Martian Music

(Class II Nerd Alert: break out your pocket unit-converters.)

Sounds on Mars work differently than on Earth. Bicycle bells are muffled. You can’t hear things that far away. And frequencies appear to vibrate at a lower resonance. So, Vitas' Fm7 falsetto isn’t as popular with Martians as it is with human freakazoids— who up until recently, we thought might be an actual alien species.

That’s all been debunked. Pressure waves in the red planet’s carbon dioxide rich atmosphere vary 10m/s for high and low pitches, and travel 200 mph slower overall. This means that when we find the underground frozen lakes we’ve been looking for… we won’t be able to laser skate them?

Abort mission. Drink saltwater. Grow gills and inflate your bladders. If we're going to survive 3rd millennium climate change, we'll need to devolve into fish again, or maybe even crabs (taking queues from the decapods). Genome engineering is moving faster than current space rates, anyway.

Hold on. With a little help from the Broad Institute, we could just base-edit our hearing for the Martian environment. If we were to database the genomes of Earth's 50,000+ protozoa, we'd find that our planet already hosts extraterrestrial biota, who probably have a mutation that metabolically processes sound. With our modern understanding of quantum fields, nothing "alien" is so "spooky" at a distance, anymore. MIT has a DNA hotline, right? Call 555-CRISPR9. The me-of-the-future will either be a hyposonically enabled terraformer or an earthbound amphibious humanoid. Let the bicycle bells of freedom ring.

Article prepared and edited by LX @Innova LX, 06/22/22