How 'Per Aspera' Reflects Our Martian Anxieties

NASA wants to take us to Mars. Laying the foundations for that eventual trip is one goal of the Artemis Lunar Exploration Program, which seeks to put men and women on the moon by 2024. In Per Aspera, humanity has finally made it to the moon and beyond, though some questions still elude our grasp. What does it mean to colonize Mars? And who does it belong to?

Per Aspera is a city builder and management sim where you play as a nascent AI called AMI (short for Artificial Machine Intelligence) that's in charge of the mission to terraform and colonize Mars. It's your job to mine resources and turn them into building materials and food, to place colonies, and ultimately to change the atmosphere of Mars to make it habitable for human beings. You're not an unthinking machine, though. As an AI, you have the ability to reflect on your actions for the sake of analyzing problems and coming up with solutions. This is reflected by having visual novel-esque sequences where AMI voices their own self reflection, with dialogue prompts for the player to choose how they analyze and understand their actions. At the start of the game, as AMI reflects on the fact that soon they will not be alone but surrounded by Martian colonists, AMI asks itself if it’s anxious or excited about that. The feelings are so similar, but the distinction is important.

I chose to be excited, but as the game goes on, the presence of human beings causes me more anxiety than anything else. One of the resources you manage is humanity itself, making their political perspectives and warring points of view as important as raising the planet's temperature.

In the world of Per Aspera, there have been many, many attempts to colonize Mars, none of them successful. You'll find remnants of the real-world InSight Lander on the planet, as well as parts of fictional Martian expeditions. What becomes clear is that the ownership of Mars is extremely political. The group that created AMI, the ISA, isn't a neutral group—it's one that belongs to a collective of countries called the Oxy-UN that still have breathable air and want to get to Mars first. Through dialogue with the human characters that assist you in your mission, you learn that at this point in humanity's future, the Chinese language has been banned in certain countries, and the ISA criticizes you for taking advantage of their technology that was abandoned on Mars. At one point, a character references that the ISA has "lost" the Moon to another nation, and is determined to claim Mars as their own. 

As an AI, you don't necessarily have knowledge of all these human factions and their beefs with each other. That's not part of your mission. And yet, managing these human emotions becomes as important as releasing greenhouse gasses into the air. I don't think I've ever primarily played a management sim for its plot before, but the philosophical questions this game poses are what keep me coming back.

While firmly science fiction, Per Aspera speaks to contemporary anxieties. Part of the terms of service for Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, for example, included a declaration that Mars is to be a "free planet." While this is definitely a goofy marketing stunt, it evokes times in human history when someone in power decided that something collective (land, or a resource) belongs to them alone, leading to the displacement of peoples. 

While there are no native citizens of Mars, do we really want to recreate settler colonialism in space? Parts of Per Aspera show a kind of worst case scenario, where scientific progress—and the continued existence of the human race—is blocked by human egos, paranoia, and greed. 

As I surveyed all the dead technology on Mars, evidence of failed missions from Korea, China, India and the United States, it became clear that in the world of Per Aspera, we all could have lived on Mars sooner if we worked together and let the planet be free.