First Neighborhood on Mars
The creator of The Sims imagines us on the Red Planet.
- By Will Wright
- Air & Space magazine, August 2012
Will Wright’s do-it-yourself virtual communities are the best-selling PC games of all time.
Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images
As the inventor of SimCity, The Sims, and other titles in the hugely popular series of interactive “god game” simulations, Will Wright has had to think a lot about how societies evolve. More recently, the 52-year-old co-founder of Maxis has taken the concept to the next level with Spore, which lets video gamers direct the evolution of life itself. So when we wanted someone to speculate about how the first communities on Mars might develop, we thought: Who better than Will Wright?
Ours was not a completely idle speculation. Last year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk made the business case for Mars this way: Reduce the cost of moving there to “around the cost of a middle-class home in California,” which he estimated at $500,000. With eight billion people on Earth by mid-century, Musk figured that one in a million would prefer Mars to California, and those would “be part of a founding team of a new civilization.”
Here’s how Wright pictures Marstown, pop. 8,000, in 2047:
From above, the terrain looked barren and rugged as the shuttle approached the landing zone near the base of the ancient volcano. At 200 feet, the thrusters began to arrest the ballistic fall of the craft, as a cloud of light dust kicked up into the air. For the first time, Sasha saw the entrance to her new home, Nili Patera, where she would in all likelihood spend the rest of her life. All that was visible on the surface was a 30-meter block with airlocks, set into the side of the volcano. Behind that wall, an extensive network of subterranean lava tubes snaked around the base of the mountain. All openings to the surface had been blocked and the interior walls sealed so the tunnels could be made habitable for the colonists.
The passengers exited the shuttle through an inflated tunnel that reached 50 meters into the airlock complex. As new colonists, they would spend two weeks in the quarantine area, near the outer perimeter of the colony network, ensuring that they were not carrying any diseases.
Like most colonists, Sasha had made the decision to move to Mars for the sake of her descendants. Seeing only limited opportunities on Earth and having a strong sense of adventure and duty, she had been captivated by the ratification of the Mars Development Treaty of 2032. Dwindling natural resources and massive environmental disruption had encouraged politicians on Earth to look to Mars as a long-term lifeboat, another foothold for humanity in the face of an uncertain future.
The Mars Treaty essentially privatized about half of the Martian surface, rewarding those willing to relocate there with huge plots of land. While that land was nearly worthless today, the hope they all carried was that one day it would be a valuable legacy to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
Sasha was in the third wave of colonists; the first group of 500 had been transported to Mars eight years earlier. The colony now numbered about 8,000, the primary limits to the population being the cost of transportation from Earth—which was covered by the Mars Development Corporation (MDC)—and the extent of the hydroponic gardens within the tube complex. The MDC represented a consortium of investors from national governments and international funds (vying for long-term territorial and mineral rights) and individual billionaires (with more idealistic motives).
Comments (3)
To paraphrase Bruce Sterling via Charlie Stross, I'll believe in human colonization of Mars when people live in the Gobi desert.
Posted by Daniel Knighten on August 2,2012 | 02:05 PM
He also created Spore :)
Posted by indexasm on August 5,2012 | 07:42 PM
By the time we have 8 billion Humans on Earth, you may just see some of them squeezed out to desert territories.
Hey, if they develop the desert-clime Los Angeles basin...,
Posted by Steve on August 7,2012 | 08:41 PM