For a long time, I kept a dream journal beside my bed. I wasn’t the best at updating it, only really caring when I had one that made any sort of sense or was particularly funny. If you’re wondering what I tend to dream about, I’m not being hyperbolic when I say everything and anything. Random people I’ve come across during my life, random places I’ve been to or seen online, and random scenarios I’ve either heard of or been involved with before. There’s virtually no limit to what my mind can cook up while asleep or awake. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I’ll wait until another time to discuss that.

At any rate, I recently had one that I’ve been thinking about here and there. It’s not really that special, but it made me think about the future.

Let me explain. It started with me waking up in a dimly-lit cabin, and the first thing I noticed when I gained my senses was that I felt really off. Muscles were stiff, eyesight wasn’t the greatest (not that it’s good in real life), and I found it harder than usual to get out of bed. When I did, I noticed that my arms were quite frail, and that there was a cane right beside my bed. I figured out that I was somehow quite a bit older, and that I was probably in my 70s or 80s. I stood up, grabbed my cane, and walked towards a door that I guessed was the cabin’s exit. Opening it, I saw something akin to this across the landscape:

It was a city on Mars. Pretty wild, right? There were domes similar to the ones above housing massive swaths of what looked to be skyscrapers, apartments, energy plants, and various other essential buildings. One of them was quite a bit larger than the other, and even though I couldn’t make out exactly what was inside of it, it was quite bright. Looking around, I noticed that I was in a dome of sorts as well, although it only seemed to cover the area from the cliffside I was apparently living on to a group of houses that couldn’t have been more than a few hundred feet away.

I don’t exactly remember what happened after that, as I woke up soon afterwards. Almost immediately, I began searching for images similar to what I saw, and I not only came across the one above, I also found several articles about scientists and researchers speculating when, not if, we’d be able to colonize Mars.

Leading those talks was someone who needs no introduction, and that’s Elon Musk. Founder of Tesla, richest man in the world, and destroyer/savior of Twitter, now called X. A couple years back, he outlined his idea of not only getting people on Mars by the end of the 2020s, but eventually building a city as well. It would involve trillions of dollars, a couple million people migrating to the planet via his SpaceX starships, and those same people settling down and working in jobs as they would on Earth to pay off the loans that they’d take out to fund their flights. I found the idea of working at a Martian pizzeria to pay off your entry loan really humorous, so I ended up setting that aside for a future short story.

Now, I have my own thoughts on Musk, but they’re irrelevant to this post. Reading through his idea, as well as the outline that’s on SpaceX’s official website for eventual interplanetary travel, I couldn’t help but wonder a couple things. Firstly, whether the idea of building a Martian city would even be feasible, and secondly, whether God would allow us to get that far before things come to an end.

To answer the first question, I think that if we’re able to collect the necessary resources/funding and have the right people in charge of the project, then I think that it could be done. I would say that sending men like Armstrong and Aldrin to the Moon could be looked at as an example of what to do and what not to do, but you also have to remember that those guys were sent to collect samples and to simply survey the surface, not lay the groundwork for a city. It often takes years to build a city on Earth, and I can only imagine how long it would take to build one on Mars. Probably decades, if I’m being honest. If they started at the end of the current decade like Musk proposed, I doubt it would be truly finished until the mid-to-late 2040s at the earliest. There would likely be many setbacks, unforeseen consequences, and so on. There is also the question of whether it would be worth it or not, and I think that depends on who you ask. For me? I’m not sure right now.

As for the other question, it’s one that I think deserves more attention than it gets. We see in many movies like Back to the Future and Blade Runner that there are sentient holograms, fully functional human-like androids, and interplanetary space travel like Musk is talking about now. Those are all cool concepts and ones I love talking about, but in reality, we aren’t exactly close to those things. I mean sure, some robotic dogs and humanoids have been made, and holographic technology is really starting to come along, but will this Earth be around long enough to see the advanced technology that we see in our favorite sci-fi movies? I’m not sure.

Now of course, nobody but the Father knows when the final day will come, but looking at the state of the world right now, it’s hard to distance yourself from thinking about whether we are living in the last days or not. I personally don’t think we’re quite there yet, but again, who am I to say? For all I know, we could all be raptured tomorrow or the Antichrist might reveal himself next week, ushering in an era of devastation. We don’t know these things, we can only speculate. Heck, the world could still be chugging along well into the 2100s, where we could have over 10 million on Mars by then. That would be pretty cool, but I highly doubt I’d live to see it.

Then again, I was living as a pensioner in one of those very Martian colonies I’ve been talking about in my dream. Forrest Gump had his quote about never knowing what you’re gonna get with your life, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how true that really is. Maybe we will eventually get to colonize Mars and I end up living there, or God cleans house before we even get a human up there. It’s all up to him, and I’ll accept his decision regardless of what it is.