Mars wanted a voice. Then they learned no one was listening.
Hello, and welcome to revolutions.
Episode 11.4, the election of 2244.
As with any revolution, historians argue about where to put our arbitrary and invisible temporal brackets to define the period we call the Martian Revolution.
Just last week, for example, I said that the Martian centenary in 2209 was a good place to draw a line and say, this is when the swirling forces that become the Martian Revolution start converging.
But that was 40 years before the Revolution.
And I'm happy to admit that contingencies, accidents and different choices could have led Earth and Mars to very different historical outcomes in 2209.
The Martian Revolution was not inevitable.
So the question is, when do we start to feel like those converging forces are coalescing into an unavoidable sequence of events?
The death of Vernon Byrd in February 2244 is an awfully tempting place to draw that line.
Now, last week I also mentioned the historian Hamish Sotow.
He's the one who said that Martian independence was still contingent and avoidable heading into 2247.
But I think it's unconsciously revealing that while Soto staked out this provocative thesis in the Declaration of Martian Independence, Crisis and Contingency, when it came time to write his own general history of the period Mars in Revolution, where does chapter one begin?
That's right, in 2244, with the death of Vernon Byrd.
Because even Soto must admit that at a certain point, the array of contingency becomes circumscribed by the actual historical actors in place at a certain moment.
We can always say, hypothetically, a person could have done this different or that different.
But could they have?
Contingent choices don't come from nowhere.
They are born of the psychology and personality of the historical actors themselves, which are not necessarily as mutable as we might suppose.
Everyone knows Napoleon made a world historical mistake when he invaded Russia in 1812.
And had he made a different choice, history would have gone very differently.