#sunlit mars

[sunlitfighter]

Highlight from the Curiosity Rover’s panorama of the Martian Landscape

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

[sunlitfighter]

I actually have an app on my phone that tells me how many earth hours and how much through the day each planet is. As if 12:11 pm eastern it's 77% through its day)

(That sounds pretty sweet, Nonny! I’m assuming it’s set to Coordinated Mars Time (MTC) since that’s what most Earth-Mars converters use.

If you want, you can also check out Mars date converters. I do things by the Darian Calendar since I like how nicely regulated it is, almost like a metric calendar. But there is also the Martiana Calendar which was created to fix the problem with the Darian Calendar having to drop a day once a quarter by rotating which day of the week the months start on. The calendars also differ in having different names for the months and days, though both sets are taken from astronomy.

Either way, you can use the converters to find out things like your Martian birthday. Mine is 28 Tula 199 by the Darian or 28 Ursa 199 by the Martiana.)

[sunlitfighter]

OMG. YOUR ANSWER IS SO DETAILED AND SO REALISTIC HOLY SHIT. CAN WE HAVE YOU RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT PLIS. omg. I definitely can understand what you mean by Mars being an extension of Earth. And that every big name company is vying for a piece of Mars for whatever purposes. It's sad to see that Mars is practically a tourist site for the rich and privileged from Earth. Martian citizens must be pissed as hell. I wonder if Martians ever feel like they're mere livestock being traded around. Pawns.

Previous Discussion

(Ha, I would only accept presidency of fictional Mars. But really, thank you. My actual degree is in history and I find Gilded Age/Imperial politics to be something that should be well-studied for how exploitative they were.

As for companies with political power, that is a speculative fiction trope I really enjoy and felt right to include within my HCs. The exact political landscape of Starfighter is a little hard to work out – like is Mother only a figurehead or does she wield any real executive powers for example? But the idea of a company with enough money and influence to basically buy up all the land on another planet and build colonies for the sole purpose of profit, that is something very real. (Look at the history of Pullman, Chicago for an example.)

However, while I do feel there would be a lot of resentment of colonists against Earth, I don’t think it’s quite at the livestock/pawn level. While there are ingrained biases against colonists, Starfighter isn’t that type of dystopia. (And though exploitation is a major theme, I wouldn’t classify it as a dystopia).

Especially on Mars which I see as probably the first and largest of the colonies and where I try to build in a certain independent/rebellious streak. Like when it comes to Martian music for example, I’ve been referencing genres linked to protest songs in the anglosphere – folk and punk. (Of course, protest songs exist in numerous genres/languages/cultures, I’ve just been using those two because of my own enjoyment of them.)

But I can certainly imagine a variety of ways there would be push back against colonial oppression on Mars beyond simply the political – movements equivalent to pirate radio, zines, maker communities, off-the-grid homesteading and more would all be present in my version of Mars. A separate, self-supporting Martian culture having taken root both because of and in spite of Earth’s oppression)

[sunlitfighter]

How do you feel about the socio and economical gap between the colonist and those who are of Earth?

How Do You Feel?

“Wow, V is really the person you should ask about this – she is much more informed about politics than I am,” he confesses, nervously rubbing the back of his neck. But then, Helios relents, “I’ll give it a shot though. I’ll just hit the main points.”

“One – A lot of people don’t realize just how big the gap is. Information about Earth is pretty sparse – usually just in movies and TV shows from Earth. So most Martians focus on inequality on Mars itself. But just from what I’ve seen being in the Alliance in terms of health care, resources, and how much food there is and this is considered a downgrade from living on Earth… I can’t even imagine how comfortable life must be there. And I think if more people on the colonies knew the truth, there would be even greater tensions.”

“Two – I dislike being patronized by people from Earth. Somehow that’s worse than even the direct discrimination. I don’t need or want their pity – I know my life was hard. I lived it. Empathy is better, but change will only come from actually understanding our problems and honestly supporting Martian independence or at least better living conditions.”

[sunlitfighter]

So Olympus Mons is a shit ton bigger than the biggest mountain on Earth. -resists dick joke.- No one seems too worried about it tho? When Mars got terraformed, did they even go near it? Is it still dead?

Okay, he can answer this – geography is one of the subjects he’s good at. Mainly because an Atlas of Mars was one of the few books they had when he was learning to read, but still the point remains that Helios legitimately takes pride in knowing a good deal about his home planet.

“Well, Tharsis – that’s the region around Olympus Mons – is inhabited but the air is so thin there that it’s all dome cities. But that’s what a lot of old Martian settlements were like before terraforming thickened the atmosphere and made the air breathable,” he explains to start, trying to paint a picture of the land. “It’s actually a pretty busy place with all the asteroid mining processing plants.”

“But, no, there isn’t any need to worry about it erupting because it’s been dormant for… I think 150 million years? It’s something like that,” Helios shrugs a bit, knowing that being off by a few million years here or there means little geologically speaking. “I mean, we don’t have quakes or anything because the crust doesn’t move around like Earth’s does. That’s how the mountains grew so large to start with – they were over these big lava hotspots and the crust just stayed there so they kept growing.”  

Lesson basically wrapped up, the Fighter then suggests, “If you ever do visit Tharsis, you can do a fly by of Olympus but be sure to get one that lets you see the other three mountains in the region – Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia. Most tourists just want to see Olympus but the others are just as interesting if you’re into volcanoes.”

[sunlitfighter]

//hey Helios mun! I've been debating about whether or not to message you cause you're just so good at what you do and I do feel a tad shy. But, I'm braving through! I think you write Helios fabulously and that you're an amazing writer. I'm always really interested in what you think of Mars and the colonies. I've read some of your posts and it's fascinating to think of Mars as having terraformed. I'm not sure if there's any mention of it on your blog, but what do you think about the colonies and

Cont: the sort of people who’re there? Thus far, we know that Cain and Helios are from the colonies and they didn’t exactly have the best lives. Whereas Abel, from earth, is far more privileged. Do you think there’s a connection between Mars and poverty, and Earth and wealth?

(Ah, please don’t be shy to ask me things! I’m always happy to to answer questions and chuck headcanons at people across the internet. And I am equally happy that you enjoy my thoughts on Mars both in terms of the post-terraformed geography as well as the society there. I’ll do my best to answer your questions concisely. But for the ask of everyone’s Dashes, I’ll be doing so under a cut -

Now in the Eclipse artbook and the script itself, there is reference to the Mars colonies – plural. I generally see Mars as a patchwork of both national and corporate interests, especially since there is indication that separate nations still exist on Earth (like Abel’s father being a politician and Cain having been held in New Volga). So there really isn’t a single unified Mars and I try to find ways to indicate that. I do so mostly by having Helios grow up in as different a location possible from Cain – a bustling corporate-controlled industrial city on the equatorial waterfront as compared to a small, snow isolated mining(?) town in a government-owned colony.  

But I feel that there is an overall theme of industrial paternalism present on the Colonies stemming from the very large wealth and resource gap between Earth and Mars. It’s like company towns on an interplanetary scale. Mars exists as an extension of Earth, the ultimate expression of offshoring. There are levels of social stratification, but any of the truly luxurious parts exist for Earth representatives or tourists rather than native Martians.

As for the people of Mars, I see them as a tough, working class people who make due as best they can inside of a broken system. And while there people who are beat down by those oppressive forces, there are others fighting against it and have hope for Mars to have an independent future. However, I don’t think it would be achievable without a massive revolution given how entrenched Earth’s influence is within Martian politics.

And this is why one of the running themes I have is that “The Colonies are shit, but Mars is beautiful.” This general idea that a post-terraformed Mars would be a place of intense natural beauty contrasted with exploitative practices and unjust social policies.

Anyway, I hope that answered your questions! Feel free to come into my inbox anytime and I’ll gladly share more of my extensive Mars headcanons.)

[sunlitfighter]

(Consider this a personal invitation to any other Helios RPers - or colonist RPers in general - that since he was confirmed as being from Mars, I am more than happy to help with any Mars headcanons you might want to kick around.

If you want to stick with Mars as cold and snowy as seen in the comics, that’s fine. But if you want to embrace the idea of a terraformed Mars with various ecosystems, I absolutely recommend checking out Mars Reborn, which in turn is inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Mars Trilogy.)

[sunlitfighter]

Your Mars map is hella cool! I'm curious though, since Mars is farther from the sun how would temperatures get as high as 35 C in summer and 10 C as a low for winter? Cain's dream had a harsh winter storm probably akin to something one would experience in the Arctic or even Antarctic, assuming the setting of his dream was his past life in the Colonies.

(Well, since you asked Nonny, I have some answers for you! Please note though that there are lots of hypotheticals when talking about terraforming Mars and theories vary wildly depending upon who you talk to.I went a little long here so I placed most of the answer under a cut but it does include answers and theories about lots of things!

TL;DR – Given the type of atmosphere we see in the comic, yes, you can theoretically have a planet with the type of temperature ranges I quoted, assuming that Cain came from one specific part of Mars while Helios comes from another.

But when it comes to temperatures on Mars, our climate records from the rovers have already recorded temperatures in the range I quoted during the Martian summer, no terraforming required. The main problem with Mars can’t hold onto those temperatures because of its thin atmosphere. For reference,  at present Mars has an average temperature of 5 C during the day, and -100 C at night and the particular area I set my map around averages about 20 C to – 80 C. But we do know that Mars was warm enough in the past to have liquid water on the surface when it possessed a thicker atmosphere billions of years ago.

So one of the key points of the hypothetical terraforming Mars is raising the temperature to something humans could handle and that goes hand-in-hand with re-thickening the atmosphere. There are several theories as to how this could be facilitated ranging from orbital mirrors concentrating the amount of sunlight it receives to covering parts of the planet with dark dusts from its moons to building of massive factories to produce greenhouse gases. At least for this discussion, the exact “how” is beside the point because we can see the results.

On the page referenced, we can make a few inferences about Mars’ current stage in the Starfighter universe.

1. The atmosphere is thick enough to support weather patterns and there is enough water to support snow. (Depending on your terraforming projections, this would take about 200 – 400 years to achieve.)

2. The atmosphere is thick enough and contains enough oxygen that one can travel outside without a breathing apparatus. (This amount of time is harder to gauge, I’ve seen as low as 500 years up to 100,000 years. 1000 years tends to be the general point people settle on)

What Mars as a whole would look like at this point in the terraforming process varies wildly depending upon how conservative your theories are. Some predict an average temperature of only 10 C while others say that the equator could easily reach 30 C. Obviously, I prefer the latter because I like the idea of a Mars with diverse climate and lots of variation in the different areas. I wanted a Mars where you could have both large expanses of snow and ice and balmy coast cities set along the revived seas.

And you can have both the Hydraotes I described and the scene shown in the comic exist on the same planet given this more hopeful theory for a terraformed Mars. Really it just depends on where you place Cain. Here are our requirements -

1. Cold enough for such a snowstorm (Not hard given that most theories assume that even under the best conditions, everything 30 degrees north and south of the equator would receive snow during the year.) 2. Air is thick enough to allow travel without a breathing apparatus. (This eliminates a number of more mountainous regions.)3. Flat enough to match the large expanse of unbroken land. (Harder than you think given the amount of creators pot-marking Mars.)4. Far enough away form the new coasts of Mars for Cain to be adverse to swimming. (While the southern hemisphere would be a good bet, it doesn’t match the other requirements.)5. Able to see Phobos and Deimos in the night sky. (Which would eliminate the poles as the moons orbit close to the equator.)

So with all this information, I theorize that Cain would’ve lived on the Alba Patera, north of Tharsis. It meets all of the requirements, being a large, flat expanse of snow even with Mars’ predicted raised temperature range. It’s far away from the theorized coastlines and not quite as high up as Tharsis proper so you could walk outside unaided. Matches what we see in the comic perfectly.

Overall, this is an interesting question of just how much you want to extrapolate from a few pages of the comic. Sure, you can go with the single biome planet trope, but it is much more fun to think about a planet with real vibrancy and diversity. This may be all highly theoretical but what is sci-fi without occasionally flights of hypothetical fancy?)