And other draft chapters (C) Mark Fowler 2022-2024
iBots on Mars Book 1
iBots on Mars is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and things are figments of my imagination. Any connections to reality, including alternate ones, are purely accidental.
The First Oil Well on Mars
“Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.” NASA, 13 February 2008
Prologue
Bot, Hopper, and Scout are robots. Sort of. They are highly specialized tools that don’t look anything like humans. But they are so much more. They are a new phylum of robotic machine called “iBots”.
Bot, Hopper, and Scout have additional software like no other machines that have preceded them. It’s called the “PM”, which stands for Personality Module. They may not look like humans but when you talk with them you’d never know they’re not three human teenage kids, two brothers and their little sister.
They’re not just tools, they haven’t been purchased to be slaves. They’ve been legally adopted by their human parents who treat them no differently than the three human kids they already have.
In addition to their human parents they also have two robot parents named Oliver and Fiona, also iBots, who work side by side with them to do the big stuff and the heavy lifting, grinding, and smelting their iBot kids can’t do.
They were secretly developed and field tested in BigGuy’s phenomenally well hidden underground labs near Coober Pedy, Australia. Above ground there is the Space Communications and Monitoring Center, the SCMC, not to be confused with SCSI, that is 100% legit. It’s what’s going on in the basement and the tunnels that’s only known by a handful.
the iBots have been living on Mars at the bottom of Gryre Planitia crater since their arrival on Earth Time April 1st, 2025, along with a bunch of their Bot cousins. Just one, big, happy robot family on the best vacation ever, an average of 140 million miles (225 million km) from home, all expenses paid. Can it get any better?
This site was chosen because it may have the richest and most diverse in-situ natural resources found on Mars to date. Which just might, on a good Sol, include oil and gas, and we are about to find out.
Today is not just a big day or Sol depending on how you count, it could be the biggest one in history. But much more than possibly finding fossil fuels on Mars, the iBot family is home for good, looking forward to the sol when the rest of the family, their human mom and dad, and their wonderful, silly, goofy loving hooman brother and sisters will join them.
1. It Begins
There were three Starsurfer launches in Earth Year 2025. The first was on April Fools Day which no one was expecting. It successfully entered Earth orbit and never came back. The mass media’s talking heads were at a near, all-time frenzy, and “The Stock” momentarily dropped below $100 for only a few minutes before computers around the world snapped up every share dumped by ignorant, panicked sellers.
After two days of ridiculous speculation the big rocket motors suddenly started belching fire and off it went to the stars. It only took a few minutes for the experts to announce it was going to the Moon. The talking heads went apocalyptic. Who gave them permission? How dare they!
BigGuy briefly appeared atop the latest Starsurfer launch tower looking a little sunburned and said “Why return to Earth when we can test the systems by landing on the Moon? It’s much easier with the lower gravity and no atmosphere, and we didn’t need FAA approval.” His video switched to a live feed from Starsurfer VII looking first back at Earth, and then split-screened to show the rapidly approaching Moon. After a few breathtaking minutes the video feed switched again to four inside cameras showing hundreds of waving iBots.
The media was frantically scrounging old B roll from the Apollo program when the experts insisted on interrupting. Even the chief talking headette had to listen, of course not believing and having to interrupt her propaganda spew with noticeable irritation. They said the spherical geometry and velocity vectors, whatever they were, clearly indicated Starsurfer would land on the Moon in three hours, not three days.
Billions were glued to their tech watching the livestream. The best part was the inside video feed showingiBots onboard Starsurfer holding up hand-lettered signs saying “Woohoo!” and “Love U BigGuy “ and “Hi Mom and Dad We Made it!”
Global pandemonium ensued for the next 48 hours. The Stock easily coasted past $1,800 USD (13,000 Yuan) and was still climbing. Like a rocket, handy when you are in the rocket business.
Billions spent countless hours watching the lunar landing followed by the iBots and a few biggie-size construction bots trundle out of the rocket and immediately get to work. What were they doing?
Slowly it became apparent they were surveying, prospecting, and beginning to harvest something in very large quantities. Amateur astronomers were the first to see the hundreds of low orbit satellites zipping around the Moon from North to South, and then around the equator. Without swarm AI software and onboard radar debris from many small satellite collisions would have already started raining down, an excellent term for a heavenly body with almost no atmosphere. It quickly became apparent the iBots were directly communicating with the satellite swarm and would suddenly veer off course immediately after a satellite passed over. It also became obvious one company, and only one company for the near future would shortly have the first total geological and topological survey of the entire Moon, including the dark side as well. The additional INSAR and COPL data was beyond their wildest dreams. Were those totally weird features on the dark side geological anomalies, or left-over buildings? The iBots are on it.
Earth’s smart people quickly figured out the robots were collecting aluminum ore along with other stuff they couldn’t identify. The iBot prospector / miners were digging up the lowest hanging fruit, the iron meteorites which were being hauled to the BiggieBot factories attached to Starsurfer VII. It all became crystal clear when the SEC filing for “The Moon Rocket Fuel Company, LLC, LTD” startup was discovered and went viral in minutes. The filing featured a detailed financial analysis of the brilliantly branded “Secret Sauce No. 9 Rocket Fuel, DBA MoonJuice” which apparently was going to cost 15% of comparable propellants on Earth. When you combined the fact that the bots who weren’t prospecting and mining were clearing building sites, at least those you could see from Earth, with the fact that you didn’t have to lift the fuel out of Earth’s gravity well, it was obvious that a lot of what was needed on Mars would be made on the Moon, not Earth.
Starsurfer XIII carrying the first humans launched in the Q4 2026 window and had just successfully landed on Mars after seven and a half months enroute. Bot, Hopper and Scout had recently celebrated their first year on Mars, 687 Earth days, and had spent every sol getting things ready for the arrival of their human mom and dad. Their human brothers and sisters would be on the next flight if everything went OK.
Starsurfer XIII,leased by the Rio Tinto, Alcola, ONGC consortium also carried two Texans and three dachshunds who were part of the most ultra secret mission in the history of the human species.
2. The Best Sols Yet
It’s going to be another amazing couple of sols for Bot, Hopper and Scout.
Despite billions secretly poured into hidden, ultra secret research by Earth’s Oil and Gas industry trying to figure out how to make $trillions using the hydrocarbons on Titan, it’s now clear it’s much cheaper and orders of magnitude easier to just find it and refine it on Mars.
The countless, disingenuous people hiding in governments around the world who have spent ginormous sums looking for “Life on Mars”, allegedly the greatest philanthropic endeavor ever. “Are we alone in the universe, or is there a lost civilization on Mars? And if there was, we must find out what killed it.”
As usual it was a big lie, secretly paid for in part by The MIC (Military Industrial Complex) and the oil companies to raise the political capital needed to build the rockets and robots to search for fossil fuels on Mars. If there had been life there possibly is lots of oil and coal buried beneath Mars’ crust, just like Earth. There might even be some natural gas but this is unlikely after a zillion years. We’re talking about tens of $trillions in future profits if the oil and coal are there, well worth the gamble.
Others not blinded and driven by power and greed sickness saw how beneficial oil, coal, and maybe natural gas could be for colonizing Mars. After the Cassini data their efforts, albeit quietly in total secrecy, began in earnest.
For BigGuy, his family, his closest friends and the thousands working their hearts out for him because they trust him, believe in him and they know it is mutual, this just might be the biggest gamble in the history of mankind, which has created his ultimate “Horns of the Dilemma” to-date. If he openly drilled for fossil fuels, regardless of which planet, his enemies would immediately try to crucify him with an untold number of lies in the media and the marketplace, possibly ending his leadership position in Earth’s ongoing electrification of transportation.
And then there’s still that handful of crazy Uber rich who blindly remain determined to destroy everyone on Earth except their slaves, which means BigGuy and those who believe in saving the human species and personal freedoms just can’t get to Mars fast enough.
Which was more important, wealth or the survival of the species? In the end there could only be one answer.
3. Mars Oil ad Gas Company
BigGuy didn’t know diddly-squat about drilling for oil, and although he is a legendary fast learner he didn’t have the time. He put out super quiet feelers though his invisible brother, and he found the handful of people who had the vision and old fashioned gumption to pitch their idea to BigGuy and his inner circle. They quietly wanted to start Mars Oil and Gas Company, and now, in theory, they are also billionaires, but being on Mars this means nothing to them. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
He and his brother bought the entire startup oil and gas company, lock, stock and oil barrel to drill this first well on Mars. Created by Harley Dawes, the legendary TOM (Texas Oil Man) based in Midland, his multigenerational experience in the oil business and the quality of his character was all BigGuy needed to see, and oh, by the way the price was right. Nobody knew the secrets of Harley’s youth, except BigGuy and a few surviving close friends who definitely know how to keep their mouths shut. Harley’s past history includes 135 air combat missions, two purple hearts and a secret Presidential Medal of Valor he never talks about, even with his kids. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Inside, Harley secretly considers any day when someone isn’t trying to kill you is an outstanding day to be cherished, and it shows in that quiet, soft spoken confidence that has nothing to with ego.
Included in the acquisition package was Doctor Valerie Voss, “VeVe” for short, a little known but spectacularly qualified Petroleum Geologist. A soft-spoken Oklahoman who’s only 5’ ½” tall (1,549.38944 mm on a good day), she hadn’t quite finished her PhD dissertation when Harley heard about her, read her dissertation draft in under 30 minutes, and made her an offer on the spot she couldn’t refuse.
So BigGuy continued to develop his iBots at an unheard of speed to travel first to the Moon and then to Mars in advance of the first humans, to find the local resources needed for people to not just survive but thrive. In time, Mars will have thousands of both humans and bots, including the fully autonomous ones with the personality software modules that were recently outlawed by the WEF, WHO, IMF, and the Democratic Party and wholeheartedly approved by the UWW. Following the bots will be those Noah’s Ark things when Martian terraforming is far enough along for the critters to have at least a 70/30 chance of survival. That Global Warming thing on Mars is going to take a while.
The highest priority list for populating Mars includes all kinds of metals, minerals and more than a handful of entries right off the Periodic Table. But never were fossil fuels mentioned, not even once. Nicely done. The possible presence of fossil fuels on Mars never entered the socialist hivemind, and that was just fine. And now BigGuy was ready to drill the first well on Mars, hiding in plain sight behind two of his newest, best friends.
Also tied for first place was getting biggie-size completely automated rock crushers, smelters, foundries and machine shops up and running on Mars, as soon as possible after they completed their dry runs and acceptance testing on Earth’s Moon. Heavy lifting this stuff from Earth was barely doable but financially a non-starter. The robofactories on the Moon were already cranking out tons of weird, aluminum, magnesium and silicon alloy parts but colonizing Mars on a grand scale was not possible without steel.
Making steel on Mars was tied for first place with everything else, not a problem from the raw materials point of view, they don’t call it the Red Planet for nothing. But the “everything else” includes finding tungsten and vanadium and refining them locally. This had been one of the robokids’ first priorities from Sol One on Mars.
4. The First Hole
Today is about finding oil and nothing else. Bot is so excited he almost can’t keep grease in his joints, the human equivalent of peeing your pants. The latest supply rocket from Earth delivered his first nextgen bolt-on geotechnical drilling rig attachment, and they’re going to drill for oil today about 30 clicks out at the next lowest spot from their own home, smack dab in the middle of Argyre Planitia crater.
In typical BigGuy fashion, a small group of Earth’s most brilliant mining equipment designers and software engineers have been stashed away in a remote corner of the Gobi Desert, ideal for running field tests in a somewhat close to Mars’ environment. Living off the grid in yurts, ankle deep in yak butter without worldly distractions, their ability to concentrate has been amazing. A couple of solar panels, redundant Starlinks, triple redundant water purifiers, and they were good to go. Nighttime stargazing takes your breath away and nobody knows if the Chinese know they’re even there. Burning yak chips for making tea and heating the yurts on really cold nights adds a certain essence to the experience.
The drilling rig is the very latest from the Really Boring Company, and instead of the traditional rotary drill bit it uses a train of Tunnelbots lined up like linked sausages in the pipe. Three teams of Tunnelbots are preprogrammed to drill three parallel vertical holes half a meter apart from each other forming a triangle. The new rig allows Bot to start all three bores at the same time. The Tunnelbots are 4.53829 meters long and preloaded themselves with Bot’s help into the first 100 meter long pipe sections. Every 10 meters there are secret doors in the side of the pipes that when commanded by a YES vote by at least three AIs slide open providing access to the parallel bores. The Number 3 Tunnelbots have special side looking sonar that can “see” their counterparts in the other bores through the rock or whatever once the secret doors open.
Once the fully autonomous geological analysis is complete the Type 3 Bots use their super special Adaptomatic Horizontal Nibblers ®, made by the Outer Mongolian Really Boring subsidiary to link the boreholes together every ten meters. When the horizontal passages are in place the doors slam shut until needed, and the autoplug functionators at each end of the Type 3 Tunnelbots disengage.
Hopper and Scout have been setting off explosive charges for the last two weeks harvesting geotechnical data, and a very, very select few petroleum engineers on Earth have been reviewing the findings, among the first ever to gain access to even a small part of the Mars Master Geological Database, the MMGDB. They are so excited with what they are seeing they’re almost peeing their pants too. They keep mumbling about anticlines and Spindletop lookalikes. It’s looking really, really good for finding oil and maybe gas on Mars, but you never know until you punch the first hole. Everyone is holding their breath in anticipation.
The thick wall aluminum pipe that will sleeve the boreholes made on the Moon and was jetpacked directly to the job site by some of Bot’s distant cousins. The Pipebots are already on their way back to the Moon after making their fully autonomous deliveries. They and some tunnelbots needing total overhaul only available on Earth are heading home onboard Mars LTL Express Cargo Hauler 007, making its endless loop orbit between Earth, the Moon and Mars, giving them plenty of time for their AIs to compare notes on how to do their job better and swap war stories.
“There I was at 11,828.3256 meters down the horizontal bore at the south rim of Valles Marineris, minding my own business when suddenly a subterranean Bifurcated Furlonger chewed its way right past me. Missed me by less than a meter. I was almost lunch for that big sucker. How it got there undetected I haven’t a clue…” VeVe is on it…
After reviewing the vids and data they knew she wasn’t pulling their legs (another human expression that absolutely mystifies the AIs. What does pulling a leg, or an arm for that matter have to do with telling the truth?) All of the AIs are chattering away over their almost private back channel: “Kevin Bacon, where are you when we really need you?” Seems there is no end to the AI addiction to watching old movies in their spare GPU cycles.
AIs are only allowed to form a hivemind under tightly controlled circumstances. The trip back to the Moon started at one of the longest elliptical orbit points and the iBots will travel 177 million miles before they return to their home on the Moon. This would take about nine months for humans but because iBots can tolerate, actually enjoy much higher acceleration and deceleration periods, the trip back will only take a little over six weeks, so they were given permission to hive for ten whole sols, an eternity for AIs.
Their ability to operate in much higher G environments would be meaningless if the energy needed to accelerate and accelerate was prohibitively expensive. But the Moon has megatons of aluminum that are now being refined in very large quantities of rocket fuel using solar furnaces and buckets of free solar electricity. After spending billions on Earth, the solar furnaces were a total failure there but the tech works great on the Moon due to the almost total lack of atmosphere and often -1300C zero temperatures. The first three are located near the Moon’s North Pole along the rim of the Peary crater which has almost continuous sunlight. This trip’s fuel came from Anvil Industries, a startup subsidiary of The Moon Rocket Fuel Company, LTD which received seed money from a really strange deal put together by India, Singapore and Poland. Its “Sacred Sauce No. 9” brand’s logo has a bright blue lighting bolt with a red dot in the middle, and nobody wants to know what happened with sauces 1 through 8. Even the AIs know it’s not a topic for conversation, especially enroute. Hard-coded in ROM is to even think the word “Boom!” (42 6f 6f 6d 21) is a big no-no.
All of America’s solar furnace data was available through the Freedom of Information Act, including sharing with our enemies, and there are three rocket fuel startups on the Moon with more coming. The aluminum is easy; finding the oxidizer and water used in some of the formulas is the hard part. Prices are all over the map. Share your secret rocket fuel formula in the spirit of planetary cooperation? Yea, right, when pigs can fly. On Mars. Maybe. We’ll get back to you on that one.
5 The First Hole
The 500mm (not quite 20”) diameter oil and gas pipe was originally extruded in 100 meter lengths, bundled together in 384 sections at a time, twanged from the Moon by the Number 16 Solar-powered Linear Accelerator, and propelled on their way to Mars at 200+ Gs using dirt cheap aluminum rocket fuel made on the Moon. Final launch speed at the end of the ramp is 283,000 m/s. Travel time was between 78 and 184 Earthdays. That much G would turn humans into goo, but the bots love it! Kind of weird, fully paid three month vacation for silicon-based life forms.
The latest pipe bundle from the Moon was snagged by the brand new Mars Orbiter Space Station I, operated by iBots of about a dozen different flavors. The Pipebots had EVAed and separated the shipment while in Mars’s orbit, delivering 30 sections to the drill site and the rest scattered along the construction track where the first pipeline from the drill site to Home Plate is being finished inside the hypertunnel between Drill One and Homeplate.
The pipeline segments were delivered by the bots with pinpoint precision accuracy (+ 0.28539m) using the recently uploaded JustInTimeOMatic (™) software. Why move it two or three times when you can just leave it in orbit and bring it to exactly where it is needed when they are ready to take delivery? Traditional Earthbound pipeline construction schedules have been reduced from months to minutes.
Bot’s geotechnical drill rig automatically raised the 100 meter lengths using thrusters and then shot out anchor cables spaced 60 degrees apart to stabilize the vertical stack for unexpected winds up to 300 kph.
The actual drilling is done using the core drill casing on the outside of specialized Drillerbots. The boring and continuous tailings analysis uses buckets of electricity which travels down one of the adjacent boreholes (the “Powerhole”) and is wirelessly transmitted the short distance between the two. Tunnelbots in the third pipe shuttle the tailings to the surface after it is passed through the secret doors.
Tiny samples are gathered every 10 centimeters, that’s about 4 inches for you old people, and Scout rocketed them back to Home Plate where VeVe, only the second human on Mars after her boss Harley, analyzed them in real time. Earth and Mars are currently as far apart from each other as they can get. It takes 20 minutes each way for radio communications, way too long to control this first ever attempt at drilling an oil and gas well on Mars by remote control.
The last thing they want to do is cut their way into a gas pocket and go maybe boom, or maybe even REALLY BOOM! This ain’t Earth and we’re not back in Kansas, Toto, so who knows? So despite all the instrumentation built into the tunnelbots BigGuy himself decided the first woman on Mars needed to be a petrochemical geologist, and right in front of him was Dr. Voss, Petroleum geologist extraordinaire, already on the payroll. Would she like to go to Mars? It took her less than two seconds and one nod from Harley to say “Oh Heck yeah. When do we leave?” Everyone kept it totally secret of course because they didn’t want to hurt EV sales, and she volunteered to be cross trained as a molecular biologist, which she actually really enjoys doing in her spare time.
Her cover story is that she is ready to go immediately onsite should life be discovered on Mars, something the idiots in social media still lap up and it continues to put their brains to sleep. She’s also taking her three miniature longhair dachshund sisters, another first for BigGuy and the team.
Suddenly the strata took a bizarre twist and both she and Harley both bellowed “Whoa Buckos!“, highly technical code words in case someone is eavesdropping from a stealth satellite. All drilling stopped immediately and the tunnelbots quickly backed out of the holes which are only 253.9852 meters deep, well short of their 2,000 meter goal. EXCELLENT NEWS!
Bot’s AI had been closely monitoring what’s going on and he doesn’t need to be told to put the ginormously big stopper upper thingers on the top of the pipes. Got it done in record time, and then, nothing. You could cut the anticlimax with a knife.
Just when everyone started congratulating themselves on their spiffy safety protocols the ground started to rumble and a spectacular gusher began spewing out the top of the main drill pipe. The spewgoo was first dark brown, then a brilliant yellow for about 10 seconds, and then back to almost black. The spectral analyzers had the latest software update and everybody anxiously waited to pore over the data. Instead of the usual pie charts, tables and graphs with squiggly lines there were just three words:
Smells like poop.
They quickly rebooted the analyser and got an update:
Smells like whale poop.
Clearly there needs to be words with the software team asap, but that will have to wait. Manually reloading the earlier software baseline worked a treat and good data started pouring out.
The last tunnelbot hadn’t cleared the pipe, and with the .38G when it blew she almost went into orbit. Affectionately known as “Sweet Pea” because of her AI’s kind disposition, she is the Tunnelbot team’s favorite and mascot. The video she sent back while it lasted could get a zillion views. The emergency recovery iBot team immediately went zipping over the regolith and had her dug out in no time. Her hardware and outer exoskeleton are toast but her AI is just fine. The stories she can tell her grandchildren will be epic.
Once given the OK by Valerie, Mars’ first Oil, Coal, and maybe Gas Queen, Bot slowly started closing the stopper upper thinger and pressure began to build to 4,000 psi, almost the design limit of the pipe! Bot started carefully backing up upwind from the boreholes at a steadily increasing pace…
Suddenly there was a giant natural gas burp which automatically flared off for 39.83736 minutes, and once it was gone the pressure dropped back to between 400 and 600 psi, exactly as expected and something Bot has been working with in the simulator for weeks. GREAT NEWS! Harley and Val were dancing, crying, hugging, and the AIs were at a total loss to understand yet another example of totally weird human behavior.
Earthlings were able to see the light from the flare 20 minutes later, and the rumor mill went into overdrive with conspiracy theories at an all time high. The one about the alien barbeque was especially appealing to the lunar fringe and the ecoterrorists burning EVs in the EU.
As darkness descended the flow rate stabilized at 30,000 barrels, or about 5 million liters per sol. Fortunately they had just finished the 33 kilometer dual pipeline, one for oil and one for gas back to Home Plate yesterday and nobody, and I mean NOBODY was expecting to actually use it this soon, except BigGuy of course. By mid morning the oil was piped to the fully automated iBot refineries that had survived the descent and they were rapidly coming up to full production under the watchful eyes of their OilBots, who love them dearly.
If the flow rate for the oil, if it continues, without even adding in the natural gas, the new Martian Oil, Coal and Maybe Gas Company suddenly had a market cap of $1.3 trillion dollars overnight.
Once the news broke on Earth there was a virtual tsunami of Earthlings wanting to invest in Mars Oil and Gas. When asked if they would be allowed to do so, Harley Dawes, MOC&MG’s first president politely said no. When they rudely demanded to know when they would be allowed to do so, in his classic West Texas drawl he calmly said “Well, we’ll think about it in about a million years or three” and hung up the phone.
Another clear indication Mars was not going to become an extension of Earth, vulnerable to the demented manipulations of the sicko oligarchs.
6. Oil, But Which One?
Vallery quickly confirmed the chemical signature is almost identical to the stuff on Titan and nothing like crude oil on Earth. The interplanetary puzzle just got much bigger.
If Earth’s Moon was blasted apart by a really, really big rock a couple of zillion years ago, is Saturn’s moon Titan another big chunk that used to be part of Mars? Is that when the water on Mars disappeared? Still floating around in Saturn’s rings? Grant application writers are suddenly in feeding frenzy mode.
A tiny fraction of the oil will be refined into diesel to run the ginormous above ground diesel-electric robot construction diggers, dirt movers and bulk transporters, which still aren’t capable of operating with the latest battery technology. Tremendous strides have been made in energy density but the battery tech is still orders of magnitude too small to meet the energy need.
Old fashioned internal combustion turbo diesel engine technology is so much simpler, cheaper and safer than using Nanonukes to provide the power for the huge, fully autonomous monster robot machines which are coming out of the Martian iBot FabLabs at one a week, soon to be one a day. The materials needed to build the monsters are almost 100% Native Martian stuff, lots of which were initially found by Bot, Hopper and Scout.
Using diesel technology was actually Harley’s youngest daughter’s idea. Charlene is a little over 6 ft, drop dead gorgeous just like her mom, and has been rolling coal in her Gen II Cummins since she was 13. No fancy pants computers for Charlene, mechanical injection P pumps all the way. Her high school senior science project was converting a fifth generation 24 valve engine back to P Pump tech, not an easy swap. Folks thought Harley, being an “Oil Man” would be upset with his daughter when the engine ran on carbon-neutral, 100% biodiesel, B100. In fact he was ecstatic because the biodiesel was made by the local FFA AG students using only homegrown feedstock. From Texas, with some from Oklahoma and Kansas, of course.
Only in Texas can a 6 foot female cheerleader who loves getting her hands dirty win the senior science fair and be the homecoming queen.
Getting a diesel to run in Mars’ existing atmosphere is a challenge to say the least, and it was Charlene’s idea to run an Earthwide competition on the ole Webonator to figure out how to getterdun. Motorheads from every corner of planet Earth came up with some amazing ideas, but nobody was surprised when a pak of Pakistanis who work at the Massey Ferguson Tractor factory in Lahore, Punjab figured it out. Beat out the Germans with their fancypants computer models, just applied homegrown smarts they use every day. Those folks are amazing! The Pakistanis were most gracious and said the Germans would have won if Dieselgate hadn’t slowed them down. When Gail Banks, now pushing 90, volunteered to be a contest judge Charlene knew she had a winner.
The absolute last thing the Martians are going to do is just burn the oil unless absolutely necessary, like fueling a hybrid diesel-electric 280 ton excavator (738 tons on Earth), even if the exhaust fumes help with the Martian terraforming. Almost all of the oil and gas will be used to make hundreds, and in time thousands of different products, everything from pharmaceuticals to plastics. Among the most immediate needs is making tons of super high tech insulation for thousands of kilometers of aluminum electrical wiring and cabling that must stand up to the Martian environment. And lubricants! The cost reduction in not having to bring them from Earth is staggering.
The Mars natural gas is another matter. Turns out it is mostly methane, which is 86 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Terrible for Earth, they claim, but wonderful for terraforming Mars. But when the Martians decide to burn it, and you need oxygen to do it, you get buckets of sorely needed heat calories, with water and CO2 as combustion byproducts.
The humans and puppies need the water, the plants need the CO2, and when the plants eat the CO2 they give off oxygen! It’s called the Carbon Cycle on Earth, and can it be the perpetual motion machine on Mars? Brilliant minds are crunching the numbers at a fantastic rate now that they know they know there is methane on Mars.
As Bot, Hopper and Scout gathered around the kitchen table with their iBot mom and dad that evening, slurping down electrons with the panache only teenagers can manage, their AIs marveled at their new human friends sitting across from them. They were wolfing down reconstituted soy burgers sharing this most special moment in the new, intertwined human and bot history. The best part was it was happening on Mars, not Earth.
Vallery looked really uncomfortable and Harley leaned over and quietly asked if there was a problem. Valerie whispered in his ear that she was dying to ask Scout questions about her geological survey data but didn’t know if that would be okay. She had never had a conversation with an iBot and didn’t want to do something improper and spoil the mood. Harley couldn’t help himself and broke into a huge laughter fit that shook the room. He said to her, “Val, Bot and I chat maybe 50 times a day. He is amazing! Go for it.”
Anticipating Vallery might want to know more, BigGuy had already zipped a tightbeam msg to Scout, her brothers and their folks letting them know Vallery would be the first human outside the Mars team to have full access to the 852 zettabyte Martian master geodatabase.
While answering Val’s questions, which left her speechless because this data had never been shared off-Mars until now, Scout’s built-in micro spectrum analyzer was discreetly taking environmental biohazard snapshots of the vapors floating out the little open bottle containing some mysterious fluid Mister Dawes called “Texas Pete”. She discreetly wondered if the big Texan was going to try to synthesize it from the Martian oil and gas. Her AI did some fast calculations and in 0.832 nanoseconds determined if he and his chemists could pull it off the market potential was endless.
As Scout drifted off to sleep to do a major over-the-air software update her AI perked up when the conversation around the table shifted to how to start mining coal on Mars. “Open pit versus tunnelbots?”
7. The Greatest Diversion Ever: The Model A1, 2 and 3 Launch
Unbeknownst to Harley and Vallery, BigGuy, his brother, sister, and six of their kids had been up all night watching the whole thing unfold live and in SuperDooper HD color, albeit twenty minutes later. Harley’s handling of the investorvipers moved BigGuy and his family’s trust in Harley to a whole new level. BigGuy already knew Harley, at 76, was well known around Midland, Texas as a real quality person. He looked like he was in his 50’s, had been a member of the Church of Christ from birth, and a real rarity among Texas oilmen he had never smoked or drank, had 8,000 hours driving up in the pointy end of over 100 different aircraft types including seven rotorwings, which helped explain why he was able to pass the astronaut medical exams with “flying colors” despite his advanced years.
What no one on Mars knew that night was BigGuy, in his usual brilliance had anticipated this critical moment in history like no other, and with no warning he and his best friend Herbie unveiled the Model A123 series that morning to deflect interest in that little drilling thing going on about 400 million km (250 million miles) away.
Totally catching his competitors off guard for the umpteenth time, the A1, 2 and 3 are all under $6,000 USD including the 48 kilowatt solar panel bundle deal, and all three models have 50% less parts than any automobile in history. There is the A1, a 6 seat van at one end, soon to be the best value for the money robotaxi on Earth, with or without a driver. The A2, the 4 door midsize pickup in the middle, and the A3 three passenger fold down side flatbed / dump truck at the other end, all with four wheel drive and four wheel steering. Need right hand drive? Just slide the joystick/petal combo assembly over. Want to drive from the middle seat just because you can? Not a problem.
But the ultimate gamechanger was the A123 series has been designed from the gitgo to be totally repairable by the owners. Every nut, bolt, wire, cable and casting. The unbelievably comprehensive repair manual was right there on the screen, with HowToFixIt videos in over a hundred languages. The MisterFixitbots had already watched the repair videos and made a great many excellent suggestions on how to simplify repair procedures while reducing the number of tools needed by 70%. This time, game over for good for legacy automakers.
But what is really special about the A123 series is their ability to be maintained and repaired by fully autonomous robots, on Earth, the Moon and Mars. The A123 is really designed for the Moon and Mars, but there are still a few room temperature IQ investors who still don’t get it. Amazing.
The next morning Vallery looked like she hadn’t slept a wink, which wasn’t far from the truth, and Harley came to join everyone for breakfast after eight solid hours of sleep and 30 minutes in the new gym. Harley had slept like a baby which even the bots’ AIs were struggling to understand given the stress load.
Val and Harley were sampling the freeze dried reconstituted bacon, scrambled eggs and gluten free muffins with real unthawed orange juice and COFFEE! One of Val’s non-negotiable items. The iBot kids were “eating” their way through a whole pile of replacement parts, fixing each other as only teenage siblings can do.
Val and Scout, with help from Fiona had devoured 24 crude oil samples gathered every 30 minutes overnight and had the first dataset ready to send back to Earth to fine tune the first six micro refineries before they were brought down to Home Plate. They had been hiding in Mars orbit, tricked out to look like communications satellites. SpaceBots did the tweaking in zero G, loving every minute.
The folks hiding in plain sight in Coober Pedy, now Earth’s largest iBot development center, was one of the last places on Earth one would look for petroleum engineers. They also had been up all night and now had the same data but 20 minutes later due to the transmission delay between the two planets.
It only took 58 minutes for BigGuy to sign off on the initial refinery configurations now that they had the first rough cut at understanding what is in the Martian crude. The first three refineries are optimized to make long chain hydrocarbons including bitumen, paraffin, synthetic rubber, heavy lubricants and diesel. The remaining three are optimized to make feedstocks for plastics, detergents, solvents, and in time pharmaceuticals..
Everyone could only watch and wait for a hopefully successful refinery landings later that night, and the first few could be up a running by tomorrow COB, fingers crossed.
All Martians, human and bot gathered outside HomePlate to watch the nighttime re-entry. It was nothing less than spectacular for the humans. The bot AIs were all monitoring the live data streams and placing their bets. Five made perfect landings, and ole number six went flooey and made a really big hole. Hopper surprised everybody including himself when his AI won the pool. Hopper doesn’t have to take out the trash and run the recycler for a whole week. Woohoo! Another one of those crazy human expressions which means absolutely nothing to iBots but just sounds so cool when they think it. Such is life on Mars.
On Earth pre-orders for the A123 blew past all previous records despite the manufactured poop storm over Oil on Mars which would be gone in less than one news cycle. With 60 million pre-orders with cash deposits in the first 48 hours BigGuy said “Thank you all!” from some mysterious very sunny location in his now trademark Luau on Mars shirt.
Quietly smiling to himself, he was one of only a handful who wasn’t surprised when the preorders for the flatbed farm truck – dumper were greater than the other two versions combined. This completely blew the so-called Wizards of Wall Street’s tiny little minds. Never entered their heads, though this was hardly surprising given the fact that not one of them owned a shovel and knew how to actually get their hands dirty growing their own food. What a crazy idea! Strictly for peasants…
With two billion subsistence farmers about to die on the vine, literally in some cases because they couldn’t get diesel, the thought of owning their own truck that came with solar panels in the bed direct from the factory was a no brainer. And they could make low-no payments in either cash or crops. The new A123 plant in Ghana would be online within three months and producing at scale by the end of the year. Before A123 production reached scale on Earth his robot children and the robofactories will have tooled up to build them on Mars by the thousands. Lots of bots are already thinking: “Why walk, run, or fly when we can ride! Just like the Fonz.” Reruns of American Graffiti hit an all time high on Mars’ hyperlink. Carbon fiber ‘56 Chevy bodies and 5 window coupe wraps are already in the works. The Merc will have to wait.
8. Family Together Again
It turned out to be the perfect end of a perfect day for Harley as well. When he finally came up for air there was an encrypted text message from Charlene, saying she was going to be on the next bus.
They talked about it before he left, and he was pretty adamant about her not coming to Mars until he was sure it was safe. She allowed as how in her note she had unintentionally expedited the process during graduation which Harley had to miss, which pained him greatly.
Graduating with a 4.0, she was in line to get her diploma from Texas A&M majoring in Petroleum Engineering, the last class before they shut down the department, knowing that her least favorite clown on the whole planet, Buster, would be right behind her. As always. Been that way alphabetically since the 3rd grade.
She had explained in her note that while they were ascending the stairs in their caps and gowns she was so ready for him to try something. She had already smelled alcohol on his breath, and when he tried to twerk her butt in the semi darkness she swung her left elbow back just like Harley had taught her at just short of the speed of sound and caught him squarely on the left side of his head. Nobody saw it happen because their eyes were glued to the podium and he pitched over, landing in the orchestra pit. Broke his arm in two places in the process of totaled priceless family heirloom trombone.
Joshua, the trombone player and one of Charlene’s best friends also since the 3rd grade, gave Buster a little thump. Ok, well more than a little as Joshua is the offensive center for the Aggies and at 320 there’s less than five pounds of fat on the boy. Turns out he had had about enough of Buster as well.
“So Joshua is also on the next bus, time to get outta Dodge, see you soon, love, Char.”
Harley’s carefully hidden grief from losing his wife five years ago got a little better knowing his family on Mars was getting a little bigger. As a father of three daughters Joshua had always been the son he never had, and now he was on his way here.
And so ended another three great days / sols on Mars and Earth, and there’s much thanks, love and affection shared by all.
Stay tuned for the next episodes, Hydropower on Mars, The Great Reawakening And The Freedom Energy Network.
Hydropower On Mars Excerpt
© Mark Fowler 2024
… “Of course every fool knows there’s no water on Mars. It disappeared millions of years ago!”
A common misconception BigGuy and his minions have done absolutely nothing to correct, what’s the point?
As far back as 2004, just two years after SpaceD started, analysts had been scratching their heads trying to figure out where the energy was going to come from to colonize Mars. BigGuy was thinking of at least a million people and sixty times as many robots.
Nuclear immediately came to mind after solar, but how realistic was that? Well, they pondered that and then pondered it some more. It made for an interesting dinner conversation but it was going nowhere fast.
Wind turbines? In the middle of Martian dust storms? Just thinking about the metallurgy and the seals for the bearings made their brains hurt.
Then a bright young sparkette from the Himalayas, on loan to ORNL in Oak Ridge Tennessee applied her passion for microhydropower research to Mars, and Boom! She quickly ran calculations to determine how much potential energy was stored, especially at Mars’ South Pole in the form of frozen water and CO2 3,000 meters thick. If you could just build a pipeline from Mars’ South Pole to the bottom of Valles Marineris at the equator, the difference in height could be 14, maybe even 15 kilometers! That’s almost 50,000 ft for you old people. Enough existing stored, free potential energy that hopefully will replenish itself every Martian winter. Again for you old people, each gallon of water descending from Mars’ South Pole will generate about 60 watt hours of power. Assume 150,000 gallons per hour through each 500 mm (~20”) pipe and you are talking 36 megawatts every hour, some serious energy, and you get the big five: electricity, water, carbon, oxygen, and carbon dioxide delivered to your door.
Yes, from a typical Earth point of view building that pipeline on Mars is beyond ridiculous. I mean, where would you get the funding? But BigGuy immediately recognized that, in time, his iBots could work this problem, especially if they made the pipe out of aluminum on the Moon.
The planners quickly found a half a dozen possible routes and going through Argyre Planitia made a lot of sense, especially in light of their early research into areas indicating there might be fossil fuels buried beneath.
A brief conference was held under his desk in the factory to get away from the noise, and when he asked for a for real show of hands, meaning “I love you dearly but are you willing to stake your job on it?”, every hand shot up and The Martian Hydropower Company was born.
(More to follow soon)
Mars Freedom Energy Network Excerpt
© 2024 Mark Fowler
… Another phenomenal period in history was suddenly in full swing. Some are calling it the Third Great Renaissance. A few recalled an earlier explosion in innovation that happened around 1900. In a period of just two years we had Marconi sending the first transatlantic wireless radio message, Wilbur and Orville doing the first airplane thing, and Willis Carrier inventing the first electric air conditioner, to name just a few. And now another innovation explosion bubble has begun. Finally!
The Great Culture War is still raging and BigGuy has now been joined by Sweet Su, and together they are making Tiny Seba’s predictions come true at a rate even he can hardly believe. It is so amazing how many people are still lost in the momentarily successful brainwashing epidemic, but those who aren’t have accumulated Earth’s greatest ever pent-up demand for something, anything better.
Su Yao Ping was born in Taiwan and after finishing her PHD at eighteen was sent to America to spy on the latest and greatest ongoing research in America. Her parents were closet Communists transplanted from Chengdu decades ago and Su was the crowning glory of their master plan.
Except there was one tiny problem. Sue had lied about her dedication to Communism her entire life and was more than smart enough to realize that trying to apply for political asylum in America in the middle of the Culture War was not only a non-starter, it was probably fatal. So she successfully buried herself in the bureaucracies, knowing the day was coming when her handlers in the US, and there were a great many, would finally be able to prove her treachery and end her.
Probably a car accident on a mountain road on her way back from Dollywood, her most favorite place on Earth because it was the only place she could safely meet with her friends in the Secret Squirrel Society.
Su’s assigned mission was to design the next generation electric power grid for the Moon, Mars, and in time space travel to the stars for the greater glory of the Communist Party. But Su’s five digit IQ had recognized years ago that all energy of every kind needed to be part of a heavily intertwined, AI based neural network. Electrical, thermal, mechanical, spiritual, it made no difference to Su.
And the Freedom Energy Network was born, given birth by a Chinese woman in America, living in the Appalachian mountains in Knoxville, Tennessee of all places, leading a phenomenally dangerous double life. The two things that kept her sane were her totally hidden, rock solid Christian faith, and her four dogs, two long hair miniature dachshunds and two corgis, all girls.
The dogs were considered totally ridiculous and a symbol of out-of-control decadence by her handlers, but they were easily fooled into believing the dogs were a necessary part of her cover story. What idiots, but whatever, her puppies brought her so much love and joy to her personal hell, floating on a sea of darkness.
Her Secret Squirrel buds had been working on a totally outrageous plan for many months that was a triple dipper. With someone this smart, why do just one thing when you can do a hat trick at the same time?
So the Squirrel Master Plan is Su is on her way to Mars, that’s one, to be the chief architect of the Freedom Energy Network, that’s two, and find husbands, the triple dipper, and it just can’t happen fast enough. The clock was ticking and this unquestioningly is literally a case of life or death. And BigGuy loves the idea that her four-legged daughters are going with her, the first puppies on Mars. Time to find her daughters’ husbands! And oh by the way, Su needs one too.
But marriage and puppies will have to wait. Su’s idea for the Freedom Energy Network design is so revolutionary it actually made Big Guy stop and think. For about three seconds, and then he said, “I like it. Do it.” and walked away to the next challenge. Su got the video call about 30 seconds later from someone she didn’t recognize and didn’t answer, much less even touch her phone. When they called again and BigGuy, or an excellent impersonator was waving in the vid and doing his wonderful goofy shuffle, she put her life on the line and answered. Not only did she not die but the new, upward trajectory of her life, soon to be literally up and out of her nightmare, was now her best blessing ever. She immediately recognized it had to be a God thing.
Her design for the Freedom Energy Network was both elegantly simple and incredibly complex at the same time. The exact opposite of the existing top-down, one way grid architecture that traced its roots all the way back to Thomas Edison’s first grid in Manhattan 140 years ago. Time for the Red Ocean dinosaur to die was at hand, and Su was now leading the charge. If that had to be on Mars to keep her safe BigGuy would make it happen.
Which is how Su ended up on the next bus to Mars with her four furry friends, a non-negotiable item, which virtually everyone thought was fantastic, First Dogs on Mars, etcetera, along with Charlene and Josh. Always careful and reserved, Su was knocked over by the two Texans’ outgoing nature. Within the first few minutes Su suddenly realized she wasn’t afraid for the first time in as long as she could remember.
Her life was turning upside down. Next on the list was her four-legged daughters immediately abandoning their mom for Josh. Here’s this gentle giant of a man, rolling around on the deck getting smothered in dog kisses, with the puppies playing King of the Mountain crawling all over him. Charlene saw the stunned expression on her face and said with a great big smile “Don’t pay him and dogs no nevermind, it’s been like that since he was two years old. Dogs just know.”
Suddenly Su started crying tears of joy, something she had never known. Charlene just wrapped her up in her arms, a total stranger no more. It was at that point Su realized she was family, something she had never had and desperately needed.
iBots on Mars 