A letter I won't send to the Mars colonists

Dear whoever gets there first,

I hope you look back at Earth. I hope you look at it long enough for the distance to do its work. Long enough for the borders to disappear. Long enough for the continents to look like they fit together, because they did, once, and they will again, eventually.

I hope you miss rain. I hope you miss it specifically: the sound on a roof, the way it changes the color of a street, the smell that comes after. Mars doesn’t have rain. I hope you remember what it sounded like.

I hope the sunset is beautiful. The simulations suggest it will be. Blue, because of the way Mars dust scatters light. A small, cold sun setting into a blue haze over a red horizon. I’ve seen the renders. They’re stunning. But renders aren’t the same.

I hope you’re scared. Not all the time. Just at the right moments. When you step outside the habitat for the first time and the sky is the wrong color and the ground is the wrong texture and the silence is the wrong kind of silence. That fear will be appropriate. It’ll mean you understand where you are.

I hope you argue with each other. Not about anything important. About who takes out the waste or whose turn it is to calibrate the water recycler. Arguments about small things are evidence that you’ve built something that has a daily rhythm, and a daily rhythm is the foundation of a life.

I hope you’re brave enough to admit you’re lonely. You’ll be millions of kilometers from the nearest person who isn’t on your crew. Loneliness at that distance is a different species of loneliness. I hope you talk about it. I hope you let it be real.

I hope you plant something. Even if it’s just a seed in a jar. Something green. Something from Earth. Something that grows because it doesn’t know it’s on another planet.

I hope you look up at the night sky and find Earth. A faint blue dot. And I hope the sight of it wrecks you a little. I hope it wrecks you the way the Overview Effect wrecks astronauts. I hope it makes you protective.

I won’t be there. I’m sitting on a roof, looking up, writing this. The best I can do is wish you well from a distance that I’ll never cross.

Go far. Stay scared. Come home if you need to. The rain will still be here.

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