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TerranTechnocrat — Far-Off Mars

#map #mars #worlda #future #scifi #space #futurehistory #futurehistorymap
Published: 2020-08-16 04:45:01 +0000 UTC; Views: 10857; Favourites: 119; Downloads: 21
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Description I had a hankering yesterday to make a cute little world map of a desolate, partially-terraformed Mars, underdeveloped and cut off from the interplanetary supply chain. The dominant oligarchic state, the Mars Directorate, is descended from a UN administrative authority, holding the planet and its corporate possessions in limbo for elapsed Earthly society. It has since become the sick man of Mars, underpopulated and too sparsely developed to maintain a global identity. Thus regions with their own budding national identities have come, or are coming, away to establish their own countries.


The environmental collapse on Earth was followed shortly by social collapse as scores of desperate people began abandoning the planet with their families to relocate to the sub-utopian stars beyond the ensuing upheaval of the solar system. The semi-autonomous United Nations Administration for Mars Affairs clamped down on the exodus of their population but still lost almost 1/20 of its workforce to the extrasolar rush. Nearly 1/3 of Earth's remaining population, unable to flee, perished in the societal chaos within the first five years after the Great Anthrocide. What remains is a remnant population numbering several billion living under a radically reorganized global community, laboring collectively to restore social order and environmental integrity but lacking the productive capacity to launch and maintain permanent spacecraft beyond their immediate gravity well. The centers of interplanetary civilization downstream from Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, the Belt and beyond either fumbled and emptied or turned inwards and cut themselves off from the outside universe, focusing on self-sufficiency.

Across the breadth of settled interstellar space, broadcasted news of the solar collapse has reached as far out as the remote Kornephoros binary system, while the migration wave has expanded beyond Sol to seven planetary systems, the furthest-out being Tau Ceti. Fortunately, their stellar economies all had at least a decade's advance notice to prepare for a sudden influx of human beings numbering billions. To cope with the collapse of previously Sol-centric interstellar shipping as well as the exodus crisis, the near-Solward systems began coordinating the establishment of the Interstellar Union, a network of regularized communication and coordination links within and between settled planetary systems to foster cultural and scientific exchange and to provide mutual assistance in the unlikely event of a significant protracted crisis.

Mars, a faltering and stifling world before the collapse, turned inwards and closed itself off, its leadership devoting society entirely to the terraforming project. The local UN administration, its parent organization rendered defunct, reorganized itself into the United Mars Directorate as an initially temporary measure to hold economic investments on Mars in trust for their Earthward investors. This arrangement turned out to be indefinite, as Earth closed itself off, and its modes of economic production were democratized on an improvisational basis, becoming wholly managed by industrial unions and worker cooperative federations. No post-terrestrial corporate or political entity emerged with the legitimacy to claim the whole of Mars. Without the necessary support from Earth or a similarly well-supplied organization or population center, the terraforming project, and by extension all economic activity on Mars, floundered. Three subsequent constituent assemblies held in Baradbri were inconclusive, repeatedly disrupted by furious jockeying between Mars's two most influential ideological movements: the older, still-globalistic Socialists and the much-younger, more-parochial Islamists. Simultaneously, the global integrity of the Directorate has steadily degraded, with various regions seceding to form independent states and polities. Sometimes almost bloodlessly, such as in the case of libertarian communalist Eridania, and other times, in particularly resource-rich regions such as Islamic Tharsis, after a period of bloody fighting.
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Comments: 5

ElPocaSombra [2020-08-20 05:27:31 +0000 UTC]

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

Suchipithecus [2020-08-16 14:15:54 +0000 UTC]

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Terranallias18 [2020-08-16 13:01:47 +0000 UTC]

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MrImperatorRoma [2020-08-16 06:29:23 +0000 UTC]

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TerranTechnocrat In reply to MrImperatorRoma [2020-08-16 06:36:55 +0000 UTC]

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