Letters from Mars
Endless Fields of Death
I still remember the roar of the engines, and the sensation of melting into my seat as the rocket lifted off my dying world, and broke through the atmosphere into low earth orbit. The year was 2066. I was 17 years old, and I celebrated my 18th birthday as we were en route to the great red planet.
There were no children allowed on the colony. It was a very dangerous place to live. When I arrived, I was the youngest person there, but I was a legal adult. I had carefully planned it out this way. Some of the colonists still thought I was too young, but I had devoted my entire life to making the cut. They high council was incredibly selective in who they chose to live in the colony.
I felt honored and grateful to be one of the selected few. I had earned my place, or so I thought. My test scores were in the top one tenth of the top percentile for my age group. You are probably wondering why in the worlds I would want to live on Mars, when I had a brilliant future ahead of me on Earth. This is a difficult question to answer, and one I hope to explore in this maiden entry of my first colonist blog. I chose to share my story on Steemit because it’s the best blogging platform in the solar system!
Like the old super hero stories from a century ago, my story begins on a little farm back on earth. My dad was a biologist and a researcher at the local university, and he helped my mom run the farm in his spare time. We only had a couple of acres, but they tended it well, and it was more productive than many farms ten to twenty times its size.
It was a bad time to be a farmer. The seasons had grown harsh and unforgiving over the years. The world had changed, and the age of big agriculture had ended. The once endless fields of green out west had turned to endless fields of death. Our little farm was a stubborn oasis in the middle of the desert. We mostly grew for ourselves, but whatever excess we had, we donated to the community food pool.
Most people lived off of algae, mushrooms, and bio-engineered meat. We were one of the few families with a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, a luxury that was normally reserved for the wealthy.
I enjoyed life on the farm. It was simple and predictable. I became attuned to the natural rhythm of the plants. I loved to help my mom with all the farm chores every day. I was homeschooled, so a big part of my education was learning how to farm.
I was an only child, like every other kid in America. After the great drought of 2042, and the mass crop failures, food shortages, and starvation that followed, Congress had passed the Only Child Act, and made it a 1st degree felony to have more than one child, with the condition that any additional children you had would be permanently taken into custody by the government.
People tried to fight the system at first, but word of the strict enforcement spread fast, until the vast majority of people were too fearful to do anything but comply. The children that were taken were drafted into the military as wards of the state. No decent parent wanted to condemn their child to a life of slavery, so the world became a far less populated place in a single generation.
It wasn’t just the birth restrictions; starvation, disease, and poverty had cut the population in half over the last 50 years. And the death toll was far worse in the third world, and the government’s far more repressive.
Altogether, there are only two billion people living on Earth now, and just a little over two hundred living on Mars. I know that these unfortunate facts are well known to most of my readers, but I share them anyways to illustrate the reason why I came here.
Just like the old superhero story, I want to save the world, of course. And I knew that the only way I could do that is if I could figure out how to make Mars habitable again. I am walking in my father’s footsteps. I’m a biologist, and my focus is rebuilding the Martian biosphere from scratch. I am working alongside a team of the best and brightest scientists who are dedicated to terraforming Mars.
If we are successful, then the technological and scientific breakthroughs that help us terraform Mars can be applied to terraforming Earth. We can save two worlds by saving one.
I had no idea how difficult this journey would be, or how unprepared I truly was, but I dove right into it with the heart of a warrior the moment I first stepped foot on the endless fields of red, a world away from home.
My name is Seldon H. Ari, and this will be the first of many letters from Mars.
Au Revoir!