The Twelve-Minute Delay: A Week in the Life of the Far Side

There is a discipline the colonists of Valles Marineris have that Earth has largely forgotten, and it begins every time they speak to home: they wait. This week the delay between the two planets sat a little under twelve minutes each way — Mars, the far side of the solar system as the colony wryly calls itself, is near enough in its orbit to make conversation almost bearable — and even so, no exchange can be a conversation. You say your piece, you send it into the silence, and you go and do something else while it crosses the gulf; by the time the answer returns you are a different person than the one who asked. The settlement has built an entire culture out of that lag. Decisions are made without waiting for Earth's blessing, because Earth's blessing arrives too late to matter; a Martian learns to finish their own sentences. "Down here you ask a question and you have already begun to answer it yourself," one colonist wrote in a dispatch that reached us this morning, twelve minutes old and perfectly calm. It is a strange sovereignty, the sovereignty of distance — a world that always answers late has learned, of necessity, to answer for itself.