I’m not working on Mars for the foreseeable future

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Mars Rover
Rover. Photo by Karl Palutke.

Some­thing I was look­ing at the pos­sib­il­ity of was a quick pro­ject on the col­on­isa­tion pro­cess of Mars. Next month NASA plans to launch the Mars Recon­nais­sance Orbiter. It’s another probe, but this one has a twist. It’s going to become the first inten­tional infra­struc­ture around Mars. Later around 2009, it’s NASA plan to launch the Mars Tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions Orbiter (since start­ing to write this, it’s been can­celled), which will be the first extra­ter­restrial satel­lel­ite whose primary mis­sion is to provide infra­struc­ture. There are inter­est­ing archae­olo­gical and anthro­po­lo­gical ques­tions which we could research, even if the first col­on­ists of Mars are robotic. As part of look­ing into this I’ve got my hands on the NASA reports and a few other things writ­ten on the sub­ject. I did ser­i­ously con­sider put­ting together some­thing for the CHAT (Con­tem­por­ary and His­tor­ical Archae­ology in The­ory [pdf]) con­fer­ence on the sub­ject but now I’ve decided not to.
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