How We Learned to Live at Eighteen Minutes and Twelve Billion

Consider two figures printed elsewhere in today's edition: a message to Mars now takes eighteen minutes each way, up from twelve in July, and Earth's population stands near twelve billion. They seem unrelated — one a matter of orbital mechanics, the other of demography — yet both measure a single thing: the growing distance across which human beings must now hold one another. On Mars the settlers of Valles Marineris, some fifty thousand strong, have made peace with a gulf no message can shorten, deciding everything that matters before their letters arrive. On Earth we have not made that peace. We still expect the reply to be instant — the aid, the welcome, the answer — and grow bitter when the physics of scale, like the physics of orbits, refuses us. History suggests the Martians are the wiser teachers here. A civilization this large is a civilization at a delay from itself; the messages between our districts and continents take their own eighteen minutes. We might, as they have, learn to act whole and report afterward, rather than waiting for a reply that scale will always slow.