Are you ready for cricket, spiders, and lizards in your Mars bedroom?
Living on earth, you have a massive biosphere all around you. Plants, animals, bugs and fungus everywhere. Here, it is to your advantage to push most of what you don’t like out of your living space. When you need something from it, you can easily get it. But that won’t be the case on Mars. Using every single bit of area that can grow something to do so is still going to leave you with shortages in things you critically need. There will be uses for every bug, leaf, fiber, scale, feather or hair produced and you still won’t produce all that is needed and have to import things to make up the difference. You will need to use every available space, have most every wall covered in plants. In many ways, it will be like living in a heavily planted greenhouse just to get enough food, air and minimal fibers and oils to barely survive there.
Keeping that ecology balance will be critical. That means there will be bugs, bugs, bugs and more bugs, tiny to large, all over the place or you don’t have a well-balanced ecology. You can, and should, keep the more dangerous ones out of your ecology, such as fire ants and hornets, but many of what people think of as pest are going to be the ones most needed to keep that ecology balanced. You need the bugs that consume the widest ranges of plants and decaying waste, turning it into usable proteins, keeping that matter in active biomass. Such insects will be a major component of the food for your fish, pets and livestock. You won’t ever have as much of them as you need.
But insect that eat most any plant matter would quickly get out of hand if you don’t have other thing preying on them. Some like cricket are cannibals and tend to be at least partly self-balancing but others are not. Bugs that eat other bugs will also be needed. Mantis, spiders, centipedes and others are all useful in keeping that ecology balanced. Even small lizards might be beneficial there. It is even possible that we will need ant and cockroaches there to keep everything balanced. The wall of your apartment, condo, office or house will need to be covered in vines to keep your air healthy and those vines will have a population of insects living in it.
Not making your bed when you get up will and you will likely find bugs taking cover in it just as you would if you left that linen out on a garden. Nor can you leave your food setting out and not find it eaten on. Dirty clothes left on the floor would become nest very fast. Keeping yourself, your clothes, and your bed clean in such an environment is a must. Are you up for it?
I would love to hear what you think.
Here is my fiction on what living there might be like.
Donald of Mars Episodes 1-5
These chapters were originally published on Kindle Vella and are still available elsewhere. The story is an ongoing serial.