Beyond Humanity: Colonies

Sarah S.: Hey Pete, you’re into space stuff, right?

Pete: Well, yes. But we are all essentially “into space stuff” as, from a cosmic perspective, that’s really all there is.

Sarah S.: Um, sure. Whatever. But you keep tabs on things like the Artemis program, right?

Pete: For sure. Artemis is sweet. It’s about darn time, too. Been fifty years since humanity had boots on the moon. I guess the end of the Cold War really just calmed everyone down a bit. We all decided we wanted more hammock-in-the-sun, mojito-sipping-time.

Sarah S.: Um, yeah. Sure. So what do you think about the Breakthrough Starshot project?

Pete: It’s freaking awesome. Becoming an interstellar civilization by sending four-gram camera probes to Proxima Centauri via laser-powered light sails? Amazing!

Sarah S.: And what do you think about a human colony on Mars?

Pete: Completely ridiculous! The whole idea of it!

Sarah S.: What? Why?

Pete: Because there’s no way it’s actually going to happen. Certainly not in our lifetime, anyway.

Sarah S.: Wait—you don’t think we’ll get humans to Mars in our lifetime?

Pete: No, actually I think we probably will. We will send people to Mars, land, look around for a bit, and then they will say, “Yeah, this sucks” and decide they want to come home. Not to mention the whole thing is being spearheaded by billionaire man-children who are so obsessed with their own ego, they can’t stop shooting crap up into the air long enough to look around for two seconds and try to apply their vast wealth to solving issues of systemic inequality!

Sarah S.: What about exploration? What about adventure?

Pete: They would get to Mars. There’s the adventure. But at the end of the nine months that it would take to get to the red planet, after the initial excitement, most of us are comfy-bed people.

Sarah S.: I think you’re projecting a bit.

Pete: Maybe. Maybe. But let’s just go through a few of the things on Mars that can kill you that we don’t yet have technological solutions for, despite billionaires flapping their false-promise, nonsense gums about fictional solutions.

Sarah S.: Okay.

Pete: Lack of sufficient food, water, and other potables.

Sarah S.: Okay.

Pete: Extreme atmospheric conditions with little to no resources in the face of technical failure.

Sarah S.: Right.

Pete: Relentless cosmic radiation with no planetary magnetic field dispersal.

Sarah S.: Sure.

Pete: Massive, marauding sandworms. 

Sarah S.: What?

Pete: What, what?

Sarah S.: I don’t think they’re a thing.

Pete: They could be.

Sarah S.: Are we talking about Arrakis sandworms or Betelgeuse, Saturn, Sandwormland sandworms?

Pete: One and the same.

Sarah S.: Well, that’s just not true.

Pete: Let’s ask Keegan. Hey, Keegan?

Keegan: Hey, what?

Pete: Arrakis sandworms and Betelgeuse, Saturn, Sandwormland sandworms. Same thing?

Keegan: Yeah. Same thing.

Sarah S.: Woooooooow. 

Keegan: What is all of this about?

Sarah S.: I was asking Pete about space as a lead-in to talk about our next unboxing, featuring Beyond Humanity: Colonies (2022), designed by Max Salamonowicz and Pawel 'Bloski' Suski and published by Three-Headed Monster. A game about colony construction, resource management, and political maneuvering in an app-driven, bluetooth-enabled, premium component board game beauty! But Pete started going off about billionaire man-children and making snide comments about the lack of human survivability on Mars. 

Keegan: That sounds plausible.

Pete: And accurate.

Keegan: Besides, billionaires are bad. Mess you up.

Pete: Mess everybody up.

Keegan: So. Sandworms?

Pete: Sandworms!

Sarah S.: UUUUUUUGH!!!

Pete: The point is: we don’t even know about all the things on Mars that can kill us. Besides, throughout history, the three main impetuses for exploration and settlement have been to beat another empire to the punch, militarily speaking; to leverage some sort of economic opportunity; and to escape or dump a social problem into a new geographic area. 

Keegan: All of that is true. At this point, there is no clear advantage to having a military presence on Mars. Prohibitively expensive and no one else is really trying to do it.

Pete: Exactly. Also: just getting there is incredibly expensive. Even if we could find a long-term solution to leverage the economics, just setting up the industry on Mars would make the first 200 years of living on the place an industrialized, strip-mined, hellscape.

Sarah S.: Okay. But what kinds of social solutions do you think we might be able to solve by setting up a colony on Mars?

Keegan: Good question.

Pete: That’s probably the most promising avenue, actually.

Sarah S.: Okay, so: what would you use a Mars colony for?

Pete & Keegan: As a penal colony for billionaires.