A thought experiment reveals how quickly yesterday’s miracle becomes everyday life
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Water was the most expensive cargo on Mars—until one day it wasn’t.
A cat in a white spacesuit stood on the red plain, watching Earth glow blue and almost unreal against the black sky. A rocket towered behind him. Nearby, the settlement’s first domes shone beneath antennas linking thousands of settlers to billions back home.
Twenty years earlier, delivering a glass of water here cost more than a good car. Now machines extracted ice from the soil, solar plants supplied power, robots tended greenhouses, and purification systems recycled almost every drop. Water hadn’t changed. The technology around it had, eliminating much of its scarcity.
One day, the cat offered the young settlers a thought experiment.
“Imagine someone from Earth’s past seeing everything inside an ordinary phone: a world map, a library, a translator, a camera, mail, a music studio, a bank, a university, and access to millions of people. What would all that have cost a century ago?”
Nobody had an answer.
“Exactly,” he said. “We often measure wealth by how much stuff we own, even as progress makes our most valuable capabilities less and less physical.”
The colony grew the same way. First, heavy parts came from Earth. Then settlers learned to print them locally. AI began designing structures around available materials, and a small lab could do work that once required a vast research center. Each advance accelerated the next: knowledge turned into software could spread to thousands of machines at almost no cost.
A few years later, a young woman from a small town on Earth developed a system for growing plants in Martian soil and shared the model openly online. Within a week, three domes were using it. Within a month, engineers across five continents had improved it. A year later, parts of the technology were helping grow food in Earth’s arid regions.
For the first time, the cat understood that a person’s ability to make an impact in this new era depended less on where they were born or the resources around them. With access to knowledge, computing power, and a global network, one person could sometimes gain capabilities once reserved for governments and major corporations.
Mars was no paradise. Systems still broke down, accidents happened, and people argued over resources. Nature kept reminding them that a vacuum doesn’t care about slick presentations on the future. But settlers tried to see each problem as the current cost of technology that wasn’t advanced enough yet, rather than an absolute limit.
One day, a child born under a Martian dome asked the cat:
“Is it true people used to think living on another planet was impossible?”
The cat glanced at the old rocket, long since turned into a museum, and smiled.
“People often call something impossible when it’s still too expensive.”
A new settlement’s lights flickered on at the horizon as Earth slowly rose above it.
And perhaps that was the real secret of abundance: the future doesn’t bring us infinite resources. It teaches us to unlock more and more possibilities from what once seemed too scarce, expensive, or out of reach.
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