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Ballrooms of Mars
2004-03-05 8:00 pm
Over the past couple of years, i've completed an about turn on my opinion of the future terraforming of Mars and other subsequent off-world colony sites. Once i put my personal feelings about humanity aside (far easier said than done), it became increasingly clear that such a process, beyond simply an inevitability, is also an imperative of the highest order. I came to my conclusion from a purely biological perspective. Why a biological perspective? because it is too easy to get mired in irrelevant and ultimately meaningless ethical and moral drivel, ignoring the plain, albeit difficult truth, that we are (among other, more attractive things), animals. So, we must look beyond the individual assholes, crackheads, republicans, or whatever we might find distasteful, and with a cold and impassive eye, observe humanity as just another population of interbreeding organisms; aka- a species. What do species do? Within the parameters of certain biocultural, evolutionary, and lifehistory mechanisms, they engage in behavior that facilitates their continued viability and survival until such a point is reached that the environment or genome cannot sustain a viable population. Under the right conditions (barring interpopulation competition and naturalbarriers, etc), the population may be able to relocate to an environment that may sustain it. All species do this, or have the potential to in some capacity, and humans are no different."Ah!!", you would then be inclined to exclaim..."but these species do so on Earth, what buisness do they have galavanting off to other planets?" Perhaps our definition of ecosystem needs revising, then. Once a population has the ability to transport itself to a new environment, than that environment is fair game. Our sense of isolation and innate territorality may contribute to the gaia-centrism exhibited by some, but the definitions we construct for our world are often way off from the actual phenomenology. I also hear some of you saying that we are unlike other species because we destroy the environments we inhabit. to this i reply that all species that sustain proportionally higher populations alter their environment, and destory certain aspects of it, in some cases irrepairably. the difference being that we do so consiously in certain cases, and to a larger extent.
so, to keep this from becoming painfully long, in order for our species to sustain itself, moving elsewhere will one day be necessary. and if we can expand to Mars and elsewhere, and by doing so prolong our presence, possibly prolonging the presence of the only occurence of life in the universe, then goddammit, we should. there is no greater force in nature than the drive to survive.i like living far too much, and wish my descendants to do the same- perhaps on New Byzantium, the glorious capital of Mars and epicentre of a new golden age of humanity, eclipsing the decline of our backwater homeplanet and its denizens, whose ancestors long long ago irritated the hell out of grandfather omegaserpent, progenitor of House Areianus, dynastic rulers of the Martian Empire.
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