11.1- The Colonization of Mars

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 11.1, the colonization of Mars. Any history of the Martian revolution must begin at the beginning. And in the beginning, there was phosphorium tetra diplicium five, known colloquially as phosphorium or p five. Absent the discovery of this component of the heretofore unknown substratum matrices existing inside the periodic table of elements, the colonization of Mars never would have happened. And no colonization of Mars, no Martian revolution. So let's begin at the beginning. As you almost certainly know from basic primary school history, Earth in the late twenty first century was a chaotic mess. Just when humanity seemed to be on the brink of transitioning to something resembling a healthy relationship with the environment and their energy production and consumption, the demands of the server farm sent us backsliding all the way to the bottom. Instead of figuring out a way to avoid the worst excesses of climate catastrophe, we just decided to shrug our shoulders and say, how bad can it really get? So by the middle of the twenty first century, we found out. The long predicted environmental wave started breaking one after the other. Sometimes quite literally, as in the case of both the lost low countries and the Caribbean envelopment. And just as it said that you go bankrupt gradually and then suddenly, well, that's how it went for the earth and its climate. It all happened with shocking swiftness by the midpoint of the twenty first century. So the world fell into a shocking state of chaos as climatic disruptions affected every part of the globe. Cold areas warmed, warm areas cooled, wet areas dried up, dry areas flooded. These disruptions to the basic habitability of entire regions sent people into motion, completely reorganizing the demographics of the world. Millions of people were thrown into motion, and global migrations created a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale, made all the worse by the often violent reactions of the people who happened to have drawn a lucky number and lived in areas that seemed to be a bit more habitable. Nation states, as previously understood, simply could not handle the social effects of the underlying environmental conditions. During the inundation of Iberia, for example, the hail was so thick and so constant that the countries of Spain and Portugal simply ceased to exist. Now as you probably learned at least once in your life, this mass destabilization of the political order of nation states, an order that had gotten going round about the Treaty of Westphalia, finally breathed its last labored breath and died in the mid twenty first century. In its place, and stop me if you've heard this before, rose the corporate order we all know and love today. As sovereign nation states failed, international corporate conglomerates stepped into the void. Because of the nature of their organizations, they could more flexibly adapt to prevailing fluid conditions. The diversification of their geographic footprint made them less susceptible …