Mars. The Red Planet. Physical manifestation of the God of War - a traditionally masculine figure in human conception. So when humanity took that cold, lifeless, sterile desert and forced it become beautiful, verdant and fertile, just like its big sister Terra, one might consider that to be planetary-scale force feminization. The theological implications are almost too much to consider.

The original business case for the colonization of Mars was always incoherent. There was nothing there except for the idea that it was not Earth. Early colonization processes were initiated out of ideology; the mass of solar mirrors were constructed over the shouts of the starving, water-comets were diverted to impact the surface in a clear defiance of market pricing signals. It was not done as a thing of reality, it was done as a matter of pride, ideology, and fantasy. The first great arcologies where all currency was decentralized and all potential migrants were tested for IQ, agreeability and cultural backgrounds erupted from crimson soil like a tumor on the flag of the workers. Great banners went up declaring the success of the mission. A parade was held. They had finally made Mars Great.

It wasn't even one generation later before they had begun plans to colonize Alpha Centauri. They were going to do it better this time, after all - with none of the mistakes that had ruined Mars.

But the thing about the follies of the wealthy is that given enough time and distance from the whip, they can become beautiful in their own right. Once the dust has set in and the flowers have grown and the palace is annexed by the state and opened to the public, the selfishness and cruelty fades away and it can stand revealed for what it is: an unreal place. A dreaming place. A place not and never of this world, made with tools utterly insufficient for the task. And so it is with Mars. It stands today as a unique achievement: A Second Earth.

With the landscape rendered into an exact climatological copy of pre-Industrialization Earth, seeded with animals resurrected from digital vaults, and then left abandoned, unobserved and unshaped, Mars is one big ecological sanctuary and natural park. Here evolution works red in tooth and claw as it did before it stumbled on the final miracles of opposable thumbs and crab pincers. Zebras walk the plains. Elephants tear down trees. Species populations spread and collapse. Mass extinction events pass unremarked upon. Someday, perhaps, humanity will evolve again from first principles - all the conditions that allowed it to happen the first time are still in place. But Mars itself is indifferent to its future; it simply plays the hand the cosmos has dealt it, a blind watchmaker left unemployed by the recession.

And there's something grand about that. A whole second Earth; a do over for every species wiped out by human hands - not as pets, not as zoo animals, as heirs to their own world. It's something out of a dream; that time humanity mortgaged its present to give uncomprehending and ungrateful animals a world of their own. 

And in the thousands of years since, they've never come back for what they were owed. There are no tourist shuttles, or safari adventures, or even observation satellites. Mars simply continues on her way, no more and no less than the final stop before Earth.