Did Craig Anderton really land on the moon?

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OK... now this parody thread title I just had to give props to... and the great Julie London just makes it that much better. I will always love her version of "Cry Me a River." And the fact that she was married to the chain-smoking, hard drinking Jack Webb just makes it all the more delicious...

I actually thought of it a couple days ago and I finally couldn't resist.

It just has that nice ring to it (the parody title). And how can you go wrong with Julie London, ya know?

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Nice. I love it.

I believe Craig did make it to the moon with his psychedelic Mandrake band.

But I didn't make it to Julie London, which is most unfortunate

The moon is interesting from a tourist standpoint, but Mars is actually okay in the summer. There is life there, but it's sort of like lichen, clinging to the crater walls. Unfortunately the dust storms are a total bitch...really, the only way to have a decent crib on Mars is to build one under the surface, ditch it in the winter, and use solar to heat it in the summer. And don't EVER go out during a dust storm. You literally cannot see two feet in front of you, and the dust gets into everything...and I mean EVERYTHING. It's also abrasive, so it's like you're getting hit with a zillion tiny dull razors. Not enough to penetrate a space suit IF it's well built, but you wouldn't want to take any chances.

The other thing is that finding water on Mars is really, really difficult. It's possible, but you have to spend days, sometimes weeks, finding some, and then you have to melt it to use it.

Despite its drawbacks, though, Mars in the summer is better than Minneapolis in January. Besides, Mars can be terraformed without too much difficulty - basically, we'd need to do what we're doing here, and get lots of CO2 into the atmosphere to trap heat. Gardening wouldn't be too difficult either, once the atmosphere started forming, which probably wouldn't take more than a few hundred years; and there is enough water locked in as ice that the vapor would help a lot.

Hope I didn't violate my non-disclosure agreement...

No, no, it was general enough that there's no violation. Carry on.

Well...okay.

Mars did have a civilization at one point, but it wasn't like aliens with ray guns and space ships. The weather on Mars was always a bitch (even back when it had a more hospitable climate), and life was pretty difficult. It's tough to describe, but they lived in a manner not unlike Native Americans in the 1200s in places like Mesa Verde, in the sense that there was a very defined social structure, and people lived (of necessity) in close proximity.

Physically, the closest analogy to the "cities" would be (seriously!) the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, where there are lots of small living spaces in a self-contained building. The main difference is that in Mars, nothing - and I mean nothing - was free-standing because the wind made it pointless. Instead, the inhabitants built against (and even into) the sides of mountains, with the slope of the "apartments" essentially becoming the mountain's new slope.

Due to the harsh life, the lifestyle pretty mucy alternated between doing what was necessary for survival and taking a break from same. One reason there was a strong social structure was because it was necessary. It was almost impossible to go through a Martian life without depending on many others, if for nothing else than repairs after storms.

Although civilization was never terribly "advanced" by our standards, it would have to be considered a successful civilization because it sustained for a long time.

All of this came to an end when a large comet, now captured by our solar system and in orbit as Venus, came within less than 1,000,000 miles of Mars. The "close encounter" had devastating impacts on the planet, including violent electrical storms and a literal "pulling away" of the atmosphere due to the gravitational field. Life was never the same after that, and the remaining Martians basically stopped procreating. They realized that what had been a hard life was now exponentially harder, with no hope of change in the future, and essentially gave up.

The ruins of the cities are still there if you look on the sides of mountains, although most distinguishing features have been obliterated by the sandstorms (BTW the "face on Mars" thing is bogus - just a coincidence). What you want to look for is something like a honeycomb pattern in the mountains covering about 4-9 square miles, as those patterns are typical of Martian cities.

It's kind of sad. Unlike the Alpha Centauri system, which seems to get all the breaks, Mars was sort of born on the wrong side of the tracks. But it would be a cool thing if we went there. First, there would be the discovery of a civilization that wasn't Terran (no, they didn't have space ships and shuttle people here when the end was near!), which would no doubt have an interesting effect on our collective psyche. Second, it would be possible to make Mars habitable again without too much work, which I think would appeal to the pioneering instinct that most humans seem to share.

And that's about it for Mars

Craig,

Did you meet John Carter while you were there?

No, he's in someone else's science fiction story!

Just to piggyback on what Craig was saying, I wanted to emphasize that although not technologically advanced, the "mainstream" civilization (to discuss the "minority" cultures would be exhaustive, and possibly begin to bend the non-disclosure agreement) was extremely sophisticated and egalitarian. Child-rearing was typically loving and consistent, and done by neighbors as well as family members, although nuclear families were still clearly defined. Although encouraging creativity in the arts and elsewhere, societal structure was well-defined. And it should be mentioned that even though the harsh climate of Mars presented serious challenges, the people never experienced famine.

Besides, Mars can be terraformed without too much difficulty - basically, we'd need to do what we're doing here, and get lots of CO2 into the atmosphere to trap heat. So why not just get a really long hose, and run it from the Earth to Mars and pipe all of our greenhouse gasses over there? We keep this planet habitable, and make another one habitable at the same time. Win-win.

Martians considered the possibility, but determined that extensive use of rubber (it'd need to be extremely flexible and coiled to account for space debris and movement between planets) would singlehandedly ruin the environment.

Did Craig Anderton really land on the moon?

Yes he did, but only due to the assistance by probes and robots.

"Hello to Craig Anderton. Wish you were here."

Ah well.

In the story I'm reading now, Mars has two populations - seafaring little green men who spend all day building and erecting statues of Propero, and humanoids who play at being Greek gods, living on Olympos Mons.

The probe thing sounds uh...painful.

I want to hear what Craig knows about Venus. I'm with Phil on the quality vs bull{censored} ratio in this thread.

Never been to Venus, it's too hot. Nothing has lived there, and probably never will.

Really, Earth and Mars are kind of it for life in this solar system. Sorry to disappoint you.

Although Ken kind of implies that the majority on Mars lived in a kind of Utopia, I can't emphasize enough that it wasn't really by choice. It's not like they were enlightened beings as much as they were extremely practical, and doing things as Ken described seemed like the most practical option.

And while there was never famine, they were never really that far away from it. As a result food was highly appreciated, and cuisine was developed to a very high artform there. During harvests, all construction and other activities stopped, as the window for harvesting was usually pretty narrow.

Finally, I have a confession to make...I've never actually lived on Mars, just visited.

To the person who PMed me about what kind of music the Martians had: ALL music was vocal in nature. Each person was like a "component" of the music, and had a distinctive sound. (This was considered important, and one of the major goals of any Martian child was to discover and refine their particular sound, as it was also used as a form of identification.) Different groups of people then became different "compositions" as the components were added together. Just switching out one or two people from the group could change the entire nature of the composition.

A major limiting factor was that Mars was often loud, what with the wind and storms. A few people built sort of installations where the wind went through sculptures and shapes to make whistling sounds, but they were generally built outside of the cities and visited, as they too could be extremely loud when the wind was really going. You could hear them faintly within the cities sometimes, which people actually kind of liked - sort of the Martian form of muzak.

Music was often used to pass the time during bad weather. Due to the honeycomb structure of the cities, it was possible to move further inward, toward the mountain, where there was less noise because of all the walls between the inner rooms and the outer walls. It seems this was partly traditional; earlier Martian structures sometimes had the outer walls ripped open by the wind, or "sandblasted" by the sand storms. This is why people went to the interior. Later structures didn't have this problem, because the walls were angled aerodynamically to deflect the wind was much as possible; but the tradition continued. However it became more of a social event than a survival-oriented one.

BTW, Mars is an archeologist's nightmare: There's virtually nothing left except for the ruins of physical buildings, because the Martians lived there so long ago, and the environment has pretty much wrecked any evidence of civilization. It's believed there's some stuff buried under tons of sand and collapsed roofs, but really, the only reason we know anything about Martians at all is thanks to anthropologists from other solar systems who visited Mars when it was still inhabited, and took copious notes.

Interestingly, when Mars was in decline there were offers by other systems to re-locate some of the Martians. Only a handful did. The rest felt devastated by what had happened during the Venus "fly-by," and couldn't picture living away from their planet and the life they had known. Also, the other systems were very developed and highly populated. Mars had an extremely low population density, and some of the Martians who did re-locate wished they hadn't - everything else was too big, too crazy, and too complex. Although life on Mars was harsh, it was simple and aside from dealing with the elements, relatively trouble-free.

At its peak there were only about 180,000,000 inhabitants, who lived mostly toward the equatorial regions in about 3,000 major cities.

Yes, this was borne out of necessity, out of survival. The egalitarian aspect was just as much about everyone being able to pitch in and do as much as they could, and do as many different things as they could to survive. The child-rearing, although loving, was quite strict and disciplined, with high societal expectations from children at a very early age.

But you have the keen eye of an archeologist/sociologist. We look forward to your coffee table book on this fascinating subject.