32 | New Scientist | 1 June 2019
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A DAY on Mars is slightly longer
than a terrestrial one – by around
39 minutes. That might explain
why I keep staying up past
midnight playing Surviving Mars.
It is a city builder, a genre made
famous by the SimCity series,
with the twist that the
environment is out to kill you.
My would-be colony starts
simply, as I choose a site on the
surface to land a sleek, SpaceX-
style rocket. This is a robotic
mission to begin with, as I have
to get life support up and running
before any humans arrive. Luckily,
my rocket is packed with tech
goodies capable of generating
water and oxygen from the wispy
Martian atmosphere, along with
solar panels and wind turbines.
Generators whirring away,
I build my first Martian dome,
the only hospitable place on the
entire planet, then prepare my
first batch of colonists for launch
from Earth. Sometime later, their
ship touches down. From there,
it becomes clear that I am no
Mark Watney, the self-sufficient
protagonist of The Martian. My
colonists almost starve to death.I realise that I have forgotten to
unpack their food from the rocket.
A cold snap then shuts down
much of my water production,
until I hurriedly build heaters.
But, little by little, I build
a thriving colony of almost
300 Martians. It is fantastic to see
how far I have come. But the Red
Planet still fights back. Recently,two water extractors, which
mine liquid from beneath the
soil, failed at the same time.
With no backup plan, dozens of
colonists died of dehydration.
While I am enjoying playing
at being Elon Musk, building a
smooth-running colony raises
uncomfortable questions. When
selecting colonists, players can
filter out candidates with certain
traits. I find myself excluding
older people, as the game won’t let
them carry out any work, makingPlaying Elon Musk Building your own Mars colony is great f un. But it throws up some
tricky real-world dilemmas, from just how many backup water filters you might need
to which would-be colonists should be excluded for the greater good, says Jacob Aron
“ My colonists almost
starve to death. I realise
that I have forgotten to
unpack their food
from the rocket”Jacob Aron is New Scientist’s
deputy news editor. He has
been playing video games
for 25 years, but still isn’t
very good at them. Follow
him on Twitter @jjaronGame
Surviving Mars
Haemimont GamesPC, PlayStation 4,
Xbox Onethem a potential drain. I also
reject alcoholics, cowards and
gamblers, for fear of their
negative impact.
This sounds perfectly sensible.
NASA only allows the fittest,
most hard-working people into
its astronaut corps. But in a game
about building a new society, is
it right to exclude some people?
My exploitation of resources
gives me similar pause. The Mars
landscape, pristine for billions of
years, is now covered in polluting
industry, with waste piling up.
Rare metals, my only export, have
been stripped out and sent back to
Earth. What is the point of settling
a new planet just to destroy it?
I am looking forward to
expanding my colony with the
game’s new update Green Planet,
which allows players to terraform
Mars. When I spoke to Gabriel
Dobrev, the game’s creative
director, he said the goal was to
allow your colonists to open the
domes and breathe freely, having
completely transformed Mars.
The sci-fi fan in me is excited, but
the conservationist is concerned.
Recently, some academics and
campaigners have argued that
we should “decolonise” space,
meaning we should question
the way that space exploration
is framed in the language of
colonialism. They hope to avoid
the historical harms that have
been perpetuated on Earth.
While I have sympathised
with the sentiment, it is a concept
I have struggled with, given how
far in the future a Mars colony will
probably be. Making a colony has
changed that: I see the choices we
make for space exploration now
could have an effect for decades,
or even centuries, to come. ❚PA
RADOX^ INTE
RA
CT
IVENo matter how well you
build your colony, the
Red Planet will bite backThe games column