Bloganuary prompt: Write a poem or short story about rain?
“Grandpa, I read about rain in the old book from earth you gave me. Why don’t we have rain on Mars?”
“In the early years of Mars exploration, people didn’t know if there was water on Mars. At the same time, humans on earth had messed up the climate so bad that the large ice deposits on the poles melted and the resulting rain and wind storms devastated large areas of the earth. Scientists warned that humanity would be extinct within a generation if nothing dramatic was done.
At in the beginning of the 21st century, a few people controlled all the resources and made the decisions, rather than in the networked way we use today. Earth had a long tradition of training highly qualified scientists only to ignore their findings when they didn’t make profits for the ruling class.
At some point, the wealthiest citizens of Earth got so bored that they decided to go into space on their own. When these oligarchs learned that the excess water on planet earth was causing a lot of damage, someone had the idea to ship that excess water to Mars in order to colonize it. This seemed more profitable than fixing the climate problems on earth.
People built huge plants that compressed vast quantities of water for transport to Mars. Spaceships of unheard-of dimensions were built and the fossil fuels needed to power these rockets, as they were called, used up most of the resources still stored on earth.
A series of rockets was sent to Mars at that time. Some contained just water, and survival gear and others held a small group of settlers, our ancestors.
Fortunately, most of the spaceships arrived successfully and served as our first habitation pods. There was in fact no accessible water on Mars at the time. The reservoirs you see in our habitation domes today were just deep craters on the surface of Mars.
When the water was unloaded and secured, the first settlers realized that nobody had thought of a way to distribute the water efficiently. The problem was that without a suitable atmosphere on Mars, there was no way to distribute the water evenly as rain and create a sustainable system to create breathable air and moisture systems like on Earth. There was one attempt to bring water droplets into the atmosphere but they just disappeared into space.
Later, when people had successfully built the first habitation domes, the rain was deemed impractical because too much of the precious resource landed in the areas where it was not needed and too little where it was needed most.”
“Thanks for explaining Grandpa! I wish we had rain on Mars – it would be great to feel it on my skin.”
