As the Sun nears its death, it’s slowly expanding into a white giant. By the year 2865, it has grown large enough to draw Mercury closer and eventually it got swallowed.

Humans have foreseen the event some 25 years ago after the equinox cycles on the northern and southern hemispheres experience longer summers and winter and shorter spring and autumns.

Upon realizing this, conventions at Geneva have urged scientists, universities and corporations worldwide to find us a new home. And the chosen destination: Mars.

Numerous probes and satellites that orbit Mars fed Earth with amazing discoveries.

The Martian polar icecaps have begun to melt and bodies of water have started to take form. However, oxygen concentration was relatively low in the atmosphere, with CO being the primary gas that occupies the Martian atmosphere.

There are already some 15 space stations orbiting Mars at the time, and a joint venture between Japan and Canada brought 3 more, this time, carrying a special cargo.

Plants.

‘The Flying Gardens of Babylon’, as those space station were called, made its way to Mars to cultivate the first Martian organisms. The steady growth of the brown ‘Yamazaki’ moss proved that Martian soil is indeed rich in minerals and the things needed for plants to grow.

2870 marks the birth of the first Martian Oasis, aptly named the ‘Yamazaki Oasis’ after the scientist that cultivated the moss that first grew there.

On 2872, WWF, Google and The UN worked on an ‘Adopt A Tree’ programme with the theme: One Man, One Tree. The program follows where any person can ‘adopt’ a tree or a plant, which can be purchased at any local plant nursery, and then receive a Tree Adoption card, which lets them register for the programme online with Google’s support.

The adopted plants and trees will be flown to Mars to be grown there. The trees will bear a tag with the owner’s name written on it. The response was overwhelming as over 35 million trees were flown within the first month of the programme’s launch.

Mars, being about the same size as earth was quickly plotted and mapped. Nations and separate corporations began to invest in space shuttles to claim Martian territorial rights. Disputes between giant American companies caused a great delay for the USA in the ‘Martian Space Race’.

Though the Japanese were the first to successfully develop a fully confined base station, they were refused cooperation from the European Union due to claims of industrial espionage.

On 2880, China and the South East Asian countries united under one banner and sent forth 3 colonial shuttles to land and establish the first homebase Martian soil, using the Japanese technology bought by ASEAN. UN attempted claim veto over one of the shuttles, but China confronted the council and went against their wishes sternly, albeit peacefully and skillfully.

The ‘Gaia’ homebase became the control center for the plants under the ‘Adopt A Tree’ programme. It was built in the center of a deep crater, and has an area the size of Borneo encircled within the 12 km high walls.

3 years later, Japan and The European Union Each sent in 2 colonial ships to establish their own homebases, far away from Gaia. More and more trees from the adoption programme were flown in at an average of 5 thousand trees every month.

In just 5 years, the ratio of carbon oxides gases dropped to below 35%, as oxygen and nitrogen begin to occupy its atmosphere. However, in 2887, a gigantic chunk of the the northern Martian polar icecap, a piece the size of Australia, broke off and melted almost immediately causing a gigantic crushing wave, and broke into the deep crater where Gaia was built, completely submerging it in 10 km deep of water, subsequently drowning many of the trees that were grown there.

There were other craters and canyons that were submerged in the water following the flood, which were later joined by other flowing bodies of water on Mars. Mars still lacked oceans, unlike earth, and that is fast becoming an issue that has become a heated debate between Gaia and the other A Martian bases. Europeans established Versailles and Napoleon, while the Japanese set up Musashi and New Tokyo.

The Americans made a radical attempt on the matter. They transported 5 million gallons of water on the spaceship Floodgate to orbit Mars and use solar energy to conduct a huge scale electrolysis. It took them 2 years to generate 25 million cubic metres of hydrogen and oxygen stored in gallon tanks.

Using small ammonium detonators, they succesfully made it rain water on Mars for the first time, where it has ben pounded by carbonic acid rains for the past few billion years.

The WHO, WWF and NG Corporation [previously known as the National Geographic Society] sent in a team of experts to evaluate and document the Martian environment with cooperation from the 5 Martian bases. On 3rd April 2990, The 3 environmental bodies declared Mars habitable.

3 months within the announcements airline companies across Earth went into what was known as the ‘Migration Revolution’. On 2900, British Airways pioneered the Inter-planetary travel package by purchasing 4 shuttles offering migration flights to Mars and back to Earth on a weekly basis. Other major airlines worldwide followed suit offering more features including cooperation with real-estate companies.

Soon enough companies dealing in home construction sprouted like mushrooms after the rain, and theirs number increased exponentially.

30 years following the Declaration, over 30% of the human population have begun to habitate Mars, marking the new age of survival for the human race.

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Once, I dreamt that I was boarding a shuttle migrating from Earth to Mars, and the scenario was somewhat like this. The fiction above is just a spinoff I came up bassed on that dream. I still remember every single bloody detail of that dream, and I might write about it later.