Observers

Today is April 31st, which marks 365 days (355 sols) since transmission from Earth abruptly stopped.

The Martian humans noticed Earth’s silence immediately, of course, but they marked the sol in their calendar without much concern. True, without a signal from Earth, they lost access to the internet, and humans do so love the internet. But after a few sols of continued silence, the humans defaulted to the Martian internet (which, they griped, was much less robust and more boring than Earth’s internet) and simply waited for the connection with Earth to be re-established.

The responsibility for re-establishing said connection fell on the Martian President. She was the only human who displayed an appropriate amount of distress over the loss of signal, and she developed a committee of Mars’ most talented and brilliant humans to fix the issue. Unfortunately, the task proved more daunting than anyone had anticipated.

Inter-planetary communication was typically dependent on the Deep Space Network (DSN). The DSN consisted of three large antennas spread out across Earth that were capable of sending and receiving radio waves across great distances. However, as previously stated, transmission from the DSN had suddenly stopped. So, the committee tried to detect weaker signals bouncing off from Earth as a result of television broadcasts, radio stations, or communication with satellites. For weeks, the committee scanned for any signal leaving Earth and detected only sparse, fragmented transmissions. Other than a few signals, Earth was completely silent.

At this, the committee grew anxious. Only the president remained calm, because she had suspected a problem of this magnitude from the beginning. She shifted tactics and directed the committee to intercept signals sent from satellites to Earth. Although Earth wasn’t producing any radio waves, she hoped that the satellites were still operational. Indeed, the committee successfully diverted the output from a weather satellite to Mars, and in doing so they captured the first live-image of Earth since the silence began.

The image showed an Earth that was entirely gray. The committee waited as more images were sent while the satellite orbited the Earth, but each image was the same. Swirls of gray blanketed Earth, with no interruption or break in the spread.

The committee seemed prepared to dissolve into panic, but the president didn’t let her fear show. She instructed the committee to hack into the satellite and gain access to the storage of images it contained. The leading computer scientists were uncertain about the request. Typically, an off-planet hack would have a negligible chance of success. Given the distance between Mars and Earth at the time of the request, it would take 8 minutes for the code to travel to the satellite and another 8 minutes for the return trip. Any attempted hack would be brutish and slow, raising countless alarms so the humans on Earth could easily stop their attack. But, with the latest images from Earth, the computer scientists were no longer certain there was anyone on Earth to stop them.

The computer scientists attempted the hack. They weren’t sure whether to be relieved or disturbed when they were successful.

With access to the storage of satellite images, the committee could now trace back to when the silence began. Given the success of the first hack, they proceeded to do the same for a dozen other satellites, until the committee had a holistic image on the events that took place on the day the transmission stopped. The results were conclusive and horrifying.

At 12:01pm, a nuclear bomb detonated in the skies above San Francisco. The electromagnetic pulse generated from the explosion caused a drastic spike in voltage in all electrical devices across the west coast, including California’s DSN antenna. Vehicles halted mid-drive, power stopped pumping water to houses, every computer and phone was fried, and Earth’s link to Mars was severed.

The images showed that retaliation was swift, and the strikes became increasingly more aggressive. Subsequent nuclear strikes obliterated the remaining DSN antennas. Firestorms tore across land, cities were leveled, and mountains were pocketed with craters. Heat from firestorms in cities sent a layer of soot high into the atmosphere, above where clouds and rain could wash away the smog. This was the gray that the committee had seen before—a layer of smoke and ash that blocked any sunlight from getting through. Temperatures on Earth were likely already dropping by 10-30ºC. Agriculture would falter, and billions would starve as Earth plunged into a manmade ice age. It was unclear, the committee determined, whether any human could survive this.

The committee grieved, as humans so often do. The committee was outraged, as humans so often are. The committee was told there was no time for emotions, since Mars was facing an extinction-level crisis of its own.

The president explained that a few months before nuclear war began on Earth, the Martian colony was hit by a series of meteorites. One of these meteorites damaged the device used to generate oxygen. Typically, the device would absorb carbon dioxide from the colony, heat it until the carbon dioxide splits into carbon monoxide and oxygen, then pass the negatively charged oxygen molecules through a membrane and release the carbon monoxide into the Martian atmosphere. However, the meteorite bent and effectively broke the ion membrane, so now it couldn’t release any oxygen into the colony without simultaneously releasing carbon monoxide and poisoning the humans.

This was not a problem. The colony had other mechanisms of producing oxygen, which involved breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen. Lithium hydroxide was then used to absorb the carbon dioxide that the humans exhaled. This was not a sustainable solution, since there was a limited amount of lithium hydroxide available, but the colony had solutions for that as well. To prevent suffocation from carbon dioxide, the colony could intermittently release air into the Martian atmosphere and refill with oxygen. However, the meteorites had also damaged the shell that surrounded the colony, which contained the atmosphere within and filtered out radiation from the sun. The meteorites had formed cracks that allowed air to slowly leak from the colony’s system. The more often the colony vented air and changed the pressure within the colony, the more the cracks would be aggravated and continue to spread.

This should not have been a problem. Earth had consistently sent shuttles to Mars since the colony’s formation, and they were scheduled to launch a spaceship containing the tools needed to fix the damage months before the conditions became catastrophic. But then Earth decided to fall into nuclear war mere weeks before the shuttle was scheduled to launch. Satellite images confirmed that the ship never left its station.

This was a problem.

The president estimated that the lithium hydroxide could last another two hundred sols, at which point the colony would have to choose between allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the colony (causing the humans to suffocate and die), venting out the carbon dioxide (increasing the damage to the protective shell, causing the air to leak, the pressure to drop, and the humans to fall unconscious and die as the liquid boils in the eyes) or releasing a mixture of oxygen and carbon monoxide into the air (causing slight disorientation until the concentration of carbon monoxide is great enough that the humans experience seizures, fall unconscious, and die). The president was insistent that the colony never reached that point.

She assigned an engineer and a physicist to lead a team dedicated toward fixing the membrane that filtered the oxygen from the carbon monoxide. She directed a geologist and a chemist to mine the rocks around the colony in search of materials that could make more lithium hydroxide. She told a material scientists to work on developing a patch that could fix the cracks in the shell. She asked a botanist to take some experimental seeds from Earth and try to grow trees. She told everyone else to help where they could, and the committee would reconvene on April 31st, one Earth-year after Earth's transmission stopped.

The sols came and went. The membrane was improved, but not fixed. A proxy to lithium hydroxide was synthesized, but it wasn’t as efficient. The crack in the shell was temporarily fixed, but under consistent venting conditions, the patch would not hold. The trees sprouted, but did not grow. The scientists had bought some time. But it wasn’t enough to save the colony.

Which brings us to today. To a distraught committee, gathered once more before the president, as she explains that they have a choice to make. To the president, who explains that at full population, the colony would need to vent and repressurize multiple times per day, each cycle widening the fractures in their shell, but a small group could survive. To the shocked humans, who are being told that everyone they love will die, but four people have the option to remain. To the schematic showing the president’s predictions for the survivors, which includes gradual carbon monoxide poisoning, the possibility of permanent damage from a low pressure environment, and the certainty that if they succeed, they will spend an eternity alone in the cosmos. To the question that lingers in the air, asking whether anyone will volunteer to survive. To the man who is shaking his head, muttering that she is asking the wrong question.

“What?” asks the president.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” says the man again, louder. “You’re asking whether anyone would be willing to endure torture so that human life can persevere.”

The president is stoic. “Yes.”

“Well, then you’re asking the wrong question,” the man insists.

“And what should I be asking?” asks the president.

“What do we owe to humanity?”

The room is quiet, but the doctor seated across from the man is unimpressed. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“If the preservation of human life is worth all this effort, then you’re implying that humanity is special. That we owe it to humanity to continue onward because…” the man trails off and barks out a laugh. “Because why? I can’t even think of a reason.”

“Because our compassion and collaboration are unmatched in any other species,” says the doctor.

“We are all about to die because a couple humans killed billions of other humans!” the man shouts, his face growing red.

“The powerful few shouldn’t condemn the many,” the doctor says, “Humans are kind. We show empathy and love—”

“And hate,” says the man.

“We have built and created so much,” says the doctor.

“And we have destroyed everything,” says the man.

“Well maybe this is our chance to start over,” says the doctor, “Maybe now we can rise to our potential, instead of giving in to our weaknesses.”

The man shakes his head. “All the humans on Earth killed each other and left us here to die. We don’t owe them anything. The universe would be better off without us in it.”

In the corner of the room, a woman bows her head. This debate is pointless, she thinks to herself, I’m going to die anyway.

“This debate is pointless,” says a psychologist, and the woman perks up. “We shouldn’t be discussing whether there’s value in the continuation of humanity, because that’s impossible. Humanity does not hinge on whether four humans decide to live or not. No matter what, we will still lose thousands of cultures, hundreds of religions, all of humanity’s collective consciousness. After today, humanity is dead. It’s just a matter of whether humankind still lives.”

The woman considers this. Part of her is still surprised that she is included in this conversation. When the president asked her to join the committee, the woman thought it was a joke. She wasn’t a scientist or an expert or a genius. She was a newly graduated student who won a ticket to Mars in a lottery. But the president had said she wanted the woman on the committee because she was “young and from Earth.” Now the woman is listening to people debate the future of humanity, and she doesn’t know how to process it all. Since the committee was formed, the woman has tried to just be an observer. But with all that’s at stake, even paying attention feels too painful. The woman places her head in her hands, barely listening, and wishes she could skip to the part where it’s all over.

“You are correct,” the president is saying, “Humanity may very well be over. But there is a chance for human life to continue. I would like to present my plan for how that could be possible. Are there any objections?”

The room is silent.

“Good.”

The president explains that the progress that has been made over the last eight months is good, but not sufficient. The four survivors will need to work tirelessly over the next two years to finish the fixes to the colony, though she admits that even if everything goes according to plan, they will likely face painful ramifications from the faulty atmosphere. In the event that they survive the next two years, they will need to propagate humans if the species is to survive.

“In preparation for that circumstance, I propose these four survivors.”

The president suggests for a physicist to survive, so they could lead the fixes to the colony and address any other issues the survivors might face. The other three survivors, the president believes, should be picked with the intention of carrying on human kind. Since birth on Mars is complicated, the colony has a dozen placental incubators, so fetuses could be cared for outside the mother’s womb. As such, the president recommends for the engineer familiar with the technology to survive. She also suggests for a doctor to survive, so she could tend to the babies and any other medical needs of the survivors. For the last survivor, the president turns to the woman.

“Me?” says the woman, shocked.

“Over the past eight months, I have collected genetic information from almost everyone in the colony,” says the president, “They have given their consent for their genes to be artificially inseminated into an egg to produce a child. This is the only way to sustain enough genetic diversity for generations of humans to last, but in order to do that, we need eggs. Eggs from someone who wasn’t born on Mars, since humans born here tend to have a lower fertility. And we need someone young, who might have enough eggs to support this first generation.”

The woman clutches her abdomen. The president had planned for this all along. The woman remembers what the president had said when the woman was first recruited to the committee. You’re young. And you’re from Earth. The president had always intended for the woman to be used for parts, to be dissected and processed and bred.

The woman thinks she might be sick.

“Of course, that’s one reason a doctor must survive—so she could facilitate the harvest of the eggs.”

The woman rushes to the nearest bin and hurls the contents of her stomach. She squeezes her eyes shut and wishes she could never open them again.

A hand is placed on her back, and the woman turns to see the man from before.

“You don’t have to do this,” the man says.

The president nods, but the woman averts her eyes, as looking at the president makes her nauseated. “He’s right. No one will force you to go through with this. We can find other options. But human kind has the highest chance of persevering with you.”

The president waits for her response, and the rest of the committee does the same. The woman hears nothing but the sound of her own breathing, and even that feels too loud. She doesn’t want to do this. How could she not do this?

“Well?”

The physicist, the engineer, the doctor, and the woman sit in spacesuits outside the colony. Within the colony, the air is being slowly displaced by nitrogen. Everyone within the colony will fall asleep, and when it’s over, a rover will collect the bodies and bury them in the colony’s graveyard. For now, the four survivors look outward across Mars’ red landscape, the stars shining above them. The stars are sharp and clear on Mars, and the woman remembers how on Earth, the stars used to twinkle and blink. She wonders whether she will be the last human who remembers what that looks like.

“Are you religious?” the woman asks.

“No,” says the doctor. “Are you?”

“Not really,” says the woman, but as she looks up at the stars, she feels the need to elaborate. “Sometimes, though, the stars feel heavy. And in those moments, I feel like the universe is watching us. I don’t really believe that humans were created, but if we were, I feel like it was so we could do this. So we could look out at the stars and know our place in it. So we could understand the balance that holds the light together, so we could grasp the rarity of life and appreciate all of it. I don’t know whether we owe anything to humanity, but maybe we owe it to the universe to persevere. To be grateful for what it’s given us. To just be observers. Because even if humanity dies tonight, tomorrow we will still be here. We will still be observers.”

The other survivors are quiet, but they seem to be contemplating her words. After a while, a timer beeps, and the engineer says, “We should return to the colony.”

The three survivors stand and walk back to the colony, but the woman stays looking at the stars a moment longer. For a second, it feels like she is looking right at me. The woman raises her arm and waves.

And I wave back.