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Musk Proposes Sites For Martian Cities
Elon Musk, of "Occupy Mars" fame, has described some of the locations that might be favorable for the inevitable trips to Mars that will take place using the SpaceX Starship.
Recently Musk mentioned he wants to build the first #Mars city in Arcadia Planitia. Low altitude, higher pressure, shallow ice deposits, well sunlit area, close to the highest peak in the Solar system. pic.twitter.com/RgFxGD8h09
— Mushmulka Space (@mushmulk) March 24, 2025
(From Musk proposes sites for Martian cities)
As far as I know, the earliest description of a Martian city can be found in Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg, published by Trubner & Co. in 1880:
Immediately to the south-eastward, and about twenty miles from where I stood, a deep arm of the sea ran up into the land, and upon the shores of this lay what was unquestionably a city. It had nothing that looked like fortifications, and even at this distance I could discern that its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities. Their colours were most various and brilliant, as if reflected from metallic surfaces; and on the waters of the bay itself rode what I could not doubt to be ships or rafts. More immediately beneath me, and scattered at intervals over the entire plain, clustering more closely in the vicinity of the city, were walled enclosures, and in the centre of each was what could hardly be anything but a house, though not apparently more than twelve or fourteen feet high, and covering a space sufficient for an European or even American street or square. Upon the lower slopes of the hill whereon I stood were moving figures, which, seen through the binocular, proved to be animals; probably domestic animals, since they never ranged very far, and presented none of those signs of watchfulness and alarm which are peculiar to creatures not protected by man from their less destructive enemies, and taught to lay aside their dread of man himself. I had descended, then, not only into an inhabited world—not only into a world of men, who, however they might differ in outward form, must resemble in their wants, ideas, and habits, in short, in mind if not in body, the lords of my own planet—but into a civilised world and among a race living under a settled order, cultivating the soil, and taming the brutes to their service.
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