What Comes Back
Last time I used a Facebook post to pick a fight with the space program, which my family will tell you is very on brand. A few of you made it to the end, and you deserve hazard pay. But one thing has bugged me since I posted it. I spent the whole piece on what we'd lose by shipping a civilization to Mars, and I never asked the obvious next question: what comes back?
Remember Philip K. Dick's story. Doc Labyrinth turns Mozart and Bach into animals so the music can survive the end of the world, and the animals adapt. They grow claws, spines, and stingers. Everyone remembers that the music came out ugly when he ran them back through the machine. Fewer people remember the rest: the spiny things were still out in the woods, and they weren't coming back to say thank you. That's the part of the story I skipped, so let's go back for it.
Science fiction has already run this experiment more than once, and the colonists never come home grateful. In Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, from 1966, a lunar colony that Earth treats as a farm and a prison revolts and wins by throwing rocks down at Earth's cities. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars has Mars fighting a war of independence against the corporations that built it. The whole world of The Expanse runs on the same premise: Mars becomes a militarized rival, and the people born out in the asteroid belt grow into a separate people who resent Earth and know exactly how to hurt it. Writers keep landing on this because the physics pushes them there.
Gravity is the high ground. Getting anything off Earth takes a staggering amount of energy, which is why rockets are mostly fuel. Dropping something from Mars or the Moon onto Earth mostly takes aim. A colony that controls the space lanes wouldn't need to start a war. It would only need the option, and everyone would know it had it. Biology adds a second wall. Mars has about thirty-eight percent of Earth's gravity. Bones and hearts form under load, and no human child has ever grown up anywhere but here. Children born there would likely grow bones and hearts adapted to that lighter pull, and a move to full Earth gravity could be medically difficult or impossible for them. So you'd have a people who might not be able to live on your planet but can reach it whenever they like. They won't see you as family. They'll see you as a resource, or a threat, or both.
Now look at who owns the colony. The backup-civilization pitch makes it sound like a frontier town of rugged pioneers. It wouldn't be. It would be a company town, privately built and privately run, and on Mars the company sells you the air. It owns the water, the pressure in your walls, and the food grown under its lights. You can't quit and walk to the next valley, because the next valley will kill you in about ninety seconds. For a long time the dependence would run the other way too: the colony would need Earth for spare parts, specialized skills, and fresh genetic diversity, which means the people inside have two landlords and no exit at all until the thing finally stands on its own. I'm a free-market guy. I think people ought to be able to build things and profit from them. But a market needs exits, competitors, and the freedom to walk away. A Mars settlement has none of those. It's corporate feudalism with a pressure seal: one landlord, no exit, and the rent is your next breath. Every warning I have about scale without accountability gets worse when the landlord controls the oxygen.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for a guy like me. Give that colony a few generations, and enough self-sufficiency, and it will do what colonies always do. It will decide the distant authority has no claim on it. That's the oldest story in the colonial book, and the most famous version is the one that made this country. I can't exactly fault people for telling a far-off power to go pound sand. I've built my whole life on that instinct. But the logic cuts both ways. A free colony owes us nothing. If the old country is a ruined planet with scattered survivors, the colonists owe the survivors nothing either, and they'd be the ones holding the high ground.
That brings me to the part of the last post I'm proudest of, turned upside down. I wrote about uncontacted peoples: the tribes deep in the Amazon that Brazil protects by deliberately staying away, after generations of learning what contact does. Epidemics, land grabs, whole peoples gone within a few years. We protect them by choosing not to know them. Now flip it. Picture Earth after the catastrophe the Mars colony was supposed to insure against. The survivors are small, scattered, and vulnerable. They are the uncontacted tribe now. The plane circling overhead with the camera belongs to the colonists. So do the missionaries, the loggers, and the mining crews, along with tools we can't match, priorities we had no say in, and germs and immune systems that have spent a century drifting out of contact with ours. Everything Brazil learned about contact would apply to us, and we'd be the ones in the clearing with a bow, aiming at the sky.
I promised myself I'd play fair, so here's the hopeful version. The colonists might come back as healers, bringing seed stock, medicine, and everything they'd preserved, to help a ruined world back on its feet. That's the dream behind the backup copy, and I hope that if it ever happens, that's who shows up. But hope isn't a plan, and a promise isn't proof. Think about what that sealed, scarce, high-stakes world would select for over a few generations. The people who thrive there wouldn't be chosen for nostalgia or for generosity toward a distant, broken parent planet. They'd be chosen for keeping the air running. The Polynesians kept their genealogies because the islands kept answering them, tying them back to where they came from. A Mars habitat answers only the people who keep it alive. It's the same machine Labyrinth built, run on the colonists themselves: survive long enough in a hostile place and you turn into whatever the place rewards. Maybe that's still a healer. I've learned to check the record before I extend the trust, and here there's no record to check. No one can audit a culture that doesn't exist yet.
None of this is left or right, by the way, and I'd ask you not to read it that way. Distrust of concentrated power, of distant authority, and of promises nobody can verify used to be common ground, and some of us never left it. A rocket company with the only oxygen in town should worry everybody. So should a government that funds it without asking what comes back.
So here's my follow-up, from the same spot on the ground floor. Before we build a second civilization on a dead planet, we should consider that we might be building our own successors, and possibly our own landlords. The safest place to keep the human story is still the one place where nobody can sell you the air. We're standing on it. Let's take care of it.
That's two Johnnybitches in a row on the fate of the species. Next time it's probably a parking lot. I'll be outside.