Blue skies on the red planet

Elon Musk has announced that he plans to start landing colonists on Mars by 2022, and I for one could not be more excited about the prospect. Humanity is taking its first steps into the final frontier, and there’s nothing more exciting than the idea of being an interstellar pioneer.

Just imagine the thrill of sitting on top of a 77-metre tall rocket, knowing that, so long as the electrical system doesn’t malfunction and leave you and your 1,000 fellow colonists a pile of indeterminate ash, you will soon be soaring upwards, leaving your earthly cradle forever behind. As the rocket arches space-ward, almost assuredly not having a heat-shield malfunction and exploding like a firecracker made of human dreams, you will bid adieu to everything you’ve ever known.

The 80-day trip – presuming your trajectory isn’t off by a fraction of an inch, which would leave you hurtling through a lifeless expanse until space-madness and cannibalism figuratively and literally consume the mind of every cursed soul on board – would give you time to appreciate the stars you are now among.

Assuming a minor pilot error doesn’t turn the landing into the first interplanetary mass grave, you will touch down on the plains of Mars among the first people to truly expand humanity’s definition of home. Walking around, armed with the knowledge that even the smallest tear in your pressurized suit could leave you exhaling your entire respiratory system before dying in unimaginable agony – like drowning and being crushed to death, all at once – you will realize that every step you take is the first a human has ever taken upon that spot.

Your deeds will live forever, written into the history of the colony as long as it isn’t wiped out by a vicious microbe unleashed by our unthinking construction crews. As a founder, your name will echo through the ages on street signs and public buildings, as loudly as the panicked screams of “WE’RE NOT ALONE! WE! ARE NOT! ALONE!” will echo through satellite uplinks to the horrified ears of your earthbound brethren when the squid-like denizens of Mars reveal themselves by violently expelling their planetary usurpers, the rivers of our pioneer blood giving an entirely new and horrific meaning to the term “red planet.”

I am almost sick with excitement just thinking about the possibilities.