If you wanted to right now you could tune into Youtube or a bunch of podcasts and find any number of people, super soldier programs, space pilots, remote viewers and scientists who will tell you what life is like, in space, working for the space force, you know, the secret space force, and time spent on Mars, dealing with the natives and their relationships to earth life things like – well, you’d call them cryptids, like how they relate to benevolent cuttlefish AI in the political positions of the Sqatch. You know, the kind of thing.
And… they’re fantastic and exciting and they’re sometimes confusing and they’re usually incoherent and they almost always rely on some stuff that sounds like it doesn’t make sense, and the reason it doesn’t make sense is because you’re hearing the most exceptional stories of the most exceptional people filtered through the work of a lot of the rest of us.
And I mean a lot of us.
First things first, life on Mars, for almost all of us, is really boring. It’s boring because so much of what you do, on Mars, is exercise, and when you’re not doing exercise, you’re usually doing paperwork. But don’t worry, because they’ve designed the exercise bikes so that you can do paperwork, while you’re exercising. I’m not joking, your daily routine requires at least ten hours, hours, of monitored exercise. You can run on the treadmills but that’s bad for writing, you can lift weights and you’ll need to do some but when that happens, it’s time to what, listen to a bunch of podcasts, and inevitably, inevitably, you wind up on one of the seats, your feet on the pedals, and you
will
exercise.
The gravity’s low, you see. If you just go to Mars and treat it like, like you’re just on some kind of naval base in Hawaii or whatever, you will get sick in a month and you will die. Oh, you don’t die of ‘low gravity’ or ‘skipped leg day,’ you die of tearing a muscle in your shoulder and your cells just flooded into that space and you wind up with a bruise the size of a bowling ball because you tried to open a door too fast.
See, it’s one of those catch 22 things, too, because on a naval base, or the ISS, if you’re there too long and it affects your health, then they cycle you out. Guards at Chernobyl go home when they’ve hit their dose. Not on Mars. Do you know what the flight time is to get to Mars? It’s seven months, and because the planets being closer to one another is part of it, so you can’t even travel to, have a seven months trip, hang around for one month and come back. No, when you get there, assuming the weather holds, you’re there for at least another eight months earth time, and then it’s seven months back, but even that’s not reliable because earth’s orbit is different to Mars’ orbit and it’s these irregular overlaps of fractions and the point is if you’re there and you overdo it or you go wacky in the head, you aren’t getting shipped back home to recover in a fashion where that solves the problem.
No, what they do, if you have a hard time mentally, is they dope you up and stick you in an exercise wheel and they try to use hypnotherapy and brain patterning and all sorts of stuff to keep your head together until you either can get right or you’re in a state where they can ship you home. And then that takes seven months in which you’re boiling your brain in more drugs like you’re a microwave meal left in for an hour and it’s just a bad scene.
So.
They do not send you over lightly because even just sending you back costs a few million dollars, even if they’re getting a discount on bulk. And so, they pick the people who can handle it, and the main way they think you can handle it is if you can handle a job where mostly, you exercise, stay inside, and do paperwork. So much paperwork. That’s the thing, these guys on Youtube telling you stories about fighting with scorpion aliens and catfaced bugs, I’m not saying they’re all hopped up on drugs because they cracked early in the cycle and ran around in an exercise yard for seven months waiting to be thrown back to Earth. I mean, any of them who describe ‘wormholing’ to Mars or travelling to some place super fast? No, they are probably confused about being doped up on the trip and all the lost time from being half-conscious because seven months on a long haul drives you mental. But some of them did wild stuff, no doubts on that, sure. The issue is that they’re describing like the rock-star stuff, the stuff that happens so rarely, for the most part, you say it doesn’t happen. And when it does happen, you know what happens?
Someone’s gotta do the paperwork.
We don’t own Mars. We’re not sovereign there. The coalition of space services of Earth that operate on Mars aren’t even able to provide a unified front of their own. There’s treaties. There’s a reason the orders of President Eisenhower are still in effect, when your travel time is seven months you can’t exactly reverse movement in mid-transit. Means that we’re still finishing orders set up a long time because the policy is first in first out. The orders that were set up have to be finished and the policies have to be changed only when there are clean, discrete points of transition. When we went from the mobile base to the permanent underground base, then we negotiated new policies and rules, but now? They’re stuck in place until there’s another major point of transition.
And that means everything on Mars –
everything
that we do has to be accounted for.
If some yahoo super soldier goes out and fights and has an honour duel with a cat-tailed cave diver, then someone else has to come out to the location afterwards and collect everything. Everything. Every footprint has to be redeformed. Every crater, every scatter of blood, every single piece of human interface with Mars has to be catalogued, photographed, uncreated, archived and stored, and it needs to be stored in the very distinct, very specific location we’ve been designated. And that means when you travel sixteen kilometers away from base to look at rocks or wave at the Curiosity Rover in its quarry, then you have to spend as much time travelling back getting rid of your tracks the whole way, because you don’t want to give anyone who’s not aware who has access to a good telescope a reason to think there’s anything else on Mars.
You can’t leave anything. You account for everything.
And it means the bulk of the work, a bulk of the human work, isn’t exploring or looking at rock samples or managing alien encounters. It’s all, at the base, sifting through bag after bag after bag, listening to the aftermath of someone exciting and almost certainly stoned out of their gourd, as you scrape human interface of single individual rocks and then write down the information. When the shuttle leaves on those weird cycles, carrying the people finally finishing their shifts and the archived material and all the signs we were ever here and oh yes, in case you were wondering, all our unreclyeable waste, so yeah, we drink the water extracted from our poop, it’s doing it with an extravagent amount of pen-on-paper, physical, paperwork, made by an army of bored drones doing our best to just not lose it in the most long-term boring job in the world, knowing there’s a nonzero chance when we get returned to earth, we might be deemed an information leak risk and get doped up so we don’t remember it properly.
Which is why the stories don’t make sense.
And we can tell them to anyone who listens.
We call the work ‘paperclipping.’