Touring the Grand Canal of Mars

[DeJaVu]

[15 Jan 3072; VOTW] Under the Terran Hegemony’s aegis, the ongoing projects to terraform Mars, Terra’s neighboring planet, gradually ceased terraforming and became artistic endeavors. The results of those mammoth “world crafting” projects, often private vanity projects of the ultra-rich, are the topic of this series of articles. To understand the fascination and wealth lavished on this mediocre planet, some background is in order.
As the outer neighboring planet to Terra, Mars was visible to the naked eye of primitive man. Prior to the terraforming programs, it was a red world and often named after the god of war or fire by various pre-spaceflight human cultures, who saw blood and fire in its color. The common moniker, “Mars,” is eponymous with the Roman God of War.
That blood was found to be merely rust, crustal iron oxidized by long-vanished moisture, and the canals seen by early astronomers were nothing but optical illusions. But the planet was cemented in the popular imagination of mankind and if the Terrans couldn't find their great canals and habitable environment, then they could make them. With the stars seemingly decades or centuries distant, the Terran Alliance set about taming Mars in the late 21st Century. After years of study and research, this effort culminated in Project Lowell, which began in 2110 and continued despite the concurrent success of the Deimos Project and access to extrasolar habitable planets.
Project Lowell was in many ways a brute force-and-massive ignorance terraforming scheme that crafted a habitable environment by throwing raw comets at Mars, releasing potent greenhouse gases like chlorofluorocarbons, spreading aggressive engineered terraforming microbes and plants like the Arctic Blue Moss, and dealing with the problems of this “from the hip” terraforming later. This would leave the Hegemony with a headache of ongoing ecological adjustment programs in the 24th and 25th Centuries. However, Lowell’s methods had two advantages: they were fast, delivering an atmosphere that could be breathed unassisted in less than a century (officially 2201AD, when the average planetary temperature also rose above freezing), and they established a self-sustaining ecosystem that was far more enduring than the worlds (like Mars’ sister Venus) that depended on technological environmental stabilization, like storm inhibitors, oxygen factories, atmospheric processors, and seismic suppressor stations.
The aftermath of Project Lowell would occupy the Terran Alliance and Terran Hegemony for centuries, and led directly to the world crafting of the Terran Hegemony’s ultra-wealthy, which will be discussed in next week’s article.