Preface: How I Ended Up Designing a ‘Map of Mars’

I have spent most of my career trying to make complicated systems easier to operate. Sometimes that means deciding how an organisation should be structured; sometimes it means working out which decisions belong where, what should be standard and what should remain local, or how hundreds of people can use the same machinery without everybody needing to understand what sits underneath it.

I trained as an engineer, then spent a decade at Google, including running its Global Business Strategy & Operations team and working as its first Chief of Staff, followed by four years as Chief Operating Officer of SoftBank International and later operating roles across startups and scale-ups. None of which obviously qualifies someone to redesign the geography of Mars.

There was, once again, no master plan.

It started with trying to make Mars work

For several years I had been writing The Mars Codex, a future-history series about the first century of permanent human civilisation on Mars. Most stories about Mars concentrate, understandably, on getting there: rockets, landing systems, habitats, life support and the considerable challenge of preventing everybody from dying shortly after arrival.

I was more interested in what happens afterwards. What happens when an expedition becomes a settlement, when one settlement becomes twenty, and when people begin building roads, power systems, mines, landing fields and cities across a planet containing no inherited human geography at all?

Somewhere in that process I kept running into a deceptively simple question: where, exactly, is everything?

At first this looked like a solved problem. Mars is extraordinarily well mapped. It has established coordinate systems, detailed imagery, elevation models and thousands of officially named features; spacecraft can determine their position on the planet with levels of precision that would have seemed miraculous to earlier generations of explorers.

So Mars does not need a better way to measure position.

The problem becomes more interesting when people start living there.

A mapped planet is not yet human geography

On Earth, we almost never describe ordinary life using coordinates. We live in streets, neighbourhoods, towns, counties, states, provinces and countries; governments define jurisdictions, postal systems create addresses, utilities divide service areas, companies organise territories, emergency services dispatch against recognised places and newspapers tell readers where something happened using geography they already understand.

None of that makes latitude and longitude obsolete. It sits on top of them, providing another layer of spatial organisation for people and institutions that need to do more than identify a point on the surface.

Earth accumulated this geography gradually over thousands of years. Settlement, terrain, language, law, property, administration, war and culture all left their marks, producing a system that is enormously useful, historically contingent and magnificently untidy. We rarely notice how much work it does because almost every inhabited place already sits inside it.

Mars begins in a rather unusual position. The scientific geography arrives first: coordinates, maps, imagery, reference frames and recognised natural features may all be mature before there is a single genuine Martian town, county, region or country.

The human geography does not.

That creates the question behind this book:

What spatial infrastructure should exist between precise planetary coordinates and the political, legal and cultural geography that future Martians will eventually need for themselves?

The part we should not design

There is an important limit to that exercise. I do not think people living on Earth today should decide what future Martians call their cities, regions or neighbourhoods, nor should we attempt to determine where their eventual political borders belong, who owns particular territory or what forms of government they choose to build.

If Mars becomes a permanent human world, its inhabitants will develop their own names, histories, loyalties, arguments and administrative habits. They should; a civilisation designed entirely in advance by people who never lived there would be a rather odd definition of civilisation.

I ran into a similar principle while developing the Marian Calendar. Technical infrastructure can provide useful structure without attempting to pre-write the culture that eventually develops around it, and geography makes that distinction especially important because lines on maps carry enormous political and emotional weight.

Yet not every useful line has to be a border. A coordinate grid does not claim sovereignty, a kilometre marker does not own the road and a postcode does not establish a government; these systems create common reference without deciding everything that humans later build upon them.

That is the more interesting problem.

How do you organise an empty planet without prematurely turning the organisation into politics?

Why this feels familiar

Although the setting is unusual, that question feels surprisingly familiar to me. Most operating problems eventually involve deciding what needs to be common and what can remain local, what must stay stable and what should be allowed to change, where a standard genuinely reduces friction and where standardisation merely removes useful freedom.

I think of that broader territory as operating architecture. It is not principally about drawing boxes or inventing terminology; it is about finding the small amount of structure that allows many different people, organisations and systems to work together without requiring them to become identical.

Mars provides an unusually clean place to ask that question because so little human infrastructure already exists there. On Earth we normally inherit geography and learn to work around it; on Mars, for a brief period, it may be possible to ask what functions a shared civil geography should perform before centuries of settlement, bureaucracy and politics make the answer largely irreversible.

That does not mean the answer should be designed in splendid isolation on twenty-first-century Earth. It means the assumptions can be made explicit, the requirements can be argued about, alternatives can be compared and the technical consequences of different choices can be understood before anybody is asked to adopt them.

This book therefore starts before Matlas.

It starts with the Mars we already have: precisely measured, extensively mapped, partly named and almost entirely without lived human geography. From there we will ask what changes when missions become settlements, what geography begins to do once people need to operate a society rather than explore a planet, and how much of that problem is already solved by the systems we have.

Only then is it worth drawing anything new.

That seems a healthier way to approach a blank sheet of paper.

Especially when the blank sheet is an entire planet with the same dry land area as Earth.

Hence this book.

Matlas: An Operational Map of Human Mars.

— Jonathan Bullock

More of my work on operating architecture, organisations and future systems can be found at iamJB.com.