Those who oppose it are incredibly big, but the comments are weird for you. One of the great wonders of the universe is that you are here, living on Earth, breathing in the air.
So it is with the stars, the planets – with everything in the universe: So many are always with zero and annihilation, and always against existence. It is surprising and surprisingly unlikely that our planet survived through the intense violence of the early solar system, though not without its dances: After all, one obvious theory is to maintain, it was a collision with a body about the size of Mars that knocked our skies into a cluster of real buildings called the Moon.
Incredibly, the Earth survived, allowing life – and finally, our kind – to evolve. And as long as humans have been around, we’ve been fascinated by Mars, and more than a little scared about it, too.
Much of our popular literature and films about Mars, such as “War of the Worlds,” “Invaders from Mars,” and “Mars Attacks !,” have been said to have life on the red planet – but life that we are very hostile to ourselves and out to get us.
Martian fantasies
Popular culture was soon embraced by popular culture, especially through the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose novels by John Carter thought that a portal of time connected the Earth and “Barsoom,” or Mars, allowing easy movement between the two. When Carter traveled there in his second book, “The Gods of Mars” (1914), he came across this aquatic vision: “To my left the sea widened as far as the world could reach. before I saw only a blurred line, dim further inland, and to my right was a powerful, wide, beautiful and majestic river, flowing between the scarlet banks to empty into the sea quiet before me. “
Mars Burroughs was very similar to our Earth, with all its struggles for power and wealth, and Burroughs had a good explanation for why there was no visible water on the planet: Its inhabitants were directed to waterways under ground, to protect it from infection and hide it from each other.
Instead most of Barsoom, he wrote, was covered with moss growing in the sea lanes that stretched across the planet. A few hidden valleys harmed forests and swamps, as well as warring kingdoms that were once rich in agricultural and mineral treasures foolish enough to make each other – and kill their planet in the bargain.
Home away from home
That’s the Mars Mark Watney discovered in Andy Weir’s brilliant 2011 “The Martian.” Aside from the plants he grows – he is a capable botanist – he is the only form of life on the red planet, having been lost in a terrible sandstorm and abandoned by his co. -ranches. Interestingly handy, it manages to survive, but not without close scratches.
The odds are definitely against it, he knows: “If the oxygenator breaks down, I suffocate,” he says. “If the water breaks back, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab (Mars Lander Campus) breaks, I just explode. If none of that happens, I’ll run out of food at the eventually starving to death. “
Even with such dangers, a growing dialogue turns to a Mars colony, now a real scene that was once a fiction department. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990s “Mars Trilogy,” which is made up of the novels “Red Mars,” “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars,” set that soon – in 2026, to be detail – let’s start with that settlement, bringing Mars back to life through terraforming and creating a sense of oxygen.
The trilogy is also very utopian, unlike the usual grim stance in many Mars-based fiction, as Robinson thinks as by remaking the planet, we grow better, fairer, welcoming strangers among us and discovering a true high Eden.
For his part, entrepreneur and entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced start-up plans to fund a colony of at least 80,000 settlers, which we will squarely infiltrate into the area of Ray Bradbury, the fiction writer science whose 1950 novel “The Martian Chronicles” is jealous. a kind of suburban land turned to Mars.
The only problem is that there are already Martians, and when people land on the red planet in the distant year of 1999, it won’t take long for the Martians to hunt. The Earthlings take revenge as Bradbury thinks of a pandemic that destroys the Martians, leaving the planet to a new breed of colonists who could, apparently, Bradbury , to be a distant cousin of the extinct Martians.
Musk settlers fly on one-way tickets, unlike Weir’s Mark Watney. And even if they wanted a orbital fare, having another planet worth coming home to is another matter. Bradbury’s book ends with the people back at home immersing themselves in the temptation as surely as the Burroughs Barsoomians did.
His thing is far from the only novel that thinks of an old home planet, an increasingly common trope because, of course, we go over the only nest we have now. As science fiction vehicles like “Elysium” and “Blade Runner” lead us, Earth is a place we will be lucky enough to leave.
Gregory McNamee writes about science, food, geography, and many other subjects from his home in Arizona. Visit him at www.gregorymcnamee.com.