What would it take to convince you to move to Mars?

When I’m on a road trip, my two strategies to pass the time are:

• Playing the cows game

• Asking the 36 questions to fall in love on the sly

I enjoy these questions because they’re prying and personal (my favorite), but there’s no elegant way to ask them without suggesting you’re keen to fall in love. As such, I’ve developed a bank of similarly invasive questions that I like to deploy, and my favorite is this: How could you be convinced to move to Mars? I’m not particularly interested in the logistics (I’m never interested in logistics), but I am interested in what people believe they require to live a good life.

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say the Martian Tourism Board is trying to tempt you to take a journey.

My initial considerations:

• How long does it take to get there?

• How long do I have to stay?

• What sort of Earth am I leaving behind?

For this game, let’s assume you can get there instantly but you need to stay at least five years. Earth is still livable but the climate is getting worse, so it’s noble to help build a Martian society for future generations. You could turn these dials any which way, but this is how I frame the hypothetical to get at my real question, which is: If you designed a city you couldn’t leave, what would it need to include?

For basic job functions and social relationships, I want at least 1,000 people, but for rich culture—sports, art, music, food—I want 500,000. And I want them to be organized to maximize community and cohesion, so:

This is a high-density city—no houses, no parking. Everything is connected by bike/pedestrian paths and trains radiating out from the center. Cars or golf carts are allowed for mobility and delivery purposes, but nobody else can have a car. Basically, I’ve designed a college campus.

I’ve included vast and accessible natural space not because I think it’s logistically sensible (remember, I care not for logistics) but because it’s an important criterion for where I’m willing to live. I want enough trees to get lost in, a body of water, and a designated running/cycling path with at least four potential routes (so I don’t get immediately bored).

These are the answers I gave when I played this game four years ago, just before I played this game with my actual life—by getting stuck in Australia in the middle of a pandemic. In many ways, Melbourne is the ne plus ultra of isolated cities: it’s never too hot or too cold to go outside; they have varied sports, art, music, and food; it’s well designed to include natural spaces and public transport; there are strong, multi-generational community networks. It is so seemingly aligned with what I always said I needed to be happy on Mars that it took me years to realize that I was not, actually, happy.

Melbourne is a city where people stay. They’re born here, they go to college here, they have families of their own here, and then they die here. It’s a place where people have been members of the same community soccer leagues and book clubs for fifty years. It’s a place where, on Sunday nights, when it gets chilly and gray, all the 20-somethings bundle up in their long coats and take the train to their parents’ houses for a walk in the park, a glass of wine in front of the fire, a dinner at their childhood table.

When I first moved to Melbourne, I loved to observe this tradition. But then time went on and that’s what I kept doing—observing.

And then I went home, where I had to drive and there was no bike path and suburban sprawl had bulldozed the forest. Home! Where everyone laughed at my jokes and gossiped about old friends and knew how I was feeling before I found the words to explain.

What I have come to see—what should have been obvious all along—is that a city full of community can’t compare to your own community. I could no longer be convinced to move to Mars.

Currently reading: Been reading a lot of summery romances; this week’s is This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune. I simply cannot get enough of books set on blustery islands.

Non-urgent thought of the week: The “36 Questions That Lead to Love” URL above is as follows:

Feel free to weigh in, but this slug implies to me the existence of a lost question about whether you want a big or small wedding. A lost treasure!

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