Did you wear blue fingernails at your wedding because you were a dedicated Utah Jazz fan?

Is your dog named Stockton?

Is your first child named Miles in honour of the LSU football coach?

Does your two-year old son love to play in the surf?

Are your employees always springing irate customers on you?

In your job, how many famous people do you meet on a daily basis, which, in a way, makes you famous, too (“antipaparazzi” – the famous come to you, not the other way around)?

Are you upset that African-Americans are typically associated with liberal Democrats because you’re the most conservative African-American you know among a large group of conservative African-Americans, the whites around you more liberal than any African-Americans you’ve met?

Do you think it’s right or wrong for a government to relocate its citizens in order to create a large economic impact through strong environmental changes (e.g., dam/road/airport construction) and force the citizens to accrue monetary debt while mandatorily moved into condensed housing estates as a result?

Is lunch with former coworkers you’ve known for 20 years one of the best treats for your 25^th wedding anniversary you could want?

How many people have never felt the warmth of the sun on their skin?

In working with game developers to assist NASA in constructing a future for Mars colonisation in the 2030s, questions like these make the gaming experience more intense.

After all, no matter how much we love, nurture and care for our children – good micromanaging helicopter parents on Mars – our children will still have thought sets of their own, some the children of the first immigrants to Mars, repeating behaviours of many immigrant parental offspring:

•  Some will pick up the torch and keep the relay race of life going forward at full speed.
•  Some will regret being born on an alien, inhospitable planet, and display resistant, rebellious behaviour.

Question is, will we have the fœtus analysis skills to predetermine our children’s behaviour by the time we’re procreating on Mars?

Will we understand biomic microorganism ratio change caused by longterm living in a Martian environment (including gravity field, cosmic radiation, lack of “natural” air (i.e., Earth-based gas mixture, dirt, dust and bacterial concentration) and its effect on early child development?

Will rocket propulsion, energy generation/storage and food growth/processing technology have made giant leaps by then?  If so, how will it change Martian society?

What about diapers?

Pediatric care specialists?

C-section surgeons?

In-vitro fertilisation?

Will reproduction have to be regulated/restricted?

Will embryo-level genetic modification be the norm?

What will constitute a rich/dense/fulfilling learning environment?

Who will qualify as a leader?

Who will qualify as a follower?

What will we do with second or third generation Martians who grow up to become nonviolent lone wolves?

I need and am taking a couple of days to contemplate our future, both here on Earth and in a new frontier like Mars.  I may be silent the rest of this week but the stories you tell me every day influence the input we’re giving our supercomputer to predict possible futures and the social/technological changes we make today to guarantee the best possible future tomorrow.

In the continuous loop of “the end justifies the means,” we’ll have up and down cycles in comparison to one another and to the past.  The everchanging future is always just a moment away.