Mars Two
Dear Earthlings,
I hope all is well on your planet, for if I die here, I will gain some comfort knowing there is a backup, a second planet on whom my kind will go on living. Someday humanity may go on to colonize the galaxy, founding a second Mars colony, hopefully with more people and more planning than the first attempt.
Did that come on too strong? If so, I apologize. Yes, I would like you to come and rescue us. But I have largely lost hope of it happening. I’m aware the company that manufactured the rockets that took us here no longer exists. I know of your political and economic turmoil. And I know full well that if it’s DALYs you care about, you could save many more of them by investing in improvements on the roads to minimize traffic accidents than in rocketing here and picking up the 148 survivors of the Silah Program.
In my spare time, I like to read early science fiction set on Mars, before the planet’s true nature was recognized. People saw the red and assumed it was a desert like that on Earth, with breathable air and a little bit of liquid water. They thought they saw canals and reasoned they were built by intelligent Martians to carry water from the polar to the equatorial regions. They supposed that Mars had been a wetter planet in the past and was slowly drying out as, they thought, the Earth would too. They weren’t entirely wrong. Mars used to be wetter (and possibly greener), and the Earth, a billion years from now, will turn into a desert, losing its hydrogen to space.
If there were intelligent inhabitants of Mars, the sci-fi writers reasoned that they must be far older than humans, for it would be a strange coincidence if intelligence arose on Mars at exactly the same time as it did on Earth. The Martians would be an old civilization with the high degree of cooperativeness necessary to build and maintain the Martian canals. They would remember the luscious, green, almost utopian past. They would realize their planet was drying and dying. Age, poverty(but with memories of wealth), and a knowledge of one’s own (individual and civilizational) morality. These, it was thought, would produce wisdom.
One could imagine a different notional Mars. A totalitarian state ruled by a pharaoh commanding an army of peasants slaving away on the canali. Hunger, propaganda, and the secret police. But the years before 1914 were a time of utopian rather than dystopian fiction, and the Wise Martian entered public consciousness, remaining long after it became known that the planet was uninhabitable.
Now there are Martians. So are we wise? There are some reasons to think so. We are supposedly smarter than Earthlings. The 830 men and women who landed on this planet had an average IQ of 134. Now technically the World Space Association didn’t use IQ tests to select the colonists, but everyone knew the tests they did use were IQ tests in disguise. It was calculated that our IQ, after regressing toward the mean, would be around 125. There was really nowhere like our colony on Earth. Rich neighborhoods are not comparable. While the rich are smarter than the poor, the correlation between money and intelligence is lower than most tend to think. It takes some smarts to make money, much less to marry into it, and none to inherit it. While faculty towns have many smart people selected for high IQ, their spouses are usually not, and some professors specialize in sociology… Our colony of Silah (sponsored by Microsoft Corporation) was truly the smartest place in the solar system. Our race of Martians was the smartest in the solar system.
I probably sound like I’m bragging about my pedigree. I intend no such thing. Why would I brag about something that failed? Yes, I should get to that now, probably the whole reason you’re reading this letter. My short letter will not be the definitive historical account of the Martian colony, but the fact that it was written by a real Martian is reason enough for it to be notable. We will be looked at as you look at the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia, the first in the world to develop writing.
Anyway, they called it the “Martian midlife crisis.” A sudden psychological change the colonists went through when they realized what they’d signed up for. Most realized the material poverty of their lives to come on Mars. They all went through the trainings, which included three months in the “bio-dome” designed to mimic the cramped conditions and sub-par food the colonists would experience. What was less obvious was the social and psychological poverty of the Mars colony. At first, it was an incredibly novel environment. But once the colonist got used to it, he realized he’d never experience anything else again. And the colonists were ill-disposed to be content with this, for the colonist was a colonist because he sought out novelty, because he was not content with an ordinary job and an ordinary hobby.
In addition to boredom was a poverty of social opportunities. Do you not like your job? Too bad, there’s no opportunity for a midlife career change. Do you not like your co-workers? Too bad, you’re stuck with them, there’s only one soil specialist team and you’re already on it. Are you on the hunt for a wife? Well, there are 400 women, 30 of them single, 15 who’ve already rejected you, not many choices…
This was hardly an unprecedented situation. It was, rather, a regression to the human normal of the “farming era.” The farming-era peasant ate a few staple crops, rice or corn or wheat, with only a bit of meat and vegetables. He had few choices in what jobs he would work or who he would marry. He probably was born, lived, and died in a very small radius. If someone gave him the chance to venture out of his localized bubble, to see some foreign shore, it was probably the opportunity to die in war for the glory of some general. No thanks, he said. Despite the horror that poverty triggers in the minds of industrial-era middle-class intellectuals, the farming-era peasant very much wanted to go on living. Yes, he suffered mightily when he had a toothache and nothing to dull the pain. But he had many moments of joy. He experienced sex and love and courtship, he ate occasional fine food, he sang and danced, he listened to entertaining tall tales, he felt the thrill of hunting rabbits or the triumph of the bumper crop. He felt proud of his children and grandchildren. The first generation Martian colonists didn’t have much, but at least they had Vicodin.
Still, the colonist asked himself why he chose to move backward in time. And why he made the choice for his not-yet-born children. His child could choose between being a farmer, auto mechanic, structural engineer, doctor… but he could never be a novelist, artist, musician, or political pundit. Why did he curse the child to such a fate? Why didn’t he and his wife stay on Earth, live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, and give the child an upper-middle-class upbringing, with all the associated advantages and opportunities? The only reason I’m writing this is because I tricked my boss into thinking it takes significantly longer than it really does to complete a certain semi-menial task.
[Or did I? I mean, I am suspiciously well-read for a supposed Martian. Perhaps I’m actually a twenty-one-year-old Earthling college student who figured out how to hack your satellite and make it look like this message came from Mars. Nah, forget that. You guys have the best security!]
A few responded to the Martian midlife crisis with drastic measures. Luther Brandt spent three weeks and two days on Mars before he went to the surface and asphyxiated himself. He spent more time in the bio-dome than on Mars. But by and large, the colonists did not respond this way. The World Space Association tried hard to filter out people with psychological problems and they mostly succeeded. The colonists were accomplished, highly intelligent people, who understood that the trip was one-way, that nothing they could do would change that, and that strikes, violence, and high-drama behavior would only make it worse. If they didn’t like their co-workers, they sucked it up and waited for quittin’ time. Still, they had large vocabularies and spent many clock cycles philosophizing about their psychological plight. We grow up hearing a lot of stories about it.
Many people resolved the moral dilemma of having children on mars in the simplest way possible: they had no children. The fertility rate of the colonists on Earth, had they stayed, would have been somewhere between 1 and 1.2. Highly intelligent, highly educated people don’t produce many children. But it was even worse on Mars, and one can see why. On Earth, there are careers where advancing requires ~60-hour work weeks. This isn’t in and of itself irrational. After all, if you are in charge of promotion, who will you pick, the guy doing 60 hours or the guy doing 40? When two of these highly intelligent, ambitious people pulling 60-hour workweeks married, how did they find time to have children? The answer is often that they didn’t.
On Mars, 60-hour workweeks are necessary just to survive. And, with the frequent deadly accidents, the replacement rate TFR was around ~3, far north of its Earth normal of 2.1. During the colony’s early years, some decided to delay having children one, two, and then three years until the situation “calmed down.” It never did. When couples decided to go for it, they were often “out of steam,” for no fertility doctors were sent with the colony. More people died than were born in almost every year of our colony’s history, as accidents and low fertility took their toll. In the early years, some drew historical parallels. When the English set up colonies in North America, the colonists initially died like flies. But after they overcame the learning curve, they started to breed like rabbits, far more prolifically than their cousins in England. We would never get there, alas.
For us, generations are unusually clear. There was the colonizing generation, 830 strong, all of whom have since died. There was the second generation of 394 people, not all of whom survived to adulthood, and of whom two still live. Then there is my generation of 237 people, of whom 109 are left. The next generation, which we sometimes call the final one, numbered 51, of whom 37 are left. Most of us have lost hope for any long-term success of the colony and hope only for a comfortable death as the life-support systems slowly fail.
You may wonder about a thing called “Martian culture.” In some respects, we are hardly different from you. There are cultural differences between Kansas and New York, but hardly any between two neighboring towns of 800 people in Kansas. There are too few of us to have developed our own dialect or style of art or music. But we have our own mythology, our own zeitgeist.
One idea developed by second-generation Martians was The Fall. Many men in the farming era despaired at their suffering and mortal existence. They imagined lives of immortal bliss and made up stories about a notional past in which they enjoyed it, before they were cast out of the garden of Eden. Modern scientists recognize a similar “Fall.” We used to be immortal; back when we were single-celled creatures, we experienced no aging. We then made a Faustian pact with the devil. We would decouple our germ cells from the rest of our bodies. This would eventually produce marvelous outcomes, most notably our intelligence, but it left us mortal. On occasion, we go back to immortality. Our cells turn into immortal cancers, effectively single-celled organisms that can divide and live on forever.
In Martian culture, The Fall refers to the first generation’s decision to leave the luscious, blue and green ball of Earth and come to this desert. Just as the notional Martians of your early science fiction looked back to a blue and green world in their past, we look back to Earth. We struggle to understand why our grandparents left. I was told it had something to do with having a “civilizational backup” to benefit Earth and that the entire Earth civilization, except for a few environmentalists and religious fanatics, encouraged us to go. We did it for you and … oh wait, am I guilt-tripping you again? Sorry.
I once toyed with the idea that our grandparents weren’t volunteers, that they were exiled from Earth after having committed terrible crimes there, and came up with the story of volunteering so that we would not be ashamed of them. But it couldn’t be true, alas, for your news sources confirm they were telling the truth.
Anyway, we are aware of our own mortality. We are, like the old Martians from sci-fi, wise.
I’d write more, but I’ve got work to do.
Sincerely,
Anonymous