what the Mars scenario gave me – and gives all of humanity – is the idea that the physical substrate of the planet itself is also a part of the project, and it’s something that we are strong enough to influence. Not create, not completely control, not completely engineer because it’s too big and we don´t have that much ability to manipulate the large systems involved, nor the amount of power involved. But we do have enough to mess things up and we do have enough to finesse the system.This, I think, was a precursor to the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is precisely the geological moment when humanity becomes a geological force, and it’s a science-fiction exercise to say that 50 million years from now, humanity’s descendants, or some other alien civilization, will be able to look at Earth and say: “This is when humanity began to impact things as much as volcanos or earthquakes.” So it’s a sci-fi story being told in contemporary culture as one way to define what we are doing now. So, that was what my Mars project was doing, and now we are in the Anthropocene as a mental space.