I read
now that the Mars One colonization project – a one way trip to
found a new society on Mars, essentially – has now found a producer
for the reality TV programme that is going to be constructed around
it.
While
the whole thing smacks of an eccentric rich Dutchman's idea of highly
publicised group suicide to some, there is no doubt that sooner or
later someone is going to have to try and colonise another world in
that very fashion...what kind of people will they be? Will they be
scientists, dry, practical yet crackling with mechanical invention?
Or oridinary people, drawn by inducements to leave an overcrowded
Earth for our real life future “Off-World Colonies” on plasma
rockets of shining silver?
Or
perhaps, the technology to send people extraterrestrial will become
available to artists.
What
could a planet settled by artists, and a society begotten by artists
be like? Peaceful with an intense co-operation and indeed socialism
in the Martian wind? Or competitive, talents of all kinds striving to
out-do each other in the new world they created?
Movements
will divide up the five continents after the devastating war between
the conceptualists and the realists. Sculptures cast their new style
idols high above the inconceivable red landscape, organic forms in
brass and bronze glinting in the reduced sunlight, so high that
across the Straits of Da Da the Island of the Photographers can see
them plain. The photographers document themsevles, document
themsevles taking pictures of each other, feedback in the lenses
choing to eternity.
The
photographers forget to feed themsevles, so intent with their
documentation and display thereof are they. They rely on food-drops
from the poets, who make edible books out of their poetry because on
mars paper is not only edible but a delicacy...the future poet of
Mars thinks that his words are literally and doubly so food for the
soul and so should be distributed free from sub orbital space
capsules.
How
does a poet know how to build a space capsule? They have made lyrical
the instruction manuals and their iambic factory workers can cope
with this form of industrialisation.
The
land of the architects, which on the southern shore of one of Lowell
and Schiaparelli's canals, which are really real but highly
misunderstood, is one of holes. For reasons of contrariness, all land
above 5 metres in height is levelled with powerful instruments, and
vast holes are dug, holes that are in the shape of buildings that
aren't there...a Chrysler building made of nothing, a Palace of
Knossos in insolid air, Eiffel Tower up not down, girder shapes
etched in the rock, into the depths.
Of
course, these architectural spaces being sacred, their creators don't
dwell in them and live in crude tents in the super-dry terraformed
atmosphere, throats coated in sand so they can't speak.
Finally
there is the Continent of the Painters, a community engaged in an
endless project – to reproduce in entirety the night sky on the
ground in utter exactitude. It is a beautiful wonder, and to avoid
spoiling it, they live underground, deep enough so their rabbit
digging does not fracture the art. They painted the land black, and
picked out stars in titanium oxide white, Tio2, tinting them
occasionally yellow or red to match in utter exactitude the tints of
Capella, Betelgeuse and the rest. The poets don't feed them because
they don't like their slavish copying of nature; they have learned
and evolved to subsist off their own paint.
The
project never finishes, because every new comet, meteor and nova has
to be added in, streaking the blackscape in more white and making the
painters scream “THIS MASTERPIECE OF CREATION SHALL NEVER BE
FINISHED”
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.03.04
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