Poverty on Mars

 “The dream had crashed. The best of the talent available on earth had been settled on this land. Oh what idealism it had been! The declaration of universal rights of sentients!

There was something cocky about the new inhabitants. Our ancestors had tried to build a society from scratch. One based on idealism, free of petty and erroneous ideas like race, religion, gender and wealth.” The thin and tall teacher paused for a moment as his pupils stared at him. They were sitting under a tree but there were no birds, no wind, no sunshine. Everything is controlled under a nano-fibre dome. 

‘Then what happened?’ asked a little girl, one of the youngest in the group. She had long curly hair of blue color and red eyes, a deep contrast against her pale white skin. She waited for an answer as she sat on the floor with her long legs crossed against each other.

The teacher looked back at her and said ‘The plan was we are going to be a source of wealth for the mother populatio, but the reality was that we were still dependent on them for supplies even as we continued to promote immigration.’

He paused, looked at a distance and sighed ‘And then earth started shrieking and puking lava- at a scale we hadn't imagined. There was massive loss of lives and resources. When all of it was breaking down, we were the last of the priorities’.

Then changing his tone to a very low and slow one, he said‘ no supply ship has visited since’. 

‘For a long while we were in touch with them but after some time our communication equipment also broke down.’

‘Do they not worry about us?’ a boy, one of the older ones asked. He was tall and bald, losing his hair even before facial hair could grow.

‘I do not know if they worry about us, or even think about us, or maybe even are aware of us.’

The year is 2500. The mars colony was completed in 2150 with a hundred thousand inhabitants spread over 5 self contained domes. In 2160, the yellowstone supervolcano exploded- without a warning. USA was obliterated practically within days. The world was pushed into a global winter within months. The mars colony struggled on with bare necessities of human living. They were mute spectators as the advanced human civilization collapsed like a house of cards. 

Today these seemed like stories, or a different world, almost like a myth. And more importantly about a different species, the martians were no more human.

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