Mar Short, a Martian jazz-house artist, was born and raised in lava tubes at the bottom of the Valles Marineris, a 2,500-mile-long canyon that stretches along the Red Planet’s equator.
Short’s signature musical style, distinguished by low bass and spacey synths, delighted Martians from both the elite and working classes. Members of the former group had his songs transmitted directly into their temporal lobes, while those of the latter, unable to afford brain implants, enjoyed them on jerry-rigged MP3 players.
A fictional artist inhabiting a fantastical Martian world, Mar Short and his music were among the dozens of inventive creations conceived by the students of “The Anthropology of Outer Space,” an undergraduate course that introduces ideas of anthropology using space exploration as a case study.
“The class aims to show students that not only is it possible to think about the world anthropologically in terms of human cultures on Earth, but also when considering the high-tech enterprise of space exploration,” said Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri, who teaches the course. “People often think of space as uninhabited, but it is deeply peopled. There is the interesting history of human exploration, but also different cultures around the world project cosmologies onto space, and the contemporary science of studying outer space has its own culture.”
The pop-up exhibit was held in the Peabody Museum’s David Friend Hall. A timeline projected onto a screen in the gallery highlighted key dates in Martian history.
The course concluded with a world-building exercise in which students imagined a human civilization on Mars. As part of the project, they constructed a detailed timeline of the founding and evolution of their Martian society.
“We started by answering some basic questions: What was happening on Earth that forced a mass migration to Mars? How did we get there?” said Messeri, associate professor of anthropology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “We create a timeline of how the society develops. There will be some holes in it, and that’s okay. Eventually, we get to a world in which Mars has about 140,000 permanent residents, which is about roughly the size of New Haven.”In the project’s final step, the students created artifacts that flesh out an imagined reality of their Martian civilization and offer insight into people’s daily lives, significant historical events, and the persistent class divisions that stratified the society.
Visitors viewed artifacts from three Martian settlements.
Welcome to the ‘Mars Museum’
The students displayed these created artifacts in “Mars Unearthed: Artifacts from the Future,” a pop-up exhibit staged last month in the David Friend Hall gem and mineral gallery at the Yale Peabody Museum. In a sense, the exhibit invited visitors into the student’s imagined world — their timeline ends in 2264 with the establishment of the Mars Museum, whose aim is to share Martian history with tourists from Earth.
Museum labels offered visitors a primer on how the Martian civilization developed: People begin migrating to Mars after the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology intensifies climate change and nearly causes a nuclear war. In 2036, the first humans set foot on the planet’s desolate red landscape. The first human settlement is established in 2072 in the lava tubes of Alba Mons, a massive volcano located in the planet’s Tharsis region, a vast volcanic plateau. Humans subsequently establish two additional settlements: one in the northern polar region and the other on the equator near Valles Marineris.
Artifacts included a vandalized campaign poster from a Martian election and a handwritten field book comparing Martian-grown plants with their earthbound counterparts.
Artifacts from the volcanic settlement included early Martian banknotes, called “Hydros,” that were discontinued in favor of digital currency due to the expense of importing paper from Earth. A detailed set of blueprints from the polar region contained the specifications for a tri-bit drill and heat gun used to access minerals underneath the planet’s polar icecap. A botanical field notebook discovered in the Equatorial community compared plants grown on Earth to their Martian counterparts, which, by necessity, were cultivated in artificial conditions.
Some of the objects provided insight into the political strife that occasionally erupted in the settlements throughout history. For example, a damaged flower crown and sunglasses were artifacts from the 2193 uprising in the polar and volcanic communities in which the working classes revolted against the ruling elites. The crown and glasses were worn by a member of the polar elite who were celebrating the annual Daylight Festival — the settlement is shrouded in darkness for half the year — when, ice miners stormed the celebration, held in hydroponic gardens off limits to the lower classes.
Regular doses of Magmavita pills provide Martians much-needed vitamins and minerals.
‘Magmavita’
How, students were asked to consider, did humans maintain their health in the harsh Martian environment? Residents of the volcanic community took regular doses of Magmavita, a vitamin and mineral supplement derived from the endless wells of magma underneath Alba Mons. A bottle of the black capsules was on display.
“Essentially, these are meant to supplement vitamins you can’t get on Mars, especially because this volcanic community lives underground,” said Hannah Quin, a junior, whose group created the artifact. “People there often suffer vitamin D deficiencies.”
Class divisions affected how the supplements were distributed, explained Quin, who is double majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology and the history of science, public health, and medicine.
The Red Genesis Capsule provides Martians with deep pockets of genetic and biochemical enhancements to help them cope with the Red Planet’s harsh conditions. Martian dumbbells, right, are calibrated to simulate the resistance one would encounter with Earth’s gravity.
“There is a government distribution system where on each ‘sol,’ which is a Martian day, different groups receive their supplements,” she said. “By the end of the day, there often aren’t enough supplements left for all the mining communities, which were part of the lower class. This eventually leads to an uprising.”
A model of the Red Genesis Capsule, a surgical pod in which people can receive genetic and biochemical enhancements to help them thrive physically under the planet’s challenging conditions, was displayed beside the Magmavita supplements. Martians who were able to foot the bill could choose from a menu of procedures, including the implantation of micro-oxygenators that release stored oxygen into the bloodstream during periods of low pressure and injections of boosted cytochrome P450 enzymes to detoxify sulfuric gases and airborne chemical irritants found in volcanic emissions.
Other worldly beats
Some artifacts offered a sense of how Martians spent their leisure time. For example, a set of dumbbells from the polar region gym could be adjusted to replicate the level of resistance one would feel while pumping iron in Earth’s higher-gravity environment.
Mar Short’s artifacts formed an interactive display. Visitors could don headphones attached to an MP3 player improvised from scrap parts and listen to tracks from three of Short’s albums: “Rift,” “Other Worldly,” and “Blue Lava.”
Students Noah Reyna and Ryan Bibb wrote and produced the music.
“Mar lived in these big lava tubes, so there would be a lot of emphasis on resonance and making sure that the sound really travels,” said Reyna, a first-year student who composes music in his free time. “I went in with the philosophy of low, drowning bass and high, spacy synths. Creating a fictional musical genre was a lot of fun.”
Listen to a track by Martian jazz-house artist Mar Short
Listen to a track by Martian jazz-house artist Mar Short
Aiden Tumminello, a third member of the group, designed the album covers as well as tokens Martians would press to transmit music directly into their brains. The contrasting listening technologies reflect the society’s stratified class system, he said.
“The elite groups in the equatorial settlement live at the top of the canyon. At the bottom of the canyon, there is very little access to resources, and everything is controlled by a mafia,” said Tumminello, a first-yea r student. “Things like the MP3 player would likely be made using scrap parts, while the more modern listening technology would be used by the elite.”
Multiple students in the exhibit gallery called the world-building exercise a unique and thought-provoking experience.
“I really enjoyed it,” Quin said. “It gave us the opportunity to incorporate the topics we covered in class into a final project, while also thinking creatively. It’s just such a cool way to end a class.”
