                     ELITE MARS SCENARIO & HISTORY                                


     The year is 2175.  Mars continues to develop as Earth's largest off 
     world colony.  The first man on Mars landed August 12th, 2027.
     A permanent base was established here in 2036, following the discovery
     of large deposits of highly valuable minerals and gemstones.

     With Earth's booming over population and pollution problems, corporate 
     interests decided to invest in Martian city base and industry 
     development.  Wily bean counters in the upper levels of huge 
     international conglomerates, and the general advancement in space 
     technologies and propulsion systems, had made exploiting 
     Mars's vast resources a new highly profitable venture.
     
     This created the initial large volume of immigrants to
     the red planet.  Others were lured by its strange beauty, the chance
     to become rich working for high "off-world" wages, and still others 
     came simply for the ability to escape the crushing over population 
     and poverty problems of Earth's ever growing urban slums.

     Through the utilization of interplanetary transports, equipped with
     huge "solar sails"as their primary means of propulsion,  supply and 
     shipment of raw materials to and from Earth's red child became an 
     economically sound operation.  Unfortunately, one way trip times of 
     these transports ran upwards of 400 days, mandating the need and
     subsequent development of human hibernation technology. Mars or Earth
     bound travelers were loaded into sleep tubes before the ships ever left.
     Only the crews of these craft experienced interplanetary space and even
     they went into hibernation for the majority of the transit time.

     Fifty years after man first set foot on Mars (2077 A.D.), more than
     20 large settlements had been established.  As was the natural case
     with man's development on Earth, geographical cultural development
     began to evolve.  This was further encouraged simply by the old Earth
     origin of the settlement's primary funding corporation.  Thus, there 
     were major clusters of inhabitants, and even whole settlements, 
     which looked for all purposes like seed pods of cultures and countries
     grafted directly from the blue homeworld.

     The Americans and Russians initially arrived, being the core of the 
     first series of explorations from 2027 thru 2036.  For the next 15 
     years there was a large influx of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese
     concerns; many of which worked in the fields of agricultural 
     biospheric development.   Also during this time, many companies of 
     the Arabic world came up to Mars, often stating that it seemed 
     "much like home" to them.  The Arabs brought their drilling technology
     expertise, which very soon became a vital activity on Mars.  Another
     country with representatives and economic entities on the Red
     Planet were the South Africans.  Their proven skills and technologies
     in "deep mining", were essential.

     For the first 50 years of man's Martian history, little concern was 
     paid to the idea of terriforming or changing the climate of Mars. 
     This era was about rapid development, and profit.  However, this 
     changed radically when in 2108 a large ice-asteroid or comet was 
     discovered, heading for a very close pass to the red planet.  The
     body measured 14km in diameter and if redirected to impact on Mars,
     could bring much needed water to the dry world as well as heating the
     planet and increasing the pressure of the atmosphere.

     An so it came to pass, with little warning and with even less time to
     carefully or completely debate the whole process which was being put
     in motion, that a large ice cube from the dark abyss of the outer
     solar system was nudged for impact.  It hit as projected in the
     isolated and uninhabited area of the darklands known as Arcadia Planitia.
     Unfortunately, the full power of the collision and what was to come
     was grossly under estimated...

     The Great Impact of 2108, as it came to be called, shrouded Mars in
     a dark cloud of Arcadia black dust for 3 years.  The black fines from
     the plain were shot many kilometers up into the thin Martian atmosphere
     and were further kept aloft by a terribly stormy following winter.
     During this period, many settlements had to be shut down or abandoned,
     or rigged to run without any assistance from sunlight.  

     When most of the dust settled out, by 2112, Mars was a different
     place.  First and most important, there was a small frozen sea on the 
     surface in the middle of Arcadia Planitia.  It was not known how long it
     would remain there, but for the time being, there was water a plenty on
     the surface of Mars!  Second, the impact had increased the average
     Martian air temperature from -50 centigrade (near the equator) to near
     -30.  Third, the atmosphere was greatly thickened to almost .4 Earth
     Atmospheres by the unexpected mass thawing of Mars's carbon dioxide
     southern polar icecap.  In the span of 8 months after the comet hit,
     the huge expanse of dry ice at the bottom of the red planet disappeared.

     In the decades that followed, scientists, scolars, and theologians,
     endeavored to research every aspect of the event, but in the end, few, 
     if any of them had all the answers as to why one impact would 
     have caused so much planetary change.  One permenant reminder seemed to  
     be that a small portion of the black fines never did come down, 
     and so man made Mars a slightly darker world in sunlight for himself.



