Fiction Alert...

Okay, so I didn't "zone out" as I had planned, but instead scanned more of the alternative internet news sites I've become addicted to of late. After a period of 'righteous indignation oversaturation' my mind, unbidden, churned out the following bit of playful fiction. Note: Any real people whose names are used in this piece HAVE NO CONNECTION TO IT, it's just a bit of make-believe fun, à-la-Onion. But enough preamble...

World’s liberals and progressives announce plans to ‘terraform’ Mars by 2050:
“This might be our only hope”

April 22, 2005

Rome, Italy – Today a watershed announcement was made by the newly-formed international coalition Left on Mars, outlining their plan to dedicate an unprecedented amount of time, money and scientific knowledge towards the realization of one of modern science’s greatest dreams: to create a habitable environment for human life on Mars.

The announcement to step-up plans to terraform the red planet, delivered from a makeshift podium on the steps of the Sistine Chapel, was precipitated, the group says, by the recent election of conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new head of the Catholic Church, and by the on-going “problems in political systems the world over, that have consistently consolidated power in the hands of the few, the radical, the conservative, leaving progressive politics and humanism out in the cold, so to speak,” says Left on Mars spokesman, and prominent progressive thinker, Noam Chomsky.

By utilizing the same industrial processes that currently release green-house gases into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing so called ‘global warming,’ but setting up these factories on the Martian surface, Left on Mars hopes to raise the temperatures on Mars to the point of melting the currently frozen polar ice caps. “It’s ironic, really, that the very thing we, on the left, have been fighting so hard against for so many years will be the ticket out of this worn-out hell-hole of conservative idiocy,” said obviously giddy environmental activist David Suzuki, prominent member of Left on Mars. Melting the ice-caps is just the first step in a long terraforming process. They will also build and point giant space mirrors at the planet’s surface, to further precipitate the conversion of the carbon-heavy Martian atmosphere to a life-friendly oxygen atmosphere more closely resembling that on Earth.

According to the group, they plan to terraform Mars over the course of the next 45 years, and will develop high-capacity solar powered space shuttles to transport supplies, introduce representative species from Earth’s various ecosystems to populate the new planet, and ultimately move every last progressive and liberal from the Blue planet to it’s red neighbour, located about 50% farther away from our Sun. “I know, I know, it’s kind of funny, all the blues on the red planet, leaving all the reds on the blue one, but heck, life is full of funny things, ain’t it?” said former President Bill Clinton, current president of Left on Mars. “It’s kind of like that Noah’s ark thing,” said one student volunteer from Columbia University, the research headquarters of the ambitious project.

Conservatives sneered at the plan, saying, “the science just isn’t there.” One prominent member of the Bush administration, asking not to be named, added, “it’s as if they think, gee whiz, we can heat up a planet with chemicals and drive flying machines with the power of the sun! Yah right, pal, and I’m Abe Lincoln!”

Despite criticisms of the plan, Left on Mars has said that with all of the expertise provided by out of work scientists in the United States looking for a chance to “actually do our job,” as one former researcher at the US Environment Protection Agency put it, they may even create a world more perfect than our own.

“It will be a brave new world, a solar-powered paradise, with gay women presidents, pluralism and harmonious multiculturalism, and a primarily soy-based economy,” predicts one of the movement’s most vocal proponents, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. “I’m just so sick of America this, China that, Russia blah, blah, blah,” he continued, “it will be nice to get away.”

Noting that such an ambitious undertaking, which optimistic projections had previously estimated would take several millennia, not decades, is a long-shot, Left on Mars finished their statement by saying “well, if this whole Mars thing doesn’t work out, we’ve still got Canada. At least for now…”