Warren Ellis has been talking an awful lot about Mars this past week. This is a good thing cause Mars has been on my mind for some time now. (Note the filing category of this post.) But yes. “Bending” Mars. Making the Red Planet our planet. Our sister petri dish for continuance of the species. This must happen. Find good things out their Mars Phoenix. Find them and give people an idea on what our next off-planet move will be.

So my characters — and the dark side of my conscience — say what are we waiting for? Let us now bend Mars to our will (and I’m aware of the overtones of both ”run a railroad” and ”will”) and fix the place up for human habitation. Let’s cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don’t know how much time we’ve got left. Let’s get a bit of air pressure happening, see if we can force out some of that water, do what it takes to at least get some overground stations into a safety zone.

Because it’s not doing us any good as a national park. And we are barely clinging to the surface of our world. And not through any fault of our own. Successful human life was a fluke on this planet even before we started poisoning ourselves. Playing the “we need to learn how to look after our planet before we go to another” lament is utterly beside the point. Think about your favourite art, your favourite memories, the best things people ever did. Does that have to go away because some people want Mars to always look like that quarry in Wales where they always shot DOCTOR WHO episodes in the 1970’s?

Read the complete entry “Bending Mars” and its predecessor “Stabbing Mars.”

(via warren ellis, whitechapel )