The soft Martian regolith shifted beneath the rover’s wheels. The automated systems detected the motion and ceased all forward progression. The rover compiled a diagnostic and sent the packet of data through its antennae to a satellite above the red planet, which relayed it to a distant blue dot.

Eight minutes later, within a studio apartment in San Francisco, a computer console beeped in warning. Blake caught sight of the flashing red light out of the corner of his eye, and his stomach sank. He sprang up from the futon and navigated through the piles of dirty laundry and pizza boxes to the opposite wall.

He sat down in his black ergonomic chair and considered the eighty-five inch screen in front of him. The status window in the lower left quadrant contained a new update.

<NAVIGATION INTERRUPTED_ 30 DEGREE TILT_ TOPPLING SEQUENCE INITIATED>

Part 1: Greed

"A rail gun? Why on God's red planet are you building a rail gun?" Patricia asks. She studies me with eyes that are never without mischief.

As much as I wish it would, I know my charm won't work on her. She made it quite clear that she was engaged when we started training for our one year rotation. As such, I made sure to get the requisition form signed by Mars2050's CFO and the outpost commander, Inigo. Patricia isn't handing out freebies from the supply stock.

"It's for meteors, Trish," I say. "There isn't enough atmospheric friction to burn them up like on Earth. I'm trying to ensure the survival of the hub."

She looks over the form, then back up at me with a raised eyebrow.

I've loved science fiction for almost as long as I can remember, at first just watching old black and white movies like The Blob, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers and The Day the Earth Stood Still on Nightmare Theater, then eventually discovering books and never looking back. It's from that position of love that I'd like to challenge your thinking on one of our most powerful and enduring visions: humans colonizing and adventuring on worlds already filled with exotic alien lifeforms. I do think we will find them, I just don't think we will live on those planets.

I'd read plenty of science fiction before stumbling across Dune when I was a freshman in high school, but it was the first book that truly transported me to new and wondrous worlds. I was stunned by the vast and unforgiving desert world with its titanic sandworms, mysterious sand trout and the human Freman who had learned to live there. As I continued to gobble up science fiction, I grew to realize that my favorite fictional worlds are those that don't exist simply as an exciting backdrop for human adventures, but seemed to have a life and history of their own. So quickly added to that list were worlds like Harry Harrison's Pyrrus from Deathworld, where the entire planetary ecosystem acts as a rapidly evolving immune system to expel the human virus, the intelligent world Solaris and even the thread ravaged world of Pern. And like all fans of this greatest of genres, I was charmed, transported and awed.

But like the humanity portrayed in Childhood's End, we have to grow up. As our tools get better and we explore real alien worlds, we expand our understanding and sometimes learn that our exciting imaginary worlds don't often match up to reality. I remember watching for hours as space-suited astronauts constructed the International Space Station. This was science fiction made real. Humanity was building our first real home in space! Yet most of my friends, many of whom were huge space and science fiction fans, found the process mind numbingly boring. For the population at large, shuttle launches became no more exciting than airliners taking off, and even robotic probes reaching Ceres and Pluto were only momentary exciting news blurbs. Thanks to our amazing rovers and orbiting spacecraft, we found that with no canals, no Barsoom or ancient sandship-riding civilizations, even Mars has become boring to the average Joe.