#martian colony

[tomorrowusa]

Whether he really said he would do it or not, donating sperm for Mars sounds like something Elon Musk would do. It's amazing, as well as cautionary, that the real life mega-rich behave like wannabe James Bond villains.

Elon Musk has denied that he offered up his sperm to help start a colony on Mars. The SpaceX founder, who has previously warned that humanity must colonize Mars if it is to survive, said he had not made a personal contribution to that effort after The New York Times reported he had volunteered his sperm as part of SpaceX's plans to build a city on the red planet. "I have not, for what it's worth, 'volunteered my sperm'" wrote Musk in a post on X. [ ... ] According to the NYT report, which is based on interviews with more than 20 people close to Musk and SpaceX and on internal SpaceX documents, Musk has directed SpaceX employees to investigate the details of how a Mars colony would work, with one team drawing up plans for a series of dome-shaped habitats on the red planet. A SpaceX medical team is also reportedly looking into whether it is possible for humans to have children on Mars, the Times wrote. Two people with knowledge of Musk's comments also told the NYT the Tesla CEO had volunteered his sperm to help grow the colony.

A colony of inbred Martians Muskians on the Red Planet would be a great subject for a comedic dystopian novel or TV series. Perhaps a clone of Musk's hair transplant surgeon would also be present at the colony.

Elon's Martian sperm is not the only news regarding him today.

Elon Musk's X platform in breach of EU rules

Preliminary findings from the European Commission on Friday said tech billionaire Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) social media platform was in breach of EU digital content rules. "Today, the Commission has informed X of its preliminary view that it is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers," the European Commission said in a statement. [ ... ] "Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information," European Commissioner Thierry Breton said in a statement. "Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA." Secondly, the Commission said that X was not in compliance with "required transparency on advertising" and did not provide "a searchable and reliable advertisement repository." In the third preliminary finding, the Commission said that X "fails to provide access to its public data to researchers" which it said need to be in line with the DSA.

[imthefailedartist]

When I watched Avatar: Way of Water, I left it thinking, you have this incredible technology to 3D print skyscrapers and terraform an alien planet, why not just do that on Earth to make it better?

But I live on earth now, and that has answered my own question.

We currently have the technology and the wherewithal to fix the environment en mass, but we're not. It's a wild place to be.

[lenrosen]

Could Mycocrete Become A Building Material For Homes On Earth, The Moon, And Mars?

[wwwdotideasnmoredotnet]

The Day the Monster Visited Martian Colony

{Author’s Note: This is a special blog post featuring my 12th short story. This Thursday will also feature the story on my other blog, Joe’s Journey, for those different audience members. Hope you enjoy it and Happy Mardi Gras!}   It was an unassuming place by all accounts. It stood there off the beaten path but welcoming to those wanting of a beverage or two. Or so it seemed. John and Terry were…

[thelastlivingme]

One of my uni essays this semester was on The War of The Worlds so please have my Martians drawn hastily on the whiteboard in the study room in effort to get into the right mood

[ufosightingsfootage]

NASA Image Reveals Mysterious UFO Disk on Mars

Researcher Jean Ward discovered this Flying Disk that had hit the surface of Mars. This is just another example of Aliens in space and NASA failing to investigating. It prefers microbes. Go figure.

[daisychainsandbowties]

do the palmer station crew develop the antarctic winter accent

oh that’s a really interesting question. for anyone curious, here’s the academic journal article discussing a study of phonetic change over i think an 8 month period. it’s a small sample size but the premise has a firm grounding in phonology. actually the urge to also link back to this post, as a related point.

i think ava and camila notice it first, as the people who talk the most (although, if you count the fact that lilith chats to all of her little creatures almost constantly, she actually talks the most).

ava’s accent has always been a mess of different vowel sounds anyway because she went from portuguese to irish-accented english (derogatory in this case) and daytime TV spanish to german and french for a while and then to american english so she’s got. all of the vowels acting like strangers to her anyway.

but she also has an ear for this because unlike beatrice, she picked up her vast repertoire of languages out of necessity, wheras all but two of bea’s were picked up in more academic settings. so she hears beatrice in the cafeteria one morning insiting loudly (for her) that “muesli is absolutely a food”. and ava just has a ‘huh?’ moment over that ‘oo’ sound and the way it latches onto the ‘d’ (and yes, she does let out a little self-satisfied chuckle at the innuendo). it’s still beatrice, especially in the deliberateness of the ‘f’, but the vowels are faintly different.

then she hears lilith roll her eyes (this is somehow possible) before saying, “it looks like something you feed to the crows if you want them to like you.”

then cam, “aw lilith did you make friends with crows? that’s adorable.”

ava slips into the cafeteria just as lilith darts crossly out into the corridor with a blunt “ava” as what passes for politness, clutching her mug and trying to hide her blush. and that, too, catches ava off-guard; her vowel-thick name just a little bit different in lilith’s mouth.

she and cam spend weeks laughing at beatrice and lilith and their slowly-eroding accents. beatrice and ava having settled into a routine of mutual infodumping sessions during the winter months. listening to beatrice turn a bit soft in her sounds, and how it matches the way she speaks, full of quiet, reverant joy.

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Everytime I replay it/watch someone else play it, I remember how much someone on the writing team for specifically Mass Effect 3 is a War of the Worlds fan.

[four-white-trees]

reading War of the Worlds having gone through covid is kinda wild

[georgelthomas]

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Would You Move to A Mars Settlement? Explain.

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Would You Move to A Mars Settlement? Explain. #WritingCommunity #WriterCommunity #BloggingCommunity #BloggerCommunity #WednesdayWeeklyBloggingChallenge #Challenge #Wednesday #Mars #MartianSettlement #Colony

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. Today is Wednesday, and it’s time for another post in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge hosted by Long and Short Reviews. If you’d like to participate in the challenge, you can find the list of topics for 2023 here. If you’re interested in reading other people’s responses to this week’s topic, you can do so here. Would You Move to A Mars Settlement?…

[antimnemonic]

i should rewatch gurren lagann

[criphd]

At the outset of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans’ genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other’s present is the colonizer’s own past. Wells’s Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race’s own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age,” and thus their “extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged” (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of “our” past, with Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of “primitive” societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on “Scientific Exploration and Empire” in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, “absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel” for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable “fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old” (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

[smileyobrien]

STAR TREK MATTE PAINTINGS APPRECIATION VOYAGER — by Syd Dutton, Robert Stromberg, Eric Chauvin (Illusion Arts Inc.)

Zahl Colony — "Year of Hell" Ocampa — "Caretaker" USS Raven crash site — "The Raven" Ocampa City — "Caretaker" Access shaft (Ocampa) — "Caretaker" Martian City — "Lifesigns" Ocampa City — "Caretaker"

[foone]

I've got an itch in my head to write a scifi short story in a 70s style about a lonely asteroid miner who lives in a habitat that's only men, and he's saving up to buy a ticket off this rock, and he's planning to visit the Martian colony. See, they had significant limits on lift mass when they colonized the planet, so they took primarily young, thin, women. So he hopes he can find a spouse there. The PanAm check-in counter says "Enjoy your trip, Mr Bowie"

Story title: Is There Wife on Mars?

[familyabolisher]

At the outset of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans' genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other's present is the colonizer's own past. Wells's Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race's own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as "living representatives of the early Stone Age," and thus their "extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged" (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of "our" past, with Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of "primitive" societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on "Scientific Exploration and Empire" in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, "absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel" for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable "fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old" (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

[superbdragoncollection-stuff]

"We did it, but others told us to."

We thought it would be fun. Wars were always a civilized business after all. It was supposed to be grand, sweeping, and romantic. Two armies would clash, there would be lots of daring do, and once this grand conflict was over that was that. You didn't hold a grudge. It was a relief from the boredom of jobs at home. You got done, shook hands, picked up the dead, and that was that. We didn't have a quarrel with the other male, this was between our bosses, see? It's the way of things. We challenge a dominant power to see who is better.

We were just following orders.

We took their Jupiter bases and wondered what all the hubbub was about further inward. Something about the targets we hit. I didn't understand. Sure the bases didn't have any weapons, but this was war. We were doing our jobs.

They opened up on us at the asteroid belt, with hundred megawatt transportation lasers and mass drivers. We didn't expect that. This was supposed to be civilized! They made us fight our way through the belt, forcing us to lose ten fighters for every kilometer of space. They were using civilian equipment against us! Those lasers were for high speed transportation, those mass drivers for cargo delivery! Why did they not use proper warships? We were just doing our jobs.

The Martian colony, here we thought would be the great decisive battle. They threw dozens of ships against us. They used their megawatt lasers and mass drivers. Their reaction drives burned out anything that got close. They screamed their hate at us and we didn't understand. We were just doing our jobs.

We dropped bombs on their colonies, we seized their stations. We took them fair and square. But they were savage. Our troops landed and they were gunned down by heavy machine guns. Machine guns designed hundreds of years ago! And their designs had stayed the same. Their rifles and tanks were certainly different, but that machine gun, that Browning, had stayed the same. And they screamed at us. They called in close air support, they planted mines, they did everything they could to bleed us dry. We destroyed what the officers said to. We blew up domes. We destroyed train lines. Even those that had nothing to do with the war effort. So what? What's that got to do with us? We did it, but others ordered us to. And isn't it our right as conquerers? We were just doing our jobs.

Their anger only grew worse. As we moved, they continued to throw everything they had at us. Soldiers sacrificed themselves so their fellows could retreat in good order. They did those kamikaze runs they are so proud of. And the prisoners were angry. We gave them supplies, and still they cursed us. We tried to be nice, to compliment them on their skills, and they were silent. They called it "interrogation". We called it friendly chats.

"Why do you force us to destroy so much expensive material? Damage to private property is very uncouth, you know! It's very expensive!"

"You bombed civilian targets!" The fighter pilot snapped at us, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Your people use private machinery rather than weapons to fight us! Well you do both, but that's beside the point!"

"We didn't hide troops in civilian domes!" The pilot shouted.

"That was what we were ordered to do. It was not my doing. The commanders simply felt a show of force was necessary."

"Necessary?! You son of a--!" We had to restrain her then.

"What inspires this loyalty?" I demanded, "You fight as though more depends on you than your life! What demands such high sacrifices?"

"If it means beating baby killers!" She snarled, her head pinned by one of my soldiers. She managed to move it, "We'll throw everything we've got at you! Someday we'll defeat you! And then you'll see who's laughing!"

I was flummoxed. "Why do you do this? Why do you fight so hard? You're only doing your job!"

She seemed confused by that. "Of course I am!"

I knelt down to where three of my soldiers held her, "Yes! So why fight so hard? Why do you defy us like this? Why do you make us kill and destroy private property?"

She seemed baffled. "What do you mean? I fight because I'm part of the UN Defense Force! Why else?"

"But you don't need to fight this hard. We fight, one of us loses, we shake hands! That's war!"

She looked befuddled, "The fuck is wrong with you, *bug*? What kinda war is that? Sounds like a slapfight!"

I tried to dumb it down for her. "You plant mines. You set traps. You crash your ships into ours. What kind of war is that? What inspires this loyalty, this desire to sacrifice so much? You are but an employee of your masters. They demand no less than you doing your job, and no more. You do not need to go beyond!"

She confusedly said, "Because that's war, idiot."

By the time we reached the lunar perimeter, our force was battered beyond belief. Forces were still fighting over Mars, and the Mercury and Venus attacks had been blunted. We finally encountered their war fleet. Many of the ships were barely finished. They had been pulled out of the dock yards still with workers aboard. Why was that? Our leader hailed their fleet admiral. He congratulated them for their clever tactics and admonished them for their unsavory techniques. He gave them a list of booty to recover, requested a refuel, and gave them a time frame for when we would be on our way. The war was over, we'd made it to their homeworld. This is how the great competitive wars are always done. Something about this confused the Admiral. "This isn't a game!" They spat. "War isn't defending dots on a map! It's death! Vast organized death! Are you telling me you came all this way for FUN?!"

"No, we came here to see who is better."

"That's the same thing."

"No it isn't." Our leader said dismissively. He paused, "Tell me, what inspires this loyalty in you? Aren't you just doing your jobs?"

"What?"

"You're just following orders. So are we. What inspires this unthinking, undying loyalty? You're just following orders, as all civilized beings should. We are just following orders." The comm line went dead. The humans unleashed a terrible display of firepower. They learned a long time ago that loyalty is not simple deference. And that war is more than just orders, it is not romantic.

War is not a game to them.