Starting a colony on Mars presents humanity’s first and maybe only shot at becoming a multi-planetary species. Establishing a base on the red planet will extend intelligent life beyond Earth, and enable us to explore the stars. At least, physically decentralizing our civilization to a second planet might be an insurance policy against Earth’s destruction.
And we will start to head out soon.
I feel fairly confident about 2026
~ Elon Musk, youtu.be/AF2HXId2Xhg
But we want more than merely a backup of humanity. We want to use this opportunity to build a better world, to make our utopian dreams come true. And we don’t think it takes a lot. Look at how a single company, SpaceX, has made travel to Mars possible by radically reducing the cost of space flight within just a few years — and thus reawakening space enthusiasm from its 50 years slumber.
We love this excitement for science and exploration and want to support the movement in our own way. Which is why we built the best Mars map out there, with higher resolution than any existing map from Google or NASA.
Go zoom in, explore the red planet and place a tweet on the surface!
Can we make our utopian dreams come true?
Beyond the demanding technical difficulties of building a Mars colony, coordinating resources and organizing people in a peaceful and beneficial exchange will be a major challenge.
Already today, nation states and private companies compete on space resources and questions arise about legal rights in space. No one made plans yet on how to make collective decisions in a settlement 300 million km away from Earth. A colony of people of different cultures, professions and motivations.
How will they set shared goals and implement them? How to resolve disputes? Through a benevolent dictator? Centralized planning and bureaucracy? Parliamentary democracy? Or direct democracy and state machines instead of states?
We acknowledge this to be not an easy problem, but a tough as well as urgent one. 2026 is near and we see our duty in building the technology which will enable a real Utopia on Mars.
We believe that Blockchain technology, albeit still in development, is part of the solution to these coordination problems — from financial coordination, to credibly neutral voting systems.
As the community we come together, not just of building the tools, but also experimenting in applying them.
This is why we are decentralizing Mars ownership, by issuing the highest resolution color images of the Mars surface to date, as NFTs. Each a unique 2x2 degree parcel of Mars, stored for eternity, and verifiable on the Ethereum blockchain.
Decentralized Mars ownership — Mars26 NFTs
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are indestructible proofs of ownership.
Mars26 is made of 16200 unique NFTs, each representing an unique area of 2x2 degrees of Mars surface. 360 degree x 180 degree / 2 x 2 degree = 16200.
While map images are optimized for web view, the NFTs come in full-quality (higher file size).
The NFTs are stored, for everyone to verify, on a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, and on IPFS and Arweave (to be deployed). This way we can be certain, the Mars NFTs will even live long after humans have already settled on Mars.
Star Love, not Star Wars — Mars governance
The proof of ownership for unique areas of Mars enables us to begin experimenting with coordination and governance, for a new, better world.
Let’s build a fair future. Let’s enable a society based on control from the bottom up. With direct democracy and clear rights of ownership and participation.
We can’t wait to unveil our governance experiments for you!
Pointy end up, flamey end down
The future is now.
Stay in touch on Twitter and our Discord community
Visit our page to get a more detailed view of Mars than ever before. Zoom in, play around and place a Tweet on the red planet :)
We are spaceP, Rov3r and spacemorty, a group of space fans building this project on the shoulders of deep space giants:
Thanks to the NASA’s Ames Research Center for their work on the Viking Mosaic, Caltech’s Murray Lab for their work on CTX imagery, USGS Astrogeology Science Center for their work on MOLA HRSC Blended DEM as well as DLR for their work on the HRSC, NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center for MOLA …
… the University of Arizona for their work on HiRISE, Malin Space Science Systems for their operation of CTX, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for various work involved and all institutions involved in the PDS. We are truly standing on the shoulders of deep space giants.
* Today’s featured image shows Valles Marineris. Well, a small part of it. Because the total valley is more than 4000 km (2500 mi) long, 200 km (120 mi) wide and 7 km (23,000 ft) deep. For comparison, the Grand Canyon is 800km (500 mi) long and 1.6km (1 mi) deep. Current research suggests the valleys to have been created from tectonic shifts when the planet cooled down, and partly from water flows. You can find it here on the Mars26 map.
How to built the best Mars map to date:
