How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  Eventually the sun went down, and Stefan could see it through one of the portholes. It wasn’t much on Mars, the sunset. It had to do with the kinds of particles that were in the air: the sun got a bit blue-gray and then it went down.

  After that, it was quite dark in the rocket.

  Sitting awake in the dark—he could have turned on his helmet light but didn’t, for some reason—he tried to think his way through the situation. One question: if the idea was that he could now, for the first time ever, do whatever he wanted . . . what did he actually want?

  After a while, he fell asleep again.

  The next day, by the time the early afternoon rolled around—Stefan’s release time—he was not sure that he was much wiser than he had been. He had spent the morning on calisthenics, some episodes of the old TV show Broen, and a few attempts at reading. He had yogurt and a sort of pancake paste from his feeding tube when it was breakfast time and he had a pureed rye bread fish sandwich for lunch. The spacesuit had a nice selection, honestly. You could get by on helmet food.

  What he knew for sure was that soon they were going to come to let him out, and he was going to have to make a statement of some kind. I have seen the error of my ways, is what he was meant to say. I’m ready to play nice for Team Orderly Mars. And of course he could just say it.

  God fucking damn it.

  Stefan paced around in the small space available to him. The situation, he’d decided, was clear enough. On the practical side, anarchy wasn’t going to be possible if you were the only person doing it. Mars was not friendly enough for rugged individualists to make their own way. You couldn’t, for example, just wander off on your own and live off the fat of the land. The land had no fat. It didn’t even have breathable air. And so perhaps you did need some cooperation, for survival purposes, he considered. And, besides, he could empathize with Roger’s likely point of view on the situation. On the other hand, he was still right that he should be allowed to do what he wanted. Also, he didn’t like Roger. Honestly, he wasn’t sure who he did like, among these people. And so there was the ideal, and there was the real. And apparently you had to choose. They were making him choose.

  At some point Stefan used his tablet to look up the word “anarchy.” The dictionary did its usual mealy-mouthed work, offering several definitions—everything from chaos to ungoverned utopia—and he found a few conflicting articles about what it might actually look like in practice. The things everybody agreed on seemed to be a lack of a central authority or hierarchies, which fit what he was thinking about. Though also a lack of coercion. Which, he wasn’t sure how that exactly fit what he was thinking about.

  He put the tablet away again.

  The others showed up at 2:30 pm, Mars time. He was given five minutes’ notice—“We’re heading over there,” came Josh’s voice in his helmet speaker—and while he waited for everyone he asked himself that same question again: What, Stefan, do you really want? And then he asked it aloud, perhaps for the cameras. There was no answer, of course. In any case, it wasn’t, he realized in the pressure of the moment, precisely a philosophical question for him. You could get philosophical about it, but for Stefan it was ultimately something more practical. Not that he specifically wanted to break fingers or wee on beds; there was nothing particularly great about those things. It was that, regardless of exactly what it was he wanted to do, which perhaps he didn’t even know himself, he bloody well wanted to be free to do it.

  Why should they be allowed to coerce him? That was how it fit.

  Through the porthole he saw all five of them bouncing toward the rocket in their spacesuits, a matching little troop of puffies. It was clear: they weren’t going to let him have that thing that he wanted. And in that realization was another realization, which was the realization that this whole thing left him quite angry. Anger that it was not safe to show.

  A minute or so later, the door opened. With the helmet masks on, they all looked exactly the same. And of course he looked just like them, too.

  “Are you ready to come out?” Josh asked via helmet radio. It wasn’t clear which one of the puffies was Josh.

  “I’m ready,” Stefan said, in a sudden burst of decision. “I was wrong and you were right.” That was what he decided to say, and that was what he said.

  After a moment of helmets checking in with other helmets, the group came to its own decision. As one, the group waved him forward out of the dark rocket, out into all the breathless orange landscape a person could ever handle.

  How to Organize Yourselves

  (Section 19 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook, as written by the founder of Destination Mars!

  The truth is that we wish we were you. Not so much that we would trade places—as we said in Section 2 of this handbook, the thought of trading places is both thrilling and also frankly terrifying—but enough that we have significant doubts at night while brushing our teeth and we wonder if we’ve turned out to be who we hoped we’d be.

  And why do we envy you? We envy you not only because you get to go somewhere that people have never gone, but also because you get to be in charge of a world. Think about it: you will be the entire population of your new planet. You will be everybody. As in, when people say “Martians,” it’ll just be you. And so you get to start over—you won’t have the United Nations looking over your shoulder, won’t find the taxman at your door, won’t ever get called for jury duty again in your lives.

  The question is: what will you do with this fresh start?

  We want to be clear that we have no intention of telling Martians how to run Mars on a day-to-day basis. Aside from one crucial rule—no sex (see Section 4)—we’re really going to leave everything in your capable hands. This is your chance to build the ideal society for you, the vision that you imagined loosely when you were young and that you’re now old enough and wise enough and lucky enough to create. You’re free—out of reach of anything more powerful than yourselves. What will you do with that freedom?

  All that said, we encourage you to consider a few principles:

  You may want to choose a leader, or a leader may emerge naturally; some people are just built for it. Studies show that monkeys with enlarged amygdalas and hypothalamuses tend to become the alpha monkeys. Serotonin is involved, too. In other words, some brains are leader brains, and people with those kinds of brains are the ones you might turn to. Just bear in mind that sometimes people have too much of that kind of brain, as studies also show, and they become serial killers.

  In fact, you might decide that you don’t want leaders. The Quakers, for example, sit around quietly in a circle until they get a good inner signal, and then they come to consensus. It’s kind of amazing to watch. Or there’s always direct democracy, where you vote on everything. It gets old fast, but even an ideal society is going to involve a little tedium. And you’re less likely to nod off mid-decision than in the Quaker model. Or you may have a more fluid system, with different kinds of things happening in different ways at different times—organically, you might say. This idea makes us nervous, but it’s not our planet.

  But, we wouldn’t want you to panic about Lord of the Flies scenarios. If you read that book as an adult instead of as a high school student, you’ll see that it’s actually pretty manipulative; Golding obviously knew where he was going from the start. To us, that suggests a lack of open-minded artistic exploration, and it leaves his conclusions very much in question. Certainly he tapped a nerve, but just because we’re afraid of something happening doesn’t mean it’s bound to happen. It’s also worth noting that Golding wrote a dozen other novels and you haven’t heard of any of them. Not even The Scorpion God, which has quite a title on it.

  In any case, a chore wheel is probably a good idea.

  One of the ways to look at this is that there’s a question of how much societal structure you’re going to import to Mars, and how
much you’re going to completely reinvent. We suspect that it’s a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand, it’s true that there’s opportunity in front of you—you could do virtually anything, even something that no philosopher on Earth has ever imagined—but on the other hand there’s comfort in things that you already know. An old sweater, special desserts from your childhood, even the feeling of being a small element in a larger sociopolitical system that you could never hope to individually influence and whose presence in your life was generally unpredictable. With this in mind, you might consider incorporating into your lives at least some of the trappings of your former world: a flag, perhaps; a kind of Mars anniversary celebration with, if not actual fireworks (not allowed per Section 9), at least sparklers (included in the Communal Resource Stockpile outlined in Section 11); staged political campaign ads; formalized mail delivery by a designated person in a makeshift uniform, whenever one of the unmanned supply rockets arrives. (See Section 13 for information on the supply rockets.) In other words, sometimes new wine tastes better if it’s presented in old bottles. Destination Mars! will be happy, if it helps bring you comfort, to play the role of the impenetrable, inaccessible bureaucracy.

  Indeed, please don’t forget that, as remote as we will be from your daily lives, we will make many significant decisions that affect you, not least of which will be the contents and timing of those supply rockets. (Do take a look at Section 13 when you get a chance.) While you are free to construct your own society, you will continue, of course, to intersect with forces larger than yourselves, as you always have.

  It probably wouldn’t be helpful to create Martian currency.

  What about the moments when a decision has to be made quickly, military style? We, for sure, won’t be able to respond to your communications at a moment’s notice. This concern is an argument in favor of a leader, definitely, and again this may just arise naturally, even right there in the moment. In our experience, emergencies tend to bring people out in ways that you’d never anticipate. Some people turn out to be cowards howling at the back of the group; others—sometimes the ones you wouldn’t expect—become startlingly bold. They’re the ones who say things like, Okay—I have an idea that’s a real long shot, but I think it gives us a chance. In situations like these, you don’t need to have a leader already in place because they just stand up when you need them—and, interestingly, sometimes the leader already in place isn’t the one who steps up when things get scary. Sometimes they’re the first to the exit.

  Usually, though, the situation won’t be an emergency. How do you build a society that can handle emergencies but usually doesn’t have to? You could say, Hope for peace, but prepare for war. Or you could say, Only prepare what you’re willing to eat. They’re both good sayings, and they both hold some truth.

  Whatever you do, remember that all groups are divisible. All groups are divisible. All groups are divisible. For this reason, working in even-numbered groups is best, so that the resulting groups have a shot at coming out equal. Working in threes is of course just foolish.

  What a lot of this boils down to is social dynamics, which play out in many different ways, and in many different forums. Take, for example, the dining room table. You’ll note that the table, which will be set up by the rover bots by the time you get there, is moldable. You can make it any shape you like. It will, as a starting point, be set up in the form of a circle because the circle is a perfect shape. There are no bad seats at a circular table; there are no invidious distinctions in the round. Nobody is automatically the metaphorical turkey carver, nobody holding down the precarious end. But it’s your table and you can do what you want with it.

  It’s a good idea to try to uncover common interests in order to facilitate group bonding. Mars will offer ample opportunities for hiking, for example. The larger point is that group bonding is essential, whether through shared values, shared customs, shared recreational activities, or the emergence of a singular Martian identity. You all do different work, are different bright stars in this universe, but you are on a common path and there’s much to connect to in one another. There’s a reason why we made all your spacesuits and jumpsuits the same color.

  Mars is unlikely to be a very formal place, but there’s always time for please and thank you.

  In terms of humor, bear in mind that some people just don’t understand sarcasm. And not just people from the American Midwest, either—you’d be surprised how many people you can stump with a piece of sarcasm. Keep things straightforward, is our advice.

  We will have no objections if the Destination Mars! logo becomes inspirational for you—if it ends up on a flag, say—or if in any way Destination Mars! becomes symbolically significant as you construct your new society.

  We’re not sure what to say about religion.

  Well, okay—we’ll say this much: if you’re going to do religion, it might be time for a new one, something you build from scratch yourselves, so that everyone can sign on. It shouldn’t be that difficult to come up with something; if you are even the tiniest bit open-hearted, you will experience some awe, at least in your first days on Mars. You will be on Mars. Put another way: you’re the first humans to set up lives away from Earth. You’re like the proverbial first humans outside the proverbial Garden of Eden! So awe should happen automatically. All you have to do is call that awe God, come up with a couple of occasions and rituals, and you’re off and running.

  We emphatically do not recommend the development of multiple religions.

  Will you even use anything like the calendar system we use? Mars has years whether you want them or not, and days, of course, but what about months? Mars’ moons are different from our moon. Will there be weeks? Will there be weekends?

  Wouldn’t it be funny if this handbook, unofficial as it is, became something like a Bible for your new religion?

  As you know, sex is not allowed on Mars, not only because it could lead to deformed babies (see Section 4) but also because it splits a group right up (seriously see Section 4). (It seems implausible, doesn’t it, that those legendary utopian free love communes of the sixties and seventies actually existed? More likely our older relatives told us those stories so that we would think our older relatives were cool. Which of course we still did not.) So the question becomes: how do you spend your life among a group of other humans and not end up having sex with any of them? Even if you don’t find the others attractive at first, surely over time your desires will shift, won’t they? And then what do you do? What the priests tell us is that you have to get married to something bigger than yourself and get your satisfaction from that. Maybe you will put that new religion together, and you will find that your awe of the manifest breadth and beauty of the solar system, of the universe, of reality itself, will lift you above bodily preoccupations. We also strongly suggest that your new religion allow for masturbation.

  Oh—and we wouldn’t mix religion and government. It would be terrible to see Mars become a totalitarian theocracy. Really a shame. Remember that Earth is counting on you to model a viable future for the species, because we’re having trouble doing it here. So go forward boldly. Make a new world. Maybe an Egalitarian Paradise of the Flies.

  Above all, be kind to one another and have fun with this! What you are doing is truly amazing, so different from anything the rest of us will ever experience. As we make our way through the many norms, expectations, legalities, and civic responsibilities of our daily lives here on Earth—every day a gauntlet of sorts—we will have you in our thoughts. We’ll have you in our thoughts as we temporarily shuck our social world each night to cozy into our beds. Sometimes we will be overcome with envy and we’ll curse our timorous dispositions that kept us here in our complicated, systematized life instead of letting us go off with you. It really is every day; I mean, who wants to go through all kinds of paperwork to renew a
driver’s license or stand in some long line to register to vote? Laws and regulations and laws. They keep a lot of us safe, but you can remember the feeling: sometimes the blanket is pretty heavy. In those moments before we fall asleep we might curse ourselves.

  Please get this right.

  The Interaction of Weight and Light, or: Birds’ Holiday

  (an excursion report)

  Purposes of Excursion:

  Non-routine inspection of, and maintenance on, our Mt. Nearby telescope during a period of minimal atmospheric dust and while still at an early enough stage of my pregnancy to be able to do it easily. (While still able to get into a spacesuit!)

  Given the opportunity provided by the maintenance run, to also collect a subsurface water sample from Trixie’s latest drill site. In Trixie’s words: “It’s like giving Mars another pregnancy test. Maybe one of these days she’ll turn up preggers, hey?”

  NOTE: Trixie has not had any luck in our time on the planet, after many samples. Sometimes in the first year I heard her crying in her lab, and for a while it seemed she had given up altogether. But lately she seems to have found some renewed energy—quite vibrant energy—for the research.