Singularly hurtling toward the red orb hanging in the distance, the outline of the ship’s hull emits a small flash as it approaches. Soon, the ship will bring itself into orbit around the target planet, not our closest interplanetary neighbor, but the most suitable for the task at hand. Mars has long captivated those who gazed at the heavens from our small blue sanctuary home planet. It is now that the long-held dream of colonizing another world is about to be brought to fruition through the labors of men and women who will be long remembered, regardless of their actual success at this mission.

The early part of the twenty-first century gave rise to a revitalization in interest and intrigue for space exploration. From this renaissance, an international port and scientific research center was constructed on the surface of the Moon. This port was to be the development and launching site for what was perceived to be the next great frontier to be explored by mankind. Several manned scouting missions were launched to Mars from the Moon, only one was successful. The others all failed from technical or psychological malfunctions prior to entering orbit around Mars.

One successful journey was enough to convince the collective conscience that a colony could be achieved, and the controversial, yet coveted, technology to terraform Mars was feasible. Mankind would soon colonize another world. The tenacity of the human mind and spirit was broken by one, simple realization brought about by the successful landing of this vessel with such auspicious goals as producing a breathable atmosphere for future generations of humans to walk freely on the surface of Mars.

The main difference between the colonizing ship and the scouting mission was scope of work. The colonizing crew was far more numerous with many more scientific and technological specialties. There was far more equipment with the colonizing mission. Then, there was the matter of the landing site. The one successful scouting mission landed in Utopia Planitia, a place that is in the northern hemisphere of the Mars, which happens to be mostly flat plains. When the colonizing ship landed, the coincidence that it should happen to be on the exact opposite side of the planet in the Argyre Planitia was not noticed at the time.

The theory was that the colonizing ship should land in the northern hemisphere where the atmospheric pressure that is being generated by the terraforming will occur the earliest. If the ship was to land in the southern hemisphere, the highlands of Mars, then the effects of the terraforming would be less measurable than at the lower altitudes, the principle being the same as on Earth that the higher the altitude the lower the atmospheric pressure. Once the colonizing crew realized that their landing site was far from where they had anticipated, the mission was now to scout the area and attempt the colonization process, if conditions seemed reasonable.

As it were, the Argyre Planitia is a far more interesting place to land than Utopia Planitia. The incomprehensibly enormous impact craters, delving several miles deep into the surrounding mountains and plains, resemble lake beds with flowing rivers spiraling outward from it’s rocky shores. They explored the region until a curious object was discovered: a human tooth. As there were supposed to have never been any humans located in this region of the planet, all were baffled by the discovery until the great leap was made. Mars is the desert we already left behind, and Earth was the colony of those who lived on Mars. It took this epiphany for human culture to understand that the expand and conquer technique is nothing new, and we’ve done it before only to forget our past indiscretions and make the same mistakes again.

Maunder crater Image used in this post courtesy of Flickr user regulus2007.

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