An Oral History of Arsia Mons - Saul Seneca
A pioneer shares his philosophy of life in the Outlands
People ask me all the time why I don’t just move. God, I hate that question. First, to presume it would be so easy. It used to be an insult to suggest someone lives in a bubble, now it’s a status thing here to literally live in one. Truth is, though, it’s the same here as it was on Earth.
When my parents talked about people living in a bubble, they were saying those people were out of touch with the real world. Today it’s the same here, we’ve just dropped the metaphor and gone straight to the real thing. People here, they really are out of touch with this world.
This place, I mean the actual place, not the facsimile under the dome – this place is my home… and it wants to kill me and you and all the rest of us and everything else except maybe the tardigrades. Ditch the gear and the miniature bubbles we move around in and it’ll boil your blood in minutes.
All the more reason to move under the dome, right? But I say no. And you’d think the reason why would be obvious by now – the old yin and yang thing, whatever you want to call it. The deeper the misery you know, the deeper the joy on the other side of the equation. You know what I mean, right?
Look, what I’m saying is we aren’t meant to be comfortable. That’s all just marketing and consumption and manipulation. Hasn’t this been obvious for decades? At least I thought it was clear to anyone paying attention. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Anyway, think about going back to a state of nature, right? Who was that? Hobbes, yeah? Nasty, brutish and short. For centuries on Earth, everyone’s trying to pillage and steal their way out of that fate for a long time. Eventually we get around to distributing it in a more civilized way and even the middle class gets to live a life of comfort. And really, by the beginning of the millennium even the poorest people in the richest countries on Earth were unimaginably comfortable by historical standards.
But then it starts to go the other way. All that comfort, it ain’t free. You gotta pay. You pay personally with obesity, heart disease, cancer, depression, addiction – it’s all in there. And the world pays – environmental destruction, inequity, the whole planet starts to boil and its inhabitants begin to go full Lord of the Flies. The first pandemic hits and we took a much bigger hit than we really needed to. I think a less comfortable society would have fared far better.
But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It’s just a single example of what I’m trying to tell you. Our society… our species had to go through a massive correction because we settled down too quick, we got more comfortable more quickly than our own programming could handle. Stack overflow. Crash. We raced Darwin, outran our own evolution and sprinted off a cliff.
Somehow some of us landed here.
This world is the bottom of the pit below the precipice we flung ourselves off of. It’s a second chance, an opportunity to struggle again, because we are built for it. We are not meant to relax and contemplate ourselves for hours, unless it comes at the end of a day spent in which you knew actual, real suffering. At least for a moment.
So will I move under the bubble? You tell me? Seems like a step backwards. Now I know we’re turning all of Mars in to one big dome of sorts, but I don’t expect it to go so smoothly. People with knowledge of what this world is really like, just how ruthless it is -- nasty and brutish, really – you’re gonna need us, especially if you wanna stay comfortable. I mean, look, I understand the human need for comfort. I guess what I think nobody asks themselves is – who needs a comfortable person?
I didn’t answer the question really, but I think I sort of did.
- Saul Seneca has worked as a Dominion engineer and independent guide at Arsia Mons and throughout the Tharsis/Oondiri region.