Early Life on Mars

Fighting climate change is a challenge for life on Mars. You can try it too, with the solitaire scenario of Bios Megafauna (2^nd edition). Back 3-4 billion years ago when life was germinating on Earth, the same might have happened on Mars. Billions of dollars have been spent on Mars missions, which include cleverly designed instruments to sample the chemistry of Mars for signs of previous or extant life. There are folks who think that Mars may even have seeded life on Earth via panspermia. As someone who studies the chemical origins of life, I try to keep up with the mission findings. (No, we have not yet found life on Mars.)

For an overview of Bios Megafauna, see this previous blog post. Today’s post will assume you’ve seen a basic overview and focus on some of the differences in gameplay.

Instead of four cratons on Earth, there are just two cratons: Tharsis and Arabia. As the solitaire player, you start out as an “animal”. There is a “plant” player (green) partly controlled by you and partly semi-automated by the scenario rules. (There’s a variant where you can be the plant and there’s an animal “parasite”.) In my first game, life started in the north of Mars on Arabia Terra. The green domes represent a swamp plant that has spread out over as much inhabitable space as it can. White discs represent seas in the basins. (Argh, I notice an error! The leftmost green dome is too far away from water and should not be there, nor can it support the black dome.)

On Mars there are three trophic levels, marked by white lines per hex. Plants occupy the lowest level. My herbivores occupy the next level, and there are currently no carnivores. The object of the game is to survive by keeping the seas in place, and thrive by life spreading out both in numbers and diversity. Cosmic events will cause evaporation of the water thereby killing life. I started as a primitive exoskeletal arthropod (black half-domes). A new phyla speciated from their ancestors, a fossorial bulldozing burrowing creature (black worms) that have developed sensory hairs. At this point in the game, the archetypes have developed a lateral line and cannibalism. Both phyla are size 3 (black die) or ~20 kg creatures.

The plants blossomed in size! They started out as tiny oziphyta and eventually developed amniotic eggs and seasonal migration. Traveling plants with eggs! The semi-automated rules can result in the plant becoming a huge horror-beast that turns on the animal creatures or no longer supports them.

The final picture below shows a later stage of the game, shortly before I lost with evaporation of the remaining seas. Although tectonic movement was slow, eventually Arabia joined up with Tharsis creating a mountain separating the two. Some of the plants have evolved into cacti (green snails) with armored casings. Cacti can survive further from the water, but the last seas of Tharsis have dried up and so the cacti there are about to die. Back in Arabia, a group of archetype arthropods evolved a new phyla (black snail) that can eat the cacti. And some of the worm-like burrowers have evolved to become carnivores, that feed on their archetypes, that in turn feed on the oziphyta. But soon Arabia will lose its water and with that life on Mars will be extinguished.

I’ve only played one game of the solitaire scenario, and while it has some interesting features it just doesn’t seem as fun and interesting as the regular game. I’m not sure if I will play a second game, but maybe being Covid cooped-up will encourage me to try. After all, it took me quite a few games of the regular Bios Megafauna to get all the rules correct, and then to develop some interesting strategies. I’ll be posting one of those in the next week or so. There’s also a two-craton Venus solitaire scenario where a runaway greenhouse is more likely to kill life; I haven’t tried it yet.

It’s hard to keep life going and thriving on Mars. At least in the primitive origin-of-life sense scenario. On the other hand, if you wanted to build colonies and exploit riches on Mars, there’s another game for that, Terraforming Mars, where you can be a corporate honcho trying to make money off the red planet; that’s a whole different story to explore some other time.