Technology

Technology brings us a Mars that is both more wonderful and terrible than fiction and imagination did. The technology in the Mars Trilogy, while not the driving force of the plot, nonetheless shapes the people and ultimately the planet itself.

This section covers the technological wonders that Stan envisions as part of our transformation of Mars and ourselves.

Space Travel

Getting to Mars is the first step, and it requires a viable interplanetary transportation technology. In Red Mars, Stan envisions Terrans journeying to Mars in a large-scale vehicle constructed from recycled elements of a common fuel tank format used by the Russian and American space agencies.

Later in the trilogy, regular and relatively rapid transportation between Earth and Mars is common place. The trip time decreased from six months to under a month, thanks to nuclear powered vehicles.

By the 23rd century, reliable fusion power brings the entire solar system within a week's travel, and the nearest stars are open to exploration by a new breed of long-living human.

Engineering on Mars

Mars is not Earth, and the conditions for refining resources, working materials, and finishing products are vastly different. There is no oxygen bearing atmosphere, much less any atmospheric pressure. The ambient temperature is almost seventy degrees (Celsius) lower than on Earth. There is little freestanding water. Worst of all, the solar energy arriving at Mars is 50% less than on Earth. All of these conditions make engineering a whole new science on Mars.

Working the Cold

Mars is as cold as Antarctica, a place that Stan has visited (and few others, for that matter). A human will die in those conditions so quickly and easily that it's difficult to appreciate the mistakes that one must avoid to survive. Most of our engineering technology is organized around a much warmer environment, so many tools and techniques we use at the personal level don't work in the Martian cold.

Transportation on Mars

Making a Home on Mars

Computing and Automata

Computing and automata (robots) provide a core technology of Martian engineering. Without the robots and the computers, the miracles of (first) making a living on Mars and then making Mars alive would not be possible. Ironically, during the worst of the U.N. military efforts to destroy the nascent Martian habitats, the robots and computers ceaselessly worked to repair the damage as soon as the bullets (and lasers and elevator and ...) stopped falling. Saxifrage and others set the machines and programs in motion, and the bulk of the tasks done by humans on Earth were done by robots, thus dramatically reducing the number of people needed to make Mars a home.

Biotechnology

In Stan's Red Mars, there is no Martian biosphere. We bring pieces of Earth's biosphere to Mars, and reform it to survive in the radically different conditions. Along the way, our exploding biotechnology reshapes humans as well, first by making us more tolerant of the onslaught of radiation, then reversing the conditions of aging (except for a terrible side-effect), and finally creating a new subspecies of humans capable of living on the planet Mars -- terraformed but not Terran (nothing can be done about the lower acceleration of gravity or length of the year, for example).