships come?”

Myrna shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t matter,” she says. 

“I’m already here.”

Acknowledgments: I would like to acknowledge the staff at Arizona State University, particularly Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, and Maciej Rebisz, who did a fine piece of art for my story.

Exploration Fact and Exploration Fiction 

by Lawrence Dritsas

Exploration comprises all kinds of interesting activities and resources, but two are absolutely required: people and money. Every aspect of a successful expedition—relevant technology, supporting institutions, transport logistics, effective methods of observation, and effective communication systems—all require human labor and financial capital. The goals of exploration are equally various, but can be reduced to one thing: knowledge. In the fourth century BCE, Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseilles) sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and turned north, seeking the northern limits of humanity.^[1] He was an explorer, but he was also seeking the sources of tin, amber, and gold that southern Europeans desired and that he could sell at profit. More than a millennium later, over seven voyages in the early fifteenth century, Zheng He was sent by the Ming emperors of China to explore the Indian Ocean and solidify their control of established trade routes that stretched from Java, via India, to Kenya.^[2] From 1485 to early 1492 Christopher Columbus visited the courts of Portugal, Genoa, and Venice, proposing his idea to sail west to reach the East before finally convincing the Iberian monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile to fund his audacious voyages across the Atlantic; Columbus spent nearly as much time looking for money as he did exploring the New World during his four voyages from 1492 to 1504.^[3] Vasco da Gama’s voyage to Calcutta in 1498 was motivated by the search for new trade routes, and the subsequent century was marked by repeated clashes between Portuguese and Ottoman explorers in the Indian Ocean seeking new routes and sources of wealth.^[4]

Clearly, among the many skills that explorers need to be successful, one of the most important is the ability to persuade others to provide the money necessary to undertake their journeys. There are very few historical cases of intrepid individuals paying their own way to simply “see what’s out there.”^[5] Indeed, the second expedition of the famed Scottish explorer David Livingstone into central Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century cost the British government around £30 million over six years. The purpose of his “Zambesi Expedition” was to identify new supplies of natural resources for British industry. When this outcome proved unlikely, the British government recalled the expedition with the foreign minister, Lord John Russell, noting that, “there is little to show that the results actually obtained can be made presently serviceable … for the interests of British Commerce.”^[6] Even where immediate profit is not the goal, money remains a factor. In Washington, D.C. on 20 July 1989, U.S. President George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, with the goal of landing humans on Mars by 2019, 50 years after Apollo 11. But Bush’s bold initiative foundered within months when a potential price tag of $540 billion scared off most supporters.^[7] In this second decade of the twenty-first century, the United States is once again on a “Journey to Mars,” but the exact details of “how?” and more importantly, “how much?” remain unanswered.^[8] 

In the United States since 2010, a blend of public and private funding has been used to support outer space travel. Alexander MacDonald argues in his recent book that this phenomenon is not new, but has deep historical roots in the United States, citing private support for observatory building in the nineteenth century and early rocketry.^[9] Not everyone agrees with the public-private model for funding exploration, but it has significant precedents beyond MacDonald’s focus on space-related activities. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke explored East Africa in the 1850s using largely private money and only minimal support from the British government. Later in the nineteenth century, prospectors scoured the Pacific Northwest, the Yukon, South Australia, and the Zambian Copperbelt looking for minerals with colonial government encouragement but risking the money of private investors. Robert Falcon Scott led his British Antarctic Expedition to its fatal end in 1913 supported mainly by private donations and commercial sponsorship, only latterly topped up by a government grant.^[10] On the ice, Scott and his men ate Huntley & Palmer’s digestive biscuits spread with Beach’s blackcurrant jam with as much “product-placement” gusto as when explorers Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere successfully retraced Scott’s route in 2014, sponsored by Land Rover and Intel.^[11] In Britain it has become a tradition to eat Kendal Mint Cake while hillwalking, the same energy-boosting treat that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ate on Everest in 1953. These are just snapshots, but the history of exploration and all its varieties of funding models may teach us a thing or two about how to move forward to Mars.

There is another body of literature that can further inform our thinking about how to explore space and how to pay for it: science fiction. The future of space exploration, and especially the exploration of Mars in the twenty-first century, can be informed, if not inspired, by a study of both the history of exploration and the science fiction of exploration.^[12] We find public-private funding models for exploring space in many novels. Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953) is a key example and offers the classic, genre-defining account of the commercialization of space exploration and colonization. Its singeing critique of Libertarian ideology, advertising-driven consumerism, and the exploitation of labor and the environment was remarkably prescient. The idea of space colonization being dominated by corporations persists also in visions of our future on Mars. Terry Bisson’s Voyage to the Red Planet (1990) is an overt science fictional satire of a privatized journey to Mars where NASA has become a subsidiary of Disney.^[13] Ben Bova’s Mars (1992) and Return to Mars (1999) see the protagonist travel to the Red Planet first on an international mission and then on a privately funded expedition. In Jeff Garrity’s novel Mars Girl (2008), the first landing on Mars is satirized as an extreme media event where television ratings and product placement matter as much as the explorers’ survival and discoveries. Karl Schroeder’s short story in this volume follows the same path: imagining how the exploration and exploitation of Mars could be funded by private money.

If exploration is about people and money, then it must include a concern with people’s bodies, keeping explorers safe. John F. Kennedy spoke to the U.S. Congress in May 1961 of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” This same goal applies now, in fact and fiction, to any crewed mission to Mars, as the surprise popularity of Andy Weir’s rescue novel The Martian (2011) and its film adaptation (2015) demonstrate. The main challenge to keeping the astronauts safe is the problem of coping with extreme, if not lethal, environments; humans are built to live on Earth and nowhere else. Even on Earth, the shared challenge of the explorers of the past was how to make their bodies survive the trip. At times, everything was against them as they pushed the extreme environments of the Earth: heat, cold, altitude, depth, and the lack of food and water. One might wonder, “Is the human body really is the best tool to explore other worlds?” Frederik Pohl explored this in Man Plus (1976), where the exploration of Mars is undertaken by human cyborgs specifically built to survive the Martian environment—no need for building habitats and spacesuits to keep the explorers in little Earth-like bubbles. But as Pohl illustrates, we cannot ignore the consequences for the altered human who has become “of Mars” and no longer “of Earth.” More recent works such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars (1996), James S. A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes (2011), and Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon (2015) also examine the idea that settling other worlds is, physiologically, a one-way trip. Of all the people involved in exploration, it’s the explorers who embody the risk, who feel the new environments around them. The diaries of explorers such as Humboldt, Livingstone, and Darwin detail the effects the journey is having on their bodies and minds. They want to return safely, but they will not return the same. 

In Karl Schroeder’s story, “The Baker of Mars,” the problem of human physiology has been solved by telepresence. Mars is being developed slowly by technicians, prospectors who operate robots remotely from Earth so that the infrastructure to support human life is ready whenever the colonists get there. The prospectors’ concessions are areas of the Martian surface leased to them, with everyone hoping for a future payoff. In “The Baker of Mars,” what is for sale are the rights to exclusively exploit parts of Mars, rights supposedly underwritten by government support through enforceable contracts. The problem posed is that it becomes unclear how anyone’s investment in an “unowned” space can pay off without simply claiming it. But in this story, and in real life, any attempt to claim parts of Mars is forbidden by the long-standing 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The tension of the story is apparent almost immediately: how to coordinate all this activity and protect investment when no one owns anything and when the potential return on investment lies far into the future. The answer provided in the story is that Mars owns itself, and through the mysterious creation of self-governing common-pool resources that are represented by an advanced, near-AI, interactive avatar, Mars can be developed without resorting to ancient techniques such as the extension of sovereignty through a colonial system, the creation of new sovereign states on Mars, chartered companies, or various forms of public-private partnerships.^[14]

At the beginning of the era of European expansion on Earth, this problem of protecting long-term investments in newly explored areas was acute. In response, financial institutions innovated and European states sponsored chartered companies, giving them special, often exclusive, rights over specific types of trade in certain parts of the world.^[15] Good examples are the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the British South Africa Company. Chartered companies such as these exerted state-like powers in places such as Canada, India, Java, Mozambique, and Rhodesia. They effectively controlled all the resources, and people, in the areas they possessed. Their investments were secure for only as long as the local population collaborated, or was subjugated, and profits could be found. They could protect their exclusive rights and profits by force, if necessary. Science fiction has often resurrected the chartered company idea in its stories—hegemonic companies operating off-world loom large in films such as Alien (1979), Outland (1981), Blade Runner (1982), and in James S. A. Corey’s ongoing novel series The Expanse (from 2011).^[16] In his novel Red Mars (1993), Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the early settlement of Mars as overseen by an authoritarian United Nations Organization Mars Authority (UNOMA) while Earth falls under the control of transnational corporations with state-like powers. Schroeder’s technological vision for the exploitation of Martian resources veers from these traditional models, but fact is catching up with fiction when it comes to the commercialization of space and the problem of property.

On 25 November 2015, the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act was signed by President Obama in order to encourage the private sector to develop outer space resources with the guarantee that their investments would be protected under U.S. law. With the passing of this law, the United States has declared that its citizens are legally entitled to own anything they extract from celestial objects, such as the Moon, asteroids, or Mars, but they cannot claim sovereignty over or ownership of the celestial object itself. Part of the rationale for the new law was to rectify a problem in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states clearly that celestial bodies are not appropriable, but also acknowledges that private entities can perform space activities.^[17] 

When such private entrepreneurs become involved in the exploration and exploitation of Mars, the issue of private property arises almost immediately.^[18] The proceeds and profits of private investment must benefit the investors. Here we see that Schroeder’s fiction is not so far from fact. How the eventual resources of space might be exploited commercially, and legally, is a very real concern. With the new law, the U.S. is asserting private property rights for its citizens in space. This raises interesting questions about sovereignty in space and some worry the legislation will destabilize the “fragile equilibrium” that has existed since 1967.^[19] The act of appropriating land on celestial bodies seems to require that a sovereign authority is endorsing it, or that a “new sovereignty” has been created.^[20] We can therefore see why the U.S. was so careful to state that they are only endorsing the rights of U.S. citizens to claim extracted resources, not celestial bodies. Nonetheless, without some sort of guarantee to property in space and on celestial bodies, the private investment that appears necessary for humanity’s next move into space will not occur.^[21]

In offering a solution to allow secure investment off-world, the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 must be understood as only the first part of a much bigger story. The very geography of economic activity looks set to change, especially when we accept that most space resources will only be useful in space—for example, using lunar water resources to supply Martian exploration. Bringing them back to Earth, or any other steep gravity well, would be a cost-prohibitive process of questionable utility, so we are talking about property rights in material value chains that may never include Earth.^[22] Moreover, given the rapid advances in robotics and virtual reality, Schroeder’s story is not far-fetched at all. Outer space and its “astropolitics” are now part of everyone’s daily lives, as Fraser MacDonald argues.^[23] If pilots can fly drones to wage war over the Middle East from an air-conditioned base in Nevada, and remote-control rovers have been exploring Mars for 20 years, how much more difficult can it be to control construction robots on Mars, once they are there? Schroeder’s story of conflict over Martian resources before any humans ever step foot on Mars may be just around the corner.

It now becomes clear why, in “The Baker of Mars,” that the story must end up in New York, at the United Nations. A meeting is held to discuss who owns Mars, and in attendance are government officials, various corporate representatives, and the “homesteaders.” The exploration and early exploitation of Mars has required human effort and financial capital on a global scale, and everyone wants to know what will happen to the investments. We can compare Schroeder’s fictional meeting to the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884–85, when the European powers sat down and decided that they all had interests in the last great terra nullius (for them), Africa. In Berlin, they agreed how they would partition and exploit the continent without stepping on one another’s toes and starting a war.^[24] The Africans themselves had very little say in the matter, but trading companies, explorers, miners, missionaries, and other European special interests certainly did; the goal in Berlin was the same as at Schroeder’s meeting: to avoid expensive conflicts and secure investments. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, was similarly devised to forestall Cold War conflicts over what remains the last “unowned” land on Earth today.^[25] In fiction, Robinson’s Blue Mars (1996) details a constitutional congress that sets up a government for dealing with conflicts over scant Martian resources. The lessons of history and fiction show us that an agreement concerning the fate of Mars is inevitable. Once we can live on Mars we will need to deal with the consequences. Steam engines and quinine dramatically changed the terms upon which Europeans approached Africa in the late nineteenth century; they partitioned Africa because these innovations allowed them to travel there and not die of malaria. Schroeder argues that telepresence and blockchain technology will similarly alter and enable our approach to Mars—offering new solutions to the age-old problems of people and money but also creating new social, political, and diplomatic challenges. 

By grounding his fictional account in the near future, Schroeder has provided food for thought about how the exploration, exploitation, and eventual colonization of Mars may begin. There is no doubt that getting humans to Mars will be complicated for all kinds of technical and political reasons.^[26] Studying the history of exploration and reading science fiction can help us predict the problems of getting there and the consequences of new discoveries. Reading the fact and fiction of journeys to new lands also reveals that exploration is not a single “project” but rather a nexus, where a wide variety of individuals and institutions come together to think about the future, define goals, make plans, raise money, develop technologies, and attempt to find out things no one has known before. Science fiction authors have been influenced by true stories of exploration and the visions of science fiction have inspired people to explore yet further. Taken together these literatures are a strong foundation for planning our future on Mars.

Acknowledgments: My sincere thanks to the organizers and funders of this project; it has been an exhilarating experience from start to finish. I also want to thank Debby Scott, Joan Haig, and the editing team at Arizona State University for their insightful and incisive comments on my essay.

Notes

^[1] Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (London: Allen Lane, 2003). [back]

^[2] Edward L. Dryer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming, 1405–1433 (London: Pearson Longman, 2007). [back]

^[3] Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). [back]

^[4] Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Francisco Bethencourt, F. and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [back]

^[5] The careers of explorer-naturalists Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) are important exceptions to this. See Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Vintage, 2015) and Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). [back]

^[6] Lawrence Dritsas, Zambesi: David Livingstone and Expeditionary Science in Africa (London: IB Tauris, 2010). [back]

^[7] Thor Hogan, Mars Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2007). [back]

^[8] Eric Berger, “Make Mars Great Again: Can the 2016 U.S. Election Save NASA’s Journey to Mars?” Ars Technica, April 12, 2016, https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/make-mars-great-again-can-the-2016-election-save-nasas-journey-to-mars; “NASA’s Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration,” NASA, October 8, 2015, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/journey-to-mars-next-steps-20151008_508.pdf [back]

^[9] Alexander MacDonald, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). [back]

^[10] “An Expensive Venture,” Antarctic Heritage Trust, Scott’s Last Expedition, http://www.scottslastexpedition.org/expedition/preparing-for-terra-nova/#chapter2. [back]

^[11] See The Scott Expedition (2014) at http://scottexpedition.com. [back]

^[12] For pioneering work in this area, see Alexander Geppert, ed., Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Readers keen to explore the history of science fiction should consult one of the standard histories such as: Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, The Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 2001); Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2011). [back]

^[13] See Edward James, Science Fiction in the 20th Century (Oxford: Opus, 1994), 205. [back]

^[14] Roger D. Launius, Historical Analogs for the Stimulation of Space Commerce (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2014). [back]

^[15] Hubert Bonin and Nuno Valério, eds., Colonial and Imperial Banking History (New York: Routledge, 2016); Wolfgang Reinhard, A Short History of Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). [back]

^[16] James S. A. Corey is the collective pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Thus far, The Expanse comprises six novels and five shorter works. It has been adapted for television by the Syfy Network. [back]

^[17] Hanneke van Traa-Engelman, “The Commercial Exploitation of Outer Space: Issues of Intellectual Property Rights and Liability,” Leiden Journal of International Law 4, no. 2 (1991). [back]

^[18] It could happen very soon on the Moon—see Martin Elvis, Tony Milligan, and Alanna Krolikowski, “The Peaks of Eternal Light: A Near-Term Property Issue on the Moon,” Space Policy 38 (2016). [back]

^[19] Fabio Tronchetti, “The Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act: A Move Forward or a Step Back?” Space Policy 34 (2015). [back]

^[20] Virgiliu Pop, “Appropriation in Outer Space: The Relationship between Land Ownership and Sovereignty on the Celestial Bodies,” Space Policy 16, no. 4 (2000). [back]

^[21] Andrew R. Brehm, “Private Property in Outer Space: Establishing a Foundation for Future Exploration,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 33, no. 2 (2015). [back]

^[22] Ian A. Crawford, “Lunar Resources: A Review,” Progress in Physical Geography 39, no. 2 (2015). [back]

^[23] Fraser MacDonald, “Anti-Astropolitik: Outer Space and the Orbit of Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 5 (2007). [back]

^[24] Stig Förster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds. Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for The German Historical Institute London, 1988). The issues surrounding the militarization of outer space are hotly debated—see Natalie Bormann and Michael Sheehan, eds., Securing Outer Space (New York: Routledge, 2009). [back]

^[25] Nevertheless, there are seven nations whose claims to portions of Antarctica are held in abeyance by the treaty; they have not retracted them. For details visit http://www.ats.aq. [back]

^[26] Mariel Borowitz and Jonathan Battat, “Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Next Steps for Human Space Exploration: Technical and Strategic Analysis of Options,” Space Policy 35 (2016); “The World Is Not Enough,” The Economist 421.9009, October 1, 2016, https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21707915-elon-musk-envisages-human-colony-mars-he-will-have-his-work-cut-out. [back]

Death on Mars

by Madeline Ashby

“Is he still on schedule?” 

Donna’s hand spidered across the tactical array. She pinched and threw a map into Khalidah’s lenses. Marshall’s tug glowed there, spiralling ever closer to its target. Khalidah caught herself missing baseball. She squashed the sentiment immediately. It wasn’t really the sport she missed, she reminded herself. She just missed her fantasy league. Phobos was much too far away to get a real game going; the lag was simply too long for her bets to cover any meaningful spread. She could run a model, of course, and had even filled one halfway during the trip out. It wasn’t the same. 

Besides, it was more helpful to participate in hobbies she could share with the others. The counselors had been very clear on that subject. She was better off participating in Game Night, and the monthly book club they maintained with the Girl Scouts and Guides of North America. 

“He’s on time,” Donna said. “Stop worrying.” 

“I’m not worried,” Khalidah said. And she wasn’t. Not really. Not about when he would arrive.

Donna pushed away from the terminal. She looked older than she had when they’d landed. They’d all aged, of course—the trip out and the lack of real produce hadn’t exactly done any of them any favors—but Donna seemed to have changed more dramatically than Khalidah or Brooklyn or Song. She’d cut most of her hair off, and now the silver that once sparkled along her roots was the only color left. The exo-suit hung loose on her. She hadn’t been eating. Everyone hated the latest rotation of rations. Who on Earth—literally, who?—thought that testing the nutritional merits of a traditional Buddhist macrobiotic diet in space was a good idea? What sadistic special-interest group had funded that particular line of research? 

“It will be fine,” Donna said. “We will be fine.” 

“I just don’t want things to change.” 

“Things always change,” Donna said. “God is change. Right, Octavia?”

The station spoke: “Right, Donna.” 

Khalidah folded her arms. “So do we have to add an Arthur, just for him? Or a Robert? Or an Isaac? Or a Philip?”

The station switched its persona to Alice B. Sheldon. Its icon spun like a coin in the upper right of Khalidah’s vision. “We already have a James,” the station said. The icon winked. 

“Khalidah, look at me,” Donna said. Khalidah de-focused from the In-Vision array and met the gaze of her mission manager. “It won’t be easy,” the older woman said. “But nothing out here is. We already have plenty of data about our particular group. You think there won’t be sudden changes to group dynamics, down there?”

She pointed. And there it was: red and rusty, the color of old blood. Mars. 

His name was Cody Marshall. He was Florida born and bred, white, with white-blond hair and a tendency toward rosacea. He held a PhD in computer science from Mudd. He’d done one internship in Syria, building drone-supported mesh nets, and another in Alert, Nunavut. He’d coordinated the emergency repair of an oil pipeline there using a combination of declassified Russian submersibles and American cable-monitoring drones. He’d managed the project almost single-handedly after the team lead at Alert killed himself. 

Now here he was on Phobos, sent to debug the bore-hole driller on Mars. A recent solar storm had completely fried the drill’s comms systems; Donna insisted it needed a complete overhaul, and two heads were better than one. Marshall couldn’t do the job from home—they’d lose days reprogramming the things on the fly, and the drill bits were in sensitive places. One false move and months of work might collapse around billions of dollars of research, crushing it deep into the red dirt. He needed to be close. After all, he’d written much of the code himself. 

This was his first flight.

“I didn’t want to be an astronaut,” he’d told them over the lag, when they first met. “I got into this because I loved robots. That’s all. I had no idea this is where I would wind up. But I’m really grateful to be here. I know it’s a change.” 

“If you make a toilet seat joke, we’ll delete your porn,” Song said, now. When they all laughed, she looked around at the crowd. “What’s funny? I’m serious. I didn’t come all the way out here to play out a sitcom.” 

Marshall snapped his fingers. “That reminds me.” He rifled through one of the many pouches he’d lugged on board. “Your mom sent this along with me.” He coasted a vial through the air at her. Inside, a small crystal glinted. “That’s your brother’s wedding. And your new nephew’s baptism. Speaking of sitcoms. She told me some stories to tell you. She didn’t want to record them—”

“She’s very nervous about recording anything.”

 “—so she told me to tell them to you.” 

Song rolled her eyes. “Are they about Uncle Chan-wook?”

Marshall’s pale eyebrows lifted high on his pink forehead. “How’d you guess?”

Again, the room erupted in laughter. Brooklyn laughed the loudest. She was a natural flirt. Her parents had named her after a borough they’d visited only once. In high school, she had self-published a series of homoerotic detective novels set in ancient Greece. The profits financed med school. After that, she hit Parsons for an unconventional residency. She’d worked on the team that designed the exo-suits they now wore. She had already coordinated Marshall’s fitting over the lag. It fit him well. At least, Brooklyn seemed pleased. She was smiling so wide that Khalidah could see the single cavity she’d sustained in all her years of eschewing most refined sugars. 

Khalidah rather suspected that Brooklyn had secretly advocated for the macrobiotic study. Chugging a blue algae smoothie every morning seemed like her kind of thing. Khalidah had never asked about it. It was better not to know.

But wasn’t that the larger point of this particular experiment? To see if they could all get along? To see if women—with their lower caloric needs, their lesser weight, their quite literally cheaper labor, in more ways than one—could get the job done on Phobos? Sure, they were there on a planetary protection mission to gather the last remaining soil samples before the first human-oriented missions showed up, thereby ensuring the “chain of evidence” for future DNA experimentation. But they all knew—didn’t they—what this was really about. How the media talked about them. How the internet talked about them. Early on, before departure, Khalidah had seen the memes. 

For Brooklyn, Marshall had a single chime. Brooklyn’s mother had sent it to “clear the energy” of the station. During the Cold Lake training mission, she’d sent a Tibetan singing bowl.

For Khalidah, he had all 4,860 games of last year’s regular season. “It’s lossless,” he said. “All 30 teams. Even the crappy ones. One of our guys down at Kennedy, he has a brother-in-law in Orlando, works at ESPN. They got in touch with your dad, and, well …”

“Thank you,” Khalidah said. 

“Yeah. Sure.” Marshall cleared his throat. He rocked on his toes, pitched a little too far forward, and wheeled his arms briefly to recover his balance. If possible, he turned even pinker, so the color of his face now matched the color of his ears. “So. Here you go. I don’t know what else is on there, but, um … there it is. Enjoy.” 

“Thank you.” Khalidah lifted the vial of media from his hand. Her crystal was darker than Song’s. Denser. It had been etched more often. She stuffed it in the right breast pocket of her suit. If for some reason her heart cut out and the suit had to give her a jolt, the crystal would be safe. 

“And for you, Donna. Here’s what we talked about. They gave you double, just in case.” 

Donna’s hand was already out. It shook a little as Marshall placed a small bottle in it. The label was easy to see. Easy to read. Big purple letters branded on the stark white sticker. Lethezine. The death drug. The colony of nanomachines that quietly took over the brain, shutting off major functions silently and painlessly. The best, most dignified death possible. The kind you had to ask the government for personally, complete with letters of recommendation from people with advanced degrees that could be revoked if they lied, like it was a grant application or admission to a very prestigious community. Which in fact it was. 

“What is that?” Brooklyn asked. 

It was a stupid question. Everyone knew exactly what it was. She was just bringing it out into the open. They’d been briefed on that. On making the implicit become explicit. On voicing what had gone unasked. Speaking the unspeakable. It was, in fact, part of the training. There were certain things you were supposed to suppress. And other things that you couldn’t let fester. They had drilled on it, over and over, at Cold Lake and in Mongolia and again and again during role-plays with the station interface. 

“Why do you have that?” Brooklyn continued, when Donna didn’t answer. “Why would he give that to you?” 

Donna pocketed the bottle before she opened her mouth to speak. When she did, she lifted her gaze and stared at each of them in turn. She smiled tightly. For the first time, Khalidah realized the older woman’s grimace was not borne of impatience, but rather simple animal pain. “It’s because I’m dying,” she said. 

She said it like it was a commonplace event. Like, “Oh, it’s because I’m painting the kitchen,” or “It’s because I took the dog for a walk.” 

In her lenses, Khalidah saw the entire group’s auras begin to flare. The auras were nothing mystical, nothing more than ambient indicators of what the sensors in the suits were detecting: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, odd little twitches of muscle fibers. She watched them move from baseline green to bruise purple—the color of tension, of frustration. Only Song remained calm: her aura its customary frosty mint green, the same shade once worn by astronauts’ wives at the advent of the Space Race. 

“You knew?” she managed to say, just as Marshall said, “You didn’t tell them?”

Khalidah whirled to stare at him. His mouth hung open. He squinted at Donna, then glanced around the group. “Wait,” he said. “Wait. Let’s just take a minute. I …” He swallowed. “I need a minute. You …” He spun in place and pointed at Donna. “This was a shitty thing to do. I mean, really, truly, deeply, profoundly not cool. Lying to your team isn’t cool. Setting me up to fail isn’t cool.” 

“I have a brain tumor,” Donna said blandly. “I’m not necessarily in my right mind.” 

“Donna,” Song said quietly. 

Oh, God. Donna was dying. She was dying and she hadn’t told them and minty-green Song had known about it the whole damn time. 

“You knew,” Khalidah managed to say. 

“Of course she knew,” Donna said. “She’s our doctor.” 

Donna was dying. Donna would be dead, soon. Donna had lied to all of them. 

“It’s inoperable,” Donna added, as though talking about a bad seam in her suit and not her grey matter. “And in any case, I wouldn’t want to operate on it. I still have a few good months here—”

“A few months?” Brooklyn was crying. The tears beaded away from her face and she batted at them, as though breaking them into smaller pieces would somehow dismantle the grief and its cause. “You have months? That’s it?”

“More or less.” Donna shrugged. “I could make it longer, with chemo, or nano. But we don’t have those kinds of therapies here. Even if we did, and the tumor did shrink, Song isn’t a brain surgeon, and the lag is too slow for Dr. Spyder to do something that delicate.” She jerked a thumb at the surgical assistant in its cubby. “And there’s the fact that I don’t want to leave.” 

There was an awful silence filled only by the sounds of the station: the water recycler, the rasp of air in the vents, an unanswered alert chiming on and off, off and on. It was the sound the drill made when it encountered issues of structural integrity and wanted a directive on how to proceed. If they didn’t answer it in five more minutes, the chime would increase in rate and volume. If they didn’t answer it after another five minutes, the drill itself would relay a message via the rovers to tell mission control they were being bad parents. 

And none of that mattered now. At least, Khalidah could not make it matter, in her head. She could not pull the alert into the “urgent” section of her mind. Because Donna was dying, Donna would be dead soon, Donna was in all likelihood going to kill herself right here on the station and what would they do—

Donna snapped her fingers and opened the alert. She pushed it over to tactical array where they could all see it. “Marshall, go and take a look.” 

Marshall seemed glad of any excuse to leave the conversation. He drifted over to the array and started pulling apart the alert with his fingers. His suit was still so new that his every swipe and pinch and pull worked on the first try. His fingers hadn’t worn down yet. Not like theirs. Not like Donna’s.

“Can you do that?” Khalidah asked Donna. When Donna didn’t answer, she focused on Song. “Can she do that?” 

Song’s face closed. She was in full physician mode now. Gone was the cheerful woman with the round face who joked about porn. Had the person they’d become friends with ever truly been real? Was she always this cold, underneath? Was it being so far away from Earth that made it so easy for her to lie to them? “It’s her body, Khal. She doesn’t have any obligation to force it to suffer.”

Khalidah tried to catch Donna’s eye. “You flew with the Air Force. You flew over Syria and Sudan. You—”

“Yes, and whatever I was exposed to there probably had a hand in this,” Donna muttered. “The buildings, you know. They released all kinds of nasty stuff. Like first responder syndrome, but worse.” She pinched her nose. It was the only sign she ever registered of a headache. “But it’s done, now, Khalidah. I’ve made my decision.”

“But—”

“We all knew this might be a one-way trip,” Song added. 

“Don’t patronize me, Song,” Khalidah snapped.

“Then grow up,” Song sighed. “Donna put this in her living will ages ago. Long before she even had her first flight. She was preapproved for Lethezine, thanks to her family’s cancer history. There was always a chance that she would get cancer on this trip, given the radiation exposure. But her physicians decided it was an acceptable risk, and she chose to come here in full awareness of that risk.” 

“I’m right here, you know,” Donna said. “I’m not dead yet.” 

“You could still retire,” Khalidah heard herself say. “You could go private. Join a board of trustees somewhere, or something like that. They’d cover a subscription, maybe they could get you implants—”

“I don’t want implants, Khal, I want to die here—”

“I brought some implants,” Marshall said, without turning around. He slid one last number into place, then wiped away the display. Now he turned. He took a deep breath, as though he’d rehearsed this speech the whole trip over. Which he probably had. Belatedly, Khalidah noticed the length of his hair and fingernails. God, he’d done the whole trip alone. The station couldn’t bear more than one extra; as it was, he’d needed to bring extra scrubbers and promise to spend most of the time in his own hab docked to theirs. 

“I brought implants,” he continued. “They’re prototypes. No surgery necessary. Houston insisted. They wanted to give you one last chance to change your mind.” 

“I’m not going to change my mind,” Donna said. “I want to die here.” 

“Please stop saying that.” Brooklyn wiped her eyes. “Please just stop saying that.”

“But it’s the truth,” Donna said, in her maddening why-isn’t-everyone-as-objective-about-this-as-I-am way. “My whole life, I’ve wanted to go to Mars. And now I’m within sight of it. I’m not going to leave just because there’s a lesion on my brain. Not when I just got here.” She huffed. “Besides. I’d be no good to any of you on chemo. I’d be sick.”

“You are sick,” Khalidah snapped. 

“Not that sick.” Song lifted her gaze from her nails and gestured at the rest of them. “None of you noticed, did you? Both of you thought she was fine.” 

“Yeah, no thanks to you.”

“Don’t take that tone with me. She’s my patient. I’d respect your right to confidentiality the same way I respected hers.”

“You put the mission at risk,” Khalidah said. 

“Oh my God, Khal, stop talking like them.” Brooklyn’s voice was still thick with tears. “You’re not mission control. This has nothing to do with the mission.”

“It has everything to do with the mission!” Khalidah rounded on Donna. “How could you do this? How could you not tell us? This entire experiment hinges on social cohesion. That’s why we’re here. We’re here to prove …” 

Now the silence had changed into something wholly other. It was much heavier now. Much more accusatory. Donna folded her arms. 

“What are we here to prove, Khalidah?” 

Khalidah shut her eyes. She would be professional. She would not cry. She would not get angry. At least, no angrier than she already was. She would not focus on Donna’s betrayal, and her deceit, and the fact that she had the audacity to pull this bullshit so soon after … Khalidah took a deep breath. 

She would put it aside. Humans are containers of emotion. She made herself see the words in the visualizing interface they had for moments like this. When someone else’s emotions spill out, it’s because their container is full. She focused on her breathing. She pictured the color of her aura changing in the others’ lenses. She imagined pushing the color from purple to green, healing it slowly, as though it were the evidence of a terrible wound.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“That’s good,” Donna said. “Because we’re not here to prove any one particular thing or another. We’re here to run experiments, gather the last Martian samples before the crewed missions begin, and observe the drills as they dig out the colony. That’s all we’re here to do. You may feel pressure to do something else, due to the nature of this team, but that’s not why we’re here. The work comes first. The policy comes later.” 

The Morrígu was divided into three pods: Badb, Macha, and Nemain. No one referred to them that way, of course—only Marshall had the big idea to actually try stumbling through ancient Gaelic with his good ol’ boy accent. He gave up after two weeks. Nonetheless, he still referred to his unit as the Corvus. 

“Nice of them to stick with the crow theme,” he said. 

“Ravens are omens of death,” Donna said, and just like that, Game Night was over. That was fine with Khalidah. Low-gravity games never had the degree of complexity she liked; they had magnetic game boards, but they weren’t entirely the same. And without cards or tokens they couldn’t really visualize the game in front of them, and basically played permutations of Werewolf or Mafia until they learned each other’s tells. 

Not that all that experience had helped her read Donna and Song’s dishonesty. Even after all their time spent together, in training, on the flight, on the station, there was the capacity for betrayal. Even now, she did not truly know them. 

Not yet, Khalidah often repeated to herself, as the days stretched on. Not yet. Not for the first time, she wished for a return to 24-hour days. Once upon a time, they had seemed so long. She had yearned for afternoons to end, for lectures to cease, for shifts to close. Now she understood that days on Earth were beautifully, mercifully short. 

Sometimes Khalidah caught Donna watching her silently, when she didn’t think Khalidah would notice. When Khalidah met her eyes, Donna would try to smile. It was more a crinkling of the eyes than anything else. It was hard to tell if she was in pain, or unhappy, or both. The brain had no nerve endings of its own, no pain receptors. The headaches that Donna felt were not the tissue’s response to her tumor, but rather a warning sign about a crowded nerve, an endless alarm that rang down through her spinal column and caused nausea and throbbing at odd hours. Or so she said. 

Khalidah’s first email was to her own psychiatrist on Earth, through her personal private channel. It was likely the very same type of channel Donna had used to carry on her deception. Can a member of crew just hide any medical condition they want? she wrote.

Your confidentiality and privacy are paramount, Dr. Hassan wrote back from Detroit. You have sacrificed a great deal of privacy to go on this mission. You live in close quarters, quite literally right on top of each other. So the private channels you have left are considered sacrosanct. Communications between any participant and her doctor must remain private until the patient chooses to disclose.

This was not the answer Khalidah had wanted to hear. 

Imagine if it were you who had a secret, Dr. Hassan continued, as though having anticipated Khalidah’s feelings on the matter. If you were experiencing the occasional suicidal ideation, for example, would you want your whole crew to know, or would you wait for the ideations to pass?

It was a valid counterargument. Mental health was a major concern on long-haul missions. Adequate care required stringent privacy. But Donna’s cancer wasn’t a passing thought about how much easier it would be to be dead. She was actually dying. And she hadn’t told them. 

Now, after all that silence on the matter, the cancer seemed to be all anyone could talk about.

“I’ve almost trained the pain to live on Martian time,” Donna said, one morning. “Most patients feel pain in the morning, but they feel it on an Earth schedule, with full sunlight.” 

Khalidah could not bring herself to smile back, not yet. Doing so felt like admitting defeat.

“She won’t die any slower just because you’re mad at her,” Brooklyn said, as they conducted seal checks on the suits.

“Leave me alone,” Khalidah said. Brooklyn just shrugged and got on with the checklist. A moment later, she asked for a flashlight. Khalidah handed it to her without a word. 

“Have you watched any of the games your dad sent?” Marshall asked, the next day. 

“Please don’t bring him up,” Khalidah said. 

Five weeks later, the vomiting started. It was an intriguing low-gravity problem—barf bags were standard, but carrying them around wasn’t. And Donna couldn’t just commandeer the shop-vac for her own personal use. In the end, Marshall made her a little butterfly net, of sorts, with an iris at one end. It was like a very old-fashioned nebulizer for inhaling asthma medication. Only it worked in the other direction. 

Not coincidentally, Marshall had brought with him an entire liquid diet intended specifically for cancer patients. Donna switched, and things got better. 

“I’ll stick around long enough to get the last samples from Hellas,” she said, sipping a pouch of what appeared to be either a strawberry milkshake or an anti-nausea tonic. She coughed. The cough turned into a gag that she needed to suppress. She clenched a fist and then unclenched it, to master it. “I want my John Hancock on those damn things.” 

“Don’t you want to see the landing?” Marshall asked. “You know, hand over the keys, see their faces when they see the ant farm in person for the first time?” 

“What, and watch them fuck up all our hard work?” 

They all laughed. All of them but Khalidah. How could they just act like everything was normal? Did the crew of the Ganesha mission even know that Donna was sick? Would the team have to explain it? How would that conversation even happen? (“Welcome to Mars. Sorry, but we’re in the middle of a funeral. Anyway, try not to get your microbes everywhere.”)

Then the seizures started. They weren’t violent. More like gentle panic attacks. “My arm doesn’t feel like my arm anymore,” Donna said, as she continued to man her console with one hand. “No visual changes, though. Just localized disassociation.” 

“That’s a great band name,” Marshall said. 

Morrígu tried to help, in her own way. The station gently reminded Khalidah of all the things that she already knew: that she was distracted, that she wasn’t sleeping, that she would lie awake listening for the slightest tremor in Donna’s breathing, and that sometimes Brooklyn would reach up from her cubby and squeeze Khalidah’s ankle because she was listening too. The station made herself available in the form of the alters, often pinging Khalidah when her gaze failed to track properly across a display, or when her blood pressure spiked, or when she couldn’t sleep. Ursula, most often, but then Octavia. God is Change, the station reminded her. The only lasting truth is Change. 

And Khalidah knew that to be true. She did. She simply drew no comfort from it. Too many things had changed already. Donna was dying. Donna, who had calmly helped her slide the rods into the sleeves as they pitched tents in Alberta one dark night while the wolves howled and the thermometer dropped to 30 below. Donna, who had said, “Of course you can do it. That’s not the question,” when Khalidah reached between the cots during isolation week and asked Donna if the older woman thought she was really tough enough to do the job. Donna, without whom Khalidah might have quit at any time. 

“You watch any of those games yet?” Marshall asked, when he caught her staring down at the blood-dark surface of the planet. Rusted, old. Not like the wine-dark samples that Song drained from Donna each week.

Khalidah only shook her head. Baseball seemed so stupid now. 

“Your dad, he really wanted to get those to you before I left,” Marshall reminded her. 

Khalidah took a deep, luxuriant breath. “I told you not to mention him, Marshall. I asked you nicely. Are you going to respect those boundaries, or are we going to have a problem?” 

Marshall said nothing, at first. Instead he drifted in place, holding the nearest grip to keep himself tethered. He hadn’t learned how to tuck himself in yet, how to twist and wring himself so that he passed through without touching anyone else. Everything about his presence there still felt wrong. 

“We don’t have to be friends,” he said, in measured tones. He pointed down into Storage. “But the others, they’re your friends. Or they thought they were. Until now.” 

“They lied to me.” 

“Oh, come on. You think it wasn’t tough for Song to go through that? You think she enjoyed it, not telling you? Jesus Christ, Khalidah. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but a lot of us made a lot of sacrifices to get this far.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was so difficult for you, finding out you’d get to go to Mars—”

“—Phobos.”

“—Phobos, without anything like the training we had to endure, just so you could pilot your finicky fucking drill God knows where—”

“Hey, now, I happen to like my finicky fucking drill very fucking much,” Marshall said. He blinked. Then covered his face with his hands. He’d filed his nails down and buzzed his hair in solidarity with Donna. His entire skull was flushed the color of a new spring geranium. “That … didn’t come out right.” 

Khalidah hung in place. She drew her knees up to her chest and floated. It had been a long time since she’d experienced secondhand embarrassment. Something about sharing such a tiny space with the others for so long ground it out of a person. But she was embarrassed for Marshall now. Not as embarrassed as he was, thank goodness. But embarrassed.

“They sent me alone, you know,” he said, finally, through the splay of his fingers. He scrubbed at the bare stubble of his skull. “Alone. Do you even know what that means? You know all those desert island questions in job interviews? When they ask you what books you’d bring, if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere? Well, I read all of those. War and Peace. Being and Nothingness. Do you have any idea how good I am at solitaire, by now?”

“You can’t be good at solitaire, it’s—”

“But I did it, because they said it was the best chance for giving Donna extra time. If they’d sent two of us, you’d all have to go home a hell of a lot faster. You wouldn’t be here when Ganesha arrives. So I did it. I got here. Alone. I did the whole trip by myself. So you and Donna and the whole crew could have more time.” 

Khalidah swallowed hard. “Are you finished?” 

“Yes. I’m finished.” He pushed himself off the wall, then bounced away and twisted back to face her. “No. I’m not. I think you’re being a total hypocrite, and I think it’s undermining whatever social value the Morrígu experiment was meant to have.” 

Khalidah felt her eyebrows crawl up to touch the edges of her veil. “Excuse me?” 

“Yeah. You heard me. You’re being a hypocrite.” He lowered his voice. “Do your friends even know your dad died? Did you tell them that he was dying, when you left? Because I was told not to mention it, and that sure as hell sounds like a secret to me.” 

Khalidah closed her eyes. The only place to go, in a space this small, was inward. There was no escape, otherwise. She waited until that soft darkness had settled around her and then asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re not alone, out here. You have friends. Friends you’ve known and worked with for years, in one way or another. So what if Donna jerked you around? She jerked me around too, and you don’t see me acting like a brat about it. Or Brooklyn. Or Song. Meanwhile you’ve been keeping this massive life-changing event from them this whole time.” 

Now Khalidah’s eyes opened. She had no need for that comforting blanket of darkness now. “My father dying is not a massive life-changing event,” she snapped. “You think you know all my secrets? You don’t know shit, Marshall. Because if you did, you’d know that I haven’t spoken to that bastard in 10 years.”

As though trying to extract some final usefulness from their former mistress, the drills decided to fail before the Banshee units returned with their samples, and before Ganesha arrived with the re-up and the Mars crew. Which meant that when Ganesha landed, the crew would have to live in half-dug habs.

“It’s the goddamn perchlorate,” Donna whispered. She had trouble swallowing now, and it meant her voice was constantly raw. “I told them we should have gone with the Japanese bit. It drilled the Shinkansen, I said. Too expensive, they said. Now the damn thing’s rusted all to shit.” 

Which was exactly the case. The worm dried up suddenly, freezing in place—a “Bertha Bork,” like the huge drill that stalled under Seattle during an ill-fated transit project. They’d rehearsed this particular error. First they ordered all the rovers away in case of a sinkhole, and then started running satellites over the sink. And the drill himself told them what was wrong. The blades were corroded. After five years of work, too much of the red dirt had snuck down into the drill’s workings. It would need to be dug out and cleaned before it could continue. Or it would need to be replaced entirely. 

The replacement prototype was already built. It had just completed its first test run in the side of a flattened mountain in West Virginia. It was strong and light and better articulated than the worm. But the final model was supposed to come over with Ganesha. And in the meantime, the hab network still needed major excavation. 

“What’s the risk if we send one of the rovers to try to uncover it?” Song asked. “We’ve got one in the cage; it wrapped up its mission ages ago. Wouldn’t be too hard to reconfigure.” 

“Phobos rovers might be too light,” Marshall said. “But the real problem is the crashberry; it’ll take three days to inflate and another week to energize. And that’s a week we’re not drilling.” 

“We could tell Ganesha to slow down,” Khalidah said. 

“They’re ballistic capture,” Marshall said. “If they slow down now, they lose serious momentum.”

“They’d pick it up on arrival, though.” 

“Yeah …” Marshall sucked his teeth. “But they’re carrying a big load. They could jackknife once they hit the well, if they don’t maintain a steady speed.” He scrubbed at the thin dusting of blonde across his scalp. “But we have to tell them about this, either way. Wouldn’t be right, not updating them.” 

Khalidah snorted. The others ignored her.

“Can we redirect the Banshees?” Brooklyn asked. “Whiskey and Tango are the closest. We could have them dump their samples, set a pin, tell them to dig out the worm, and then come back.” 

Khalidah shook her head. “They’re already full. They’re on their way to the mail drop. If we redeployed them now, they wouldn’t be in position when Ganesha arrives. Besides, they’re carrying Hellas—we can’t afford to compromise them.” 

“Those samples are locked up like Fort Knox,” Brooklyn said. “What, are you worried that the crew of Ganesha will open them up by mistake? Because that’s pretty much guaranteed not to happen.”

“No, but—”

“There’s a storm in between Whiskey and the worm,” Marshall said. He pointed at an undulating pattern of lines on the screen between two blinking dots. “If we send Whiskey now, we might lose her forever. And the samples. And we still wouldn’t be any further with the drill. Fuck.” 

He pushed away from the console, knuckling his eyes. Khalidah watched the planet. In the plate glass, she caught Donna watching her. Her friend was much thinner now. They’d had to turn off her suit, because it no longer fit snugly enough to read her heartbeat. Her breath came in rasps. She coughed often. Last month, Song speculated that the cancer had spread to her lungs; Donna claimed not to care very much. Khalidah heard the older woman sigh slow and deep. And she knew, before Donna even opened her mouth, what she was about to suggest. 

“There’s always the Corvus,” Donna said. 

“No,” Khalidah said. “Absolutely not.”

But Donna wasn’t even looking at her. She was looking at Marshall. “How much fuel did they really send, Marshall? You got here awfully fast.” 

Marshall licked his lips. “Between what I have left over and what Ganesha is leaving behind for you midway, there’s enough to send you home.” 

“Which means Corvus has just enough to send me down, and give me thrust to come back.” 

“Even if that were true, you could still have a seizure while doing the job,” Song said. 

“Then I’ll take my anti-seizure medication before I leave,” Donna said. 

“The gravity would demolish you, with the state you’re in,” Marshall said. “It should be me. I should go. I know Corvus better, and my bone density is—” 

“That’s very gallant of you, Mr. Marshall, but I outrank you,” Donna reminded him. “Yes, I tire easily. Yes, it’s hard for me to breathe. But I’m stronger than I would be if I were on chemo. And the suit can both give me some lift and push a good air mix for me. Right, Brooklyn?” 

Brooklyn beamed. “Yes, ma’am.” 

“And Marshall, if any of those things do occur, I need you up here to remote-pilot Corvus from topside and get the samples back here.” She gestured at the map. “If you tell Tango to meet me, I can take her samples and put them on Corvus. Then I get in Tango’s cargo compartment and drive her around the storm, to the worm. I dig out the drill, and you restart it from up here. When I come back, you have the samples, and Ganesha has another guestroom.” She grinned. The smile made her face into a skull. “Easy peasy,” Donna said. 

“You know you’re making history, right?” Marshall asked, as they performed the final checks on Corvus. “First human on Mars, and all that. You’re stealing Ganesha’s thunder.”

Donna coughed. “Don’t jinx it, Marshall.” 

“How are your hands?” 

Donna held them up. Slowly, she crunched her thickly gloved digits into fists. “They’re okay.”

“That’s good. Go slow. The Banshees take a light touch.”

“I know that, Marshall.”

He pinked. “I know you know. But I’m just reminding you. Now, I’ll get you down there, smooth as silk, and when it’s time to come home you just let us know, okay?”

Donna’s head tilted. She did that when she was about to ask an important question. For a moment it reminded Khalidah so much of the woman she’d been and the woman they’d lost that she forgot to breathe. “Is it home now, for you?”

Marshall’s blush deepened. He really did turn the most unfortunate shade of sunburned red. “I guess so,” he said. “Brooklyn, it’s your turn.” 

Brooklyn breezed in and, flipping herself to hang upside down, performed the final checks on Donna’s suit. “You’ve got eight hours,” she said. “Sorry it couldn’t be more. Tango is already on her way, and she’ll be there to meet you when you land.”

“What’s Tango’s charge like?” 

“She’s sprinting to meet you, so she’ll be half-empty by the time she hits the rendezvous point,” Marshall said. “But there’s a set of auxiliary batteries in the cargo area. You’d have to move them to get into the cockpit anyhow.” 

Donna nodded. The reality of what was about to happen was settling on them. How odd, Khalidah thought, to be weightless and yet to feel the gravity of Donna’s mission tugging at the pit of her stomach. The first human on Mars. The first woman. The first cancer patient. She had read a metaphor of illness as another country, how patients became citizens of it, that place beyond the promise of life, and now she thought of Donna there on the blood-red sands, representing them. Not just a human, but a defiantly mortal one, one for whom all the life-extension dreams and schemes would never bear fruit. All the members of the Ganesha crew had augmentations to make their life on Mars more productive and less painful. Future colonists would doubtless have similar lifehacks. Donna was the only visitor who would ever set an unadulterated foot on that soil. 

“I’ll be watching your vitals the whole time,” Song said. “If I don’t like what I see, I’ll tell Marshall to take control of Tango and bring you back.” 

Donna cracked a smile. “Is that for my benefit, or the machine’s?” 

“Both,” Song said. “We can’t have you passing out and crashing millions of dollars’ worth of machine learning and robotics.” 

And then, too soon, the final checks were finished, and it was time for Donna to go. The others drifted to the other side of the airlock, and Brooklyn ran the final diagnostic of the detachment systems. Khalidah’s hands twitched at her veil. She had no idea what to say. Why did you lie to us? Did you really think that would make this easier? What were you so afraid of? 

Donna regarded her from the interior of her suit. She looked so small inside it. Khalidah thought of her fragile body shaking inside its soft volumes, her thin neck and her bare skull juddering like a bad piece of video. 

“I want—”

“Don’t,” Donna said. “Don’t, Khal. Not now.”

For the first time in a long time, Khalidah peeped at Donna’s aura through the additional layer in her lenses’ vision. It was deep blue, like a very wide and cold stretch of the sea. It was a color she had never seen on Donna. When she looked at her own pattern, it was much the same shade. 

Marshall chose this moment to poke his head in. “It’s time.” 

Donna reached over to the airlock button. “I have to go now, Khalidah.” 

Before Khalidah could say anything, Marshall had tugged her backward. The door rolled shut. For a moment she watched Donna through the small bright circle of glass. Then Donna’s helmet snapped shut and she wore a halo within a halo, like a bull’s-eye. 

The landing was as Marshall promised: smooth as silk. With Corvus he was in his element. He and the vessel knew each other well. They’d moved as much of Corvus’s cargo as they could into temporary storage outside the hab; the reduced weight would give Donna the extra boost on the trip back that she might need. 

Donna herself rode out the landing better than any of them expected. She took her time unburdening herself of her restraints, and they heard her breathing heavily, trying to choke back the nausea that now dominated her daily life. But eventually she lurched free of the unit, tuned up the jets on her suit, jiggered her air mix, and began the unlocking procedure to open Corvus. They watched her gloved hands hovering over the final lock. 

“I hope you’re not expecting some cheesy bullshit about giant leaps for womankind,” Donna said, panting audibly. She sounded sheepish. For Donna, that meant she was nervous. “I didn’t really have time to prepare any remarks. I have a job to do.” 

Brooklyn wiped her eyes and covered her mouth. Marshall passed her a tissue, and took one for himself. 

“You’ve wanted this since you were a little girl, Donna,” Song said. “Go out there and get it.” 

Together they watched the lock spin open, and Donna eased herself out. There was Tango, ready and waiting. And there was Mars, or at least their little corner of it, raw and open and red like a wound. 

“I wish I could smell it,” Donna said. “I wish I could taste the air. It feels strange to be here and yet not be here at the same time. You can stand here all you want and never really touch it.” 

“You can look at the samples when you bring them back,” Brooklyn managed to say. 

Donna said nothing, only silently made her way to Tango and moved the samples back to Corvus. Then she began the procedure to get Tango into manual. Her feed cut out a couple of times, but only briefly; they hadn’t thought to test the signal on the cameras themselves. Her audio was fine, though, and Marshall talked her through when she had questions. In the end it ran like any other remote repair. Even the dig went well; clearing the dirt from the drill and restarting it from the control panel was a lot simpler than any of them had expected. 

Halfway back to Corvus, Tango slowly rolled to a stop. 

“Donna, check your batteries,” Marshall suggested. 

There was no answer. Only Donna’s slow, wet breathing. 

“Donna, copy?”

Nothing. They looked at Song; Song pulled up Donna’s vitals. “No changes in her eye movements or alpha pattern,” Song whispered. “She’s not having a seizure. Donna. Donna! Do you need help?” 

“No,” Donna said, finally. “I came here to do a job, and now I’m finished with it. I’m done.” 

Something in Khalidah’s stomach turned to ice. “Don’t do this,” she whispered, as Marshall began to say “No, no, no,” over and over. He started bashing things on the console, running every override he could. 

“No, you don’t, you crazy old broad,” he muttered. “I can get Tango to drive you back, you know!” 

“Not if I’ve ripped out the receiver,” Donna said. She sounded exhausted. “I think I’ll just stay here, thank you. Ganesha can deal with me when they come. You don’t have to do it. You’d have had to freeze me, anyway, and vibrate me down to crystal, like cat litter, and—”

“Fuck. You.” 

It was the first full complete sentence that Khalidah had spoken to her in months. So she repeated it. 

“Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to us. Again. Fuck you for this selfish fucking bullshit. Oh, you think you’re being so romantic, dying on Mars. Well fuck you. We came here to prove we could live, not …” Her lips were hot. Her eyes were hot. It was getting harder to breathe. “Not whatever the fuck it is you think you’re doing.” 

Nothing. 

“Donna, please don’t,” Brooklyn whispered in her most wheedling tone. “Please don’t leave us. We need you.” She sounded like a child. Then again, Khalidah wasn’t sure she herself sounded any better. Somehow this loss contained within it all the other losses she’d ever experienced: her mother, her father, the slow pull away from the Earth and into the shared unknown.

“This is a bad idea,” Marshall said, his voice calm and steady. “If you want to take the Lethezine, take the Lethezine. But you don’t know how it works—what if it doesn’t go like you think it will, and you’re alone and in pain down there? Why don’t you come back up, and if something goes wrong, we’ll be there to help?”

Silence. Was she deliberating? Could they change her mind? Khalidah strained to hear the sound of Tango starting back up again. They flicked nervous, tearful glances at each other. 

“Are you just going to quit?” Khalidah asked, when the silence stretched too long. “Are you just going to run away, like this? Now that it’s hard?” 

“You have no idea how hard this is, Khal, and you’ve never once thought to ask.” 

It stung. Khalidah let the pain transform itself into anger. Anger, she decided, was the only way out of this problem. “I thought you didn’t want me to ask, given how you never told us anything until it was too late.” 

“It’s not my fault I’m dying!” 

“But it’s your fault you didn’t tell us! We would have—”

“You would have convinced me to go home.” Donna chuckled. It became a cough. The cough lasted too long. “Because you love me, and you want me to live. And I love you, so I would have done it.” She had another little coughing jag. “But the trouble with home is that there’s nothing to go back to. I’ve thrown my whole life into this. I’ve had to pass on things—real things—to get to this place. But now that I’m here, I know it was worth it. And that’s how I want to end it. I don’t want to die alone in a hospital surrounded by people who don’t understand what’s out here, or why we do this.” 

Khalidah forced her voice to remain firm. “And so you want to die alone, down there, surrounded by nothing at all?” 

“I’m not alone, Khal. You’re with me. You’re all with me, all the time.” 

Brooklyn broke down. She pushed herself into one corner. Khalidah reached up, and held her ankle, tethering her into the group. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears bud away. Song’s beautiful ponytail drifted across her face. Arms curled around Khalidah’s body. Khalidah curled her arms around the others. They were a Gordian knot, hovering far above Donna, a problem she could not solve and could only avoid.

“That’s right, Donna,” Marshall said. “We’re here. We’re right here.” 

“I’m sorry,” Donna said. “I’m sorry I lied. I didn’t want to. But I just … I wanted to stay, more than I wanted to tell you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Khalidah said. “I …” She wiped at her face. Her throat hurt. “I miss you. Already.” 

“I miss you, too. I miss all of you.” Donna sniffed hard. “But this is where we’re supposed to be. Because this is where we are at our best.” 

They were quiet for a while. There was nothing to do but weep. Khalidah thought she might weep forever. The pain was a real thing—she had forgotten that it hurt to cry. She had forgotten the raw throat and pounding head that came with full-body grief. She had forgotten, since her mother, how physically taxing it could be. 

“Are you ready, now?” Song asked, finally. She wiped her eyes and swallowed. “Donna? Are you ready to take the dose?”

The silence went on a long time. But still, they kept asking, “Are you ready? Are you ready?”

Acknowledgments: First, I am grateful to Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich, Alissa Haddaji, and Steve Ruff at Arizona State University for their tireless work bringing this incredibly special project to fruition. I’m also profoundly lucky to have worked with Zachary Pirtle and Jacob Keaton at NASA. It is beyond cool to have had these gentlemen answer my questions. I also want to thank Scott Maxwell for his input and commentary, as well as his open discussion of his work as a Mars rover driver. (I should also thank Joi Weaver for introducing us!) Lastly, I must thank my husband David Nickle, who was beyond patient with me as I worked through one of the most difficult, engaging stories of my career.

Life on Mars?

by Steve Ruff

I consider myself a Martian, at least virtually, like Karl Schroeder’s “homesteaders.” I’m actually a Mars geologist, a scientist who applies knowledge of Earth geology to explore Mars geology. But for three months in 2004, I and a few hundred other Earthbound explorers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got as close to being Martians as humanly possible at this point in history. Many of us from across the U.S. and abroad took up residence in Pasadena and surroundings so that we could ride shotgun with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Our apartments were equipped with blackout window shades to help adjust our wake and sleep cycle to the rising and setting sun in the Martian sky. We needed to be on Mars time, just like the rovers. Just like Wekesa Ballo. 

Although we Terrans share the same Sun with the real Martians (if they exist), their planet turns just a bit more slowly on its axis than ours, such that the Martian day is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer. This Martian “sol” is quite a cosmic coincidence. Our other next-door neighbor, Venus, rotates the slowest of any planet. So a “day” there would stretch for more than 243 Earth days, precluding any hope of living on Venus time.

Mars time, however, I could get used to. My night-owl ways had unexpectedly prepared me for a mission with about 40 minutes of bonus time each night, followed by the luxury of sleeping 40 minutes later each morning. Apparently my circadian metronome beats with a Martian rhythm. I was among the lucky few. My housemate lasted only a week before his decidedly terrestrial metronome forced him back to the rhythm of Earth time. 

Like my housemate, the baker and homesteaders in Schroeder’s story are permanently jet-lagged, a condition experienced by many of the JPL-based “Martians.” Fortunately, the jet lag of our team of JPL Martians ended after a mere 90 sols, the prespecified length of the rovers’ primary mission. The rovers, of course, are immune to jet lag and free from human frailties. They have been loyal mechanical surrogates following the commands of their Earthbound masters each day since their landing, one of them for more than 13 years now. 

For decades we’ve been sending our robotic surrogates to Mars. The first spaceships had just minutes of close encounters with the alien planet before sailing past. Subsequent missions graduated to extended visits in orbit, bolstered by ever-improving capabilities to sense the landscape a few hundred miles below and to probe the meager atmosphere in between. 

Our first touch of Martian soil came in 1976 from one-armed robotic landers, an incredible feat of engineering and science prowess. But the lack of mobility of the Viking landers was so frustrating that Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos how he found himself “unconsciously urging the spacecraft at least to stand on its tiptoes, as if this laboratory, designed for immobility, were perversely refusing to manage even a little hop.”^[1] The rover mission he so passionately championed would not come until after his untimely death. That 1996 Pathfinder mission was wildly successful, but its modestly equipped little rover never ventured out of sight of its aptly named home base, the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.

Nearly 10 years would pass before the next rovers visited Mars. Spirit and Opportunity arrived in 2004 with significant advances in mobility and scientific instrumentation, but their capacity to explore is still very limited. They undertake reconnaissance by committee, following orders from humans tens of millions of miles away who have an incomplete picture of the landscape through which the rovers move at the pace of a Galápagos tortoise. Even the newer, larger, and more sophisticated Curiosity rover still suffers from the same exploration-at-a-distance realities of its precursors. This is not an efficient way to investigate the vast reaches of an unknown planet. I often wonder what pieces of the scientific puzzle we’re missing that a geologist on the surface would’ve zeroed in on with ease.  

Karl Schroeder’s story describes a near future in which humans interact with Mars through virtual reality “telecommuting” in much the same way as our Earthbound teams navigate the terrain via rovers. The homesteaders and we must deal with the tens of minutes of time delay, but they use smarter robots and greater visibility of the landscape to create enhancements in productivity. For Schroeder’s imagined future to work as intended, however, we’ll need significant improvements in satellite and receiver infrastructure to increase the amount of data sent between the planets. The fastest data rate from Mars to Earth today is two megabits per second. That’s about five times slower than the slowest “Starter Package” offered by my home internet service provider. We’re going to need at least the “Premier Package” to make high-definition 3D telepresence viable.

In a very different vision of Mars exploration, Madeline Ashby’s story “Death on Mars” puts the human explorers in orbit around the Red Planet, using Phobos, one of its two tiny moons, as a natural satellite base camp. This would offer the major advantages of allowing astronauts to command rover activity in real time and the potential for much greater transfers of data. Other benefits include the fact that the microgravity of the moons allows spacecraft to land and take off with very little effort or special equipment compared with landing and taking off from the Martian surface. So appealing are these benefits that NASA is seriously eyeing this possibility as one of the first steps in the journey of humans to Mars. But even in this scenario, major advances in rover capabilities will still be necessary. 

We’ve already started to teach old rovers new tricks. For example, in the search for Martian dust devils using rover cameras, the otherwise data-intensive effort is minimized via software that only returns images in which a change is detected. And interesting rocks can now be targeted for imaging and other non-contact measurements using onboard software that is smart enough to recognize them without a human in the loop. Ultimately however, true in-depth exploration of the Red Planet will require highly mobile and dexterous robots that can explore and interact with the Martian environment using artificial intelligence. Just as test pilot astronauts during the Apollo era learned the fundamental skills of a geologist, so too could robotic surrogates on Mars. But unlike the rudimentary capabilities of the Apollo geologists, future Mars robotic geologists will be equipped with sensor systems unimaginable in the 1970s. These tools will identify rocks and minerals with a precision and accuracy that even skilled field geologists on Earth would envy. The discoveries of these robotic explorers would be the starting point for human explorers to make sorties from their orbiting base camp, and ultimately, from their surface exploration zones. 

But what is the point of all of this Mars exploration? The easiest answer is the search for past or present life. As a geologist, I could be perfectly happy just learning about the history of that distant planet independent of the search for life. But the most profound discovery in all of space exploration will come when we find life beyond Earth. We have only one data point in the entire universe regarding life, only one planetary body known to harbor it. Never mind that Earth represents an absurdly rich and fecund harbor; it’s still the only data point we’ve got. So even the discovery of fossil microbes on Mars would double the number of planets that we know to host life. And to borrow a concept from Isaac Asimov, it’s unlikely that, having found a second example of life in the universe, there are indeed only two.

In this context, robotic explorers offer a major advantage over humans in the search for Martian life: they lower the possibility of contaminating the surface of Mars with human-borne microbes. It’s relatively straightforward to reduce the “bioload” on hardware; not so for humans. The search for microbes on Mars is more likely to yield unambiguous results if the searchers are not carrying colonies of terrestrial microbes. 

It still may take human explorers on the surface of Mars to prove once and for all whether life was or is present there. But I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet. We’ve never even brought back samples to search for traces of microbial Martians (rather than little green men). Yes, we’ve got several dozen rock samples from Mars thanks to natural impact events launching them into space to ultimately fall as meteorites on Earth. But these Martian meteorites are nearly all igneous rocks, the ones most able to survive the violent expulsion from their home world and least likely to host evidence of Martian microbes. We need to collect samples of rocks known to have formed in habitable environments on Mars from a time and place that offers the greatest likelihood of having hosted inhabitants.

This is precisely the intent of the next NASA Mars rover mission in 2020. For the first time in the history of Mars exploration, we’ll have a rover capable of collecting cored rock samples and caching them for possible future return to Earth. It’s going to require some really interesting rock samples to compel the launch of a follow-up mission to pick them up and deliver them Earthside. But our robotic reconnaissance has already delivered a compelling view of Mars as a planet with an early history that really may have had habitable environments capable of supporting life—life which would be captured and preserved in the rock record. 

After decades of preparation, we’re finally poised to collect rock samples most likely to answer the question of life on Mars. Though complicated, collecting samples robotically and sending them back to Earth for analysis offers benefits beyond minimizing the potential for organic contamination. The full capabilities of instruments and techniques in labs on Earth can be deployed in the search for microbes in the returned samples. It’s simply not possible to equip rovers for such complex analyses. Yet the biggest benefit of sample collection via robot comes from the substantially lower costs, in part because it’s so much easier to equip rovers to deal with the incredibly inhospitable conditions of the Martian environment. 

The surface of Mars today is lethal to life as we know it, which may be why we haven’t found any yet. Even the least clement places on Earth are far more tolerable than the most hospitable places on Mars, starting with the most precious resource for human life: oxygen. The atmospheric pressure of Mars is less than 1% that of Earth, and 95% of that thin atmosphere is the stuff we breathe out, carbon dioxide. The life-giving oxygen molecules that we breathe in are considered a “trace” gas on Mars at less than 1%. Heavy tanks of oxygen would be essential gear for human explorers, as well as pressurized suits to keep one’s fluids from boiling away. 

Then there’s the cold. Despite the presence of a known greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there’s just not enough of it to provide the warmth that humans need to survive. Although you could walk barefoot comfortably on a summer day near the equator thanks to the heat-absorbing soil and rocks, you’d need a jacket and hat for warmth against the freezing air temperatures. At night, you’d need a lot more than warm clothes to survive the plummeting temperatures that bottom out near minus 100°F. In the wintertime, at latitudes beyond about 40° from the equator, it gets cold enough on Mars that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condenses out as a layer of dry ice at nearly 200°F below zero. So far, even rovers haven’t ventured more than 15° from the relative warmth of the equator, and even there they still require electric heaters on the motors that drive wheels and other moving components. 

Rovers are relatively immune to other nasty features of the Martian environment like global dust storms, ionizing radiation, and toxic salts in the soil that will challenge human explorers, not to mention potential future colonists. Some view colonization of Mars as a hedge against a calamitous end to human life on Earth. But for thousands of years, no war, disease, or famine has ever come close to wiping out our prolific and tenacious species. More importantly, over Earth’s history, even the greatest natural calamities produced from within the Earth and from without have never made our planet less habitable than Mars. The same goes for Earth’s most extreme climate changes. And even the dreaded scenario of all-out nuclear war would not strip Earth of its life-giving oxygen or rainfall. Humanity would be forced to mitigate the effects of ionizing radiation, but that’s already the case on Mars today. Billions of years ago its internal dynamo died, taking with it the protective bubble of a magnetic field that shielded it from cosmic and intense solar radiation. Earth’s dynamo still churns out a magnetic bubble, with no realistic scenario for its demise in sight.

Some view Mars as a new frontier to be settled, like the American West, or as a place to create a new and better human society. But the Western pioneers didn’t have to worry about how they were going to breathe, or keep out radiation, or farm land devoid of organic matter and covered in toxic salts. Such conditions would challenge even the most committed founders of a new Mars society. It would be much easier to establish a colony in the Atacama Desert or any other of the most barren and uninhabited places on Earth.

Regardless of the incredible challenges of sending humans to Mars, I can’t wait to see it happen. There’s no shortage of volunteers ready for a chance to go, and I fantasize about being among them. Despite my fantasy, I suspect that the first boots on Mars will arrive long after mine are packed away. As a child in the Apollo era, I watched the Moon landings and expected to see flags and footprints on Mars by my early adulthood. But that trajectory was unsustainable, driven not by science and the quest for knowledge, but instead by a Cold War imperative. In my advancing middle age, I don’t see a comparable driver for sending human explorers to Mars, or a compelling rationale for the even greater challenges of sending human colonists. But with perhaps-naïve optimism, I do imagine a scenario in which robotic missions return Martian rock samples that reveal tantalizing hints of long-dead biota, creating a new imperative for sending humans to find the answer. In doing so, there will indeed be life on Mars.

Acknowledgments: Exploration of Mars would not be possible without the efforts of countless engineers, scientists, administrators, and staff at NASA and its academic and industrial partners. Together we are privileged to do so thanks to the commitment of the public and its representatives.

Notes

^[1] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Books, 2013): 137. First published in 1980. [back]