Yes, actual news direct from Mars
The Red Planet is turning green. We're there to capture it as it happens.
Welcome to the debut edition of The Mars Spectrum!
The Mars Spectrum aims to be your source of news, commentary and context from one world in transition to another, featuring reports from both the Outposts and cities inside the bubble (at least for now). Subscribe now to keep up to date with the unfolding saga of the first nearby world to become habitable in at least the past few billion years.
As I write this, I am one of over a million humans in residence on Mars.
Yes, I know, it’s surprising to read those words, especially if you haven’t been paying attention to the news or the general zeitgeist lately. I don’t blame you for tuning out.
But the sad truth for old folks like me is that the Mars generation has come of age and is now having children of their own.
It often seems like just a week ago Dixie D’Amelio and other waning old-school stars from subsumed platforms like TikTok managed to reinvent themselves with the help of Elon Musk and the first-ever zero-grav content house bound for another planet.
Never underestimate what an influencer will do to maintain influence. And it always helps to have the world’s greatest and richest influencer bankrolling your comeback.
While billions watched months worth of short clips from what seemed like a ceaseless journey to Mars, it’s remarkable how few of them we actually remember.
The power dance moves had less pop in microgravity, but everyone managed to survive the trip and a true civilian presence was finally established under the first dome at Jezero Crater.
And as an entire generation had done decades earlier on actual handheld devices, the fans followed, aided by early SpaceX incentives that Dominon would later inherit and continue.
Of course, you know all this already.
Now, leaders from Dominion project that this rust-tinted world will soon play host to its first ten million inhabitants, including the first generation of native-born Martians.
To support all that growth and our new multi-planetary reality, the Red Planet is undergoing the long-anticipated transition to a warmer, more hospitable and greener world. Terraforming is imminent and the Mars Spectrum is here to cover the process from multiple perspectives.
This will not be a transition without its growing pains. Those who know Mars best and have trodden its ochre regolith longest understand that, as humans so often do, we have coalesced to form multiple worlds upon this rock that is so brand new to our species.
Many of the pioneers, engineers and technicians who came long before the influencers, informers and motivators have spent decades scarcely enjoying the benefit of any dome or bubble; living in decaying Starships, dim caves, lava tubes and various other sorts of holes in the ground to stay safe from the myriad ways this world conspires to kill us.
These denizens of the outlands and minders of the dingy outposts harvested, in situ, all the materials needed for life support in the beginning. Later, under the management of Dominion, they supported the construction of the bubble world that provides a more cush urban life under the domes at Jezero, Mariner Valley and the smaller sites.
But with plans to terraform Mars and create a hospitable global atmosphere without the need for bubbles or domes now well under way, the burden is again being carried disproportionately by the outlands.
Humans are trying for a second time to engineer a world, and just as on Earth, the stakes are high. The mission of the Mars Spectrum is to tell the stories of this tense transition from all sides, independently and with plenty of personality.
We aim to document this historic era and provide context and varied perspectives that will allow people on Earth and Mars to understand what is happening from day to day and sol to sol.
We are non-partisan and unaffiliated with NASA, ESA, ISA, Dominion LTD, The Mars Society, the ByteDance-HelloFresh-Raytheon Group, Elon Musk, AI Musk, SpaceX, Starman Ventures or any Martian councils or other OST-sanctioned entities.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to get the latest from Mars in your inbox and follow this remarkable story as it unfolds. And, of course, you can always get the latest at www.marsspectrum.com or marsspectrum.space. We haven’t given up on legacy platforms just yet, either, so don’t forget to find us @marsspectrum.
- E.M., Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Sol 10,234 (currently Arsia Mons)