Srijan Pal Singh - Reignited 2: Emerging Technologies of Tomorrow

10 July 2055

0630 hours

Mars

Trinnggg... Time to wake up, Ankit, said a slightly coarse female voice.

Ahhh! Please give me ten more minutes. Ten minutes only, said Ankit, still not opening his eyes to the light.

What! No way, Ankit. You are already getting a better deal than the boys on Earth, since every day you get one extra hour of sleep here on Mars. Think about those boys and get up. After all, your big mission starts today... If you are late, what will your team members think?

Okay, Mother. Ankit gave up the struggle.

Good boy. I will get things ready for you, she said as she rotated the chassis of her vehicle 180 degrees and wheeled away from Ankit.

Rita was among the first generation of 300 settlers who had arrived on the red planet after a three-month-long journey from Earth. That was twenty years ago, in 2035. These initial settlers had had a hard time adjusting to the new conditions. They lived underground, in lava cubes that were the result of ancient volcanoes on the red planet. These helped them avoid ultraviolet radiation and massive sandstorms on the surface. The little houses for the first settlers were already built before they had arrived on the planet, made by an army of 1000 humanoids and rovers, which had been tirelessly working on Mars since the 2025 space missions were launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

As you can guess, the most difficult challenge on the red planet was finding water. Ankits mother, Rita, had been an expert at drilling for oil when she was on Earth. It was because of this that she had been selected for the Mars 101B mission in 2035. Her job on Mars was to detect and drill for water. Thankfully, the settlers were able to find underground rivers on the planet. Of course, it was highly saline water but, with abundant sunshine on Mars, researchers were able to desalinate it using solar energy and also break it down to get oxygen for breathing. Under the prevailing Martian laws then, 75 per cent of the groundwater was to be used for oxygen and only 25 per cent as water. This made liquid water scarce. The daily allowance was never more than 12 litresyou could drink it, cook with it and save up some for an occasional shower. Water was the currency of exchange, and a standard 25-litre can could buy you almost anything you wanted at the Mars Store.

Mars-borns like Ankit, who had never lived on their home planet, Earth, would often gaze at their parents planet through a telescope. Earth looked blue from afar, and they had heard stories of natural sweet water flowing in rivers and stored in giant ponds. They had seen fascinating videos of water raining down from the skies. One could even drink this water, theyd heard. Earth seemed bountiful to Mars-borns.

Ankits mother was an Earth-born immigrant. She was thirty-four years old when shed arrived on the red planet, barely making the cut-off age for Martian settlers, which was thirty-five back when the programme started. Earth did not want to send older people to Mars. First, because of the harsh conditions of travel; second, because they wanted the Martian settlers to live the bulk of their lifetime on Mars so that they could contribute longer. Rita did not fare too well because of the radiation exposure she had got in the inadequately protective spaceship from Earth. Moreover, as a driller, she had to constantly enter the planets surface, where, despite the spacesuits protection, she was exposed to strong dust and, worse, radiation. The spacesuits provided to them in 2035 had been designed for the Moon, which was protected by Earths magnetic cover, and were certainly not suitable for Mars. Radiation had affected many a settler, who had later been diagnosed with diseases such as blood cancer.

It was not that the Martian settlers had not been aware of the health risks they were exposing themselves to. Most of them were foremost scientists and engineers, who had chosen to bear the risks of travelling to and settling on an alien planet. After all, human exploration of new domains always came at the price of the sacrifices made by a fewand quite often the bestminds of the times. When humans ventured under the ocean for the first time, many of the best sailors lost their lives in the process, but the sacrifice was made for the discovery of seafaring. On the path to the discovery of the new continent of America, many brilliant explorers drowned in the Atlantic; and when humans aimed to fly, many scientists literally jumped to their deaths to test the wings and machines they had created. Martian settlers were only another chapter in this book of human civilization, wherein each lesson started with sacrifices and perils and ended in the conquest of a new frontier by the species. Rita was one such sacrifice.

But the Mars settlers had been given an opportunityto be part of the first human effort towards an afterlife. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), along with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), had invented a new product. It was an electromagnetic headset that could be used to extract memories from the brain of any living being and saved on to a computer. They had been working on such a system since the year 2010, but it took them almost two decades to finally come up with a prototype that produced favourable results.

This new form of artificial intelligence, or AI, called BrainLoading, was programmed such that robots could talk, behave and even feel like the human whose thoughts were stored in its system. However, it was an alarming invention, as it could easily lead to the thoughts being stolen and traded. So its use on humans was instantly banned and declared illegal. Of course, it was still used on some animalsespecially pet dogs and cats. When a pet dog would die, a robotic dog would take its place and respond in the exact same way as the earlier pet that was made of flesh and bones.

But Martian laws were not governed by the laws of Earth, and in order to give some hope to the Mars settlers, who were constantly struggling against extreme forces of nature on the lonely red planet, the laws were bent. Therefore, for the first time, in 2035, BrainLoading was made available to human Martian settlers in the event of their premature death.