White Mars

How It All Began

Plans are already afoot to send human beings to Mars. Behind these exciting possibilities lies a less worthy objective: an assumption that the Red Planet can be turned into something resembling a colony, an inferior Earth. This operation would extend prevailing dystopian tendencies into the next century.

Planets are environments with their own integrity. Any vast engineering schemes would be invasive. The end result could only be to turn Mars into a dreary suburb, imitating the less attractive features of terrestrial cities. A military-industrial complex would probably rule over it.

APIUM stands for humanity’s right to walk on Mars, and is against its rape and ruination. Mars must become a UN protectorate, and be treated as a “planet for science’, much as the Antarctic has been preserved—at least to a great extent—as unspoilt white wilderness. We are for a WHITE MARS!

Mars should remain as a kind of Ayers Rock in the sky. It must be made visitable to ordinary men and women (the travel costs to be met by community service at home). Its solitudes will be preserved for silence and meditation and honeymooning. From Mars, traditionally the God of War, a myth of peace will spread back to Earth, supplanting the myth of energy/power/exploitation that has so darkened the twentieth century.

APIUM believes that great good will come to both planets if we have the courage to sustain a WHITE MARS.

Brian W. Aldiss, President, APIUM

Pamphlet distributed January 1997

Green College, Oxford, England