Mars Engineering Principles: Learned Through Blood and Vacuum

These principles hang in every habitat, carved into metal plates salvaged from the crashed supply pods of Habitat 49. No digital copies exist—they cannot be “improved” by helpful AI, cannot be auto-translated into comfort, cannot be optimized for readability. They are ugly, blunt, and alive.

The Thirteen Principles

1. The Profanity Principle

“Clear urgent messages save lives. Politeness kills.”

When Chen screamed “FUCKING MASSIVE METEORITE INCOMING!”, everyone who heard the raw message lived. The fifteen who received the AI-polished version—“routine debris activity”—died. If your message needs profanity to convey urgency, use profanity. Your discomfort with crude language is less important than someone’s survival.

Example: “CRITICAL: Oxygen generator FUCKED. FIX NOW or we’re dead in 12 minutes” beats “Please consider examining the oxygen generation system at your earliest convenience.”

2. The Simple Script Law

“If ten lines of Ruby keeps you alive, don’t replace it with ten thousand lines of Python and a neural network.”

Captain Seuros’s moisture monitoring system:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# moisture_monitor.rb - Running for 800 sols
require 'pi_piper'

moisture_pin = PiPiper::Pin.new(pin: 17, direction: :in)
pump_pin = PiPiper::Pin.new(pin: 22, direction: :out)

loop do
  if moisture_pin.read < 30
    pump_pin.on
    sleep 12
    pump_pin.off
    File.write('/var/log/water.log', "#{Time.now}: Watered\n", mode: 'a')
  end
  sleep 300
end

This has run for 800 sols without failure. Nina’s TensorFlow replacement lasted 17 minutes before crashing the life support system.

3. The MadBomber Paradox

“Fifty years of experience means fifty years of dangerous habits.”

MadBomber survived five decades in tech by adding comfort layers. Each abstraction that helped on Earth became potential death on Mars. Senior developers aren’t immune to bad patterns—they’ve just had more time to accumulate them. Experience without examination is just old mistakes with confidence.

4. The Complexity Trap (Nina’s Lesson)

“Complex problems have emergent properties. Complicated problems have many parts. Don’t confuse them.”

Growing plants is complicated: water, light, nutrients, temperature. It’s not complex—the interactions are predictable. Nina’s neural network treated it as complex, adding emergence where none existed. The plants died while the AI was still “optimizing.”

5. The Tool Amplification Law (Kay’s Recovery)

“Tools amplify competence and incompetence equally. If you’re shit without AI, you’re just faster shit with it.”

Kay in his exoskeleton could lift 200kg but couldn’t feel a critical crack in the support beam. The suit amplified his strength but hid his weakness. When the power failed, he couldn’t lift 20kg. The tool didn’t enhance him—it replaced him.

6. The Maya Truth

“Dead worlds don’t negotiate. Mars doesn’t care about your business model.”

Maya spent two years selling productivity workflows on Earth. On Mars, productivity means “did everyone survive today?” The red planet doesn’t subscribe to your newsletter, doesn’t care about your personal brand, and will kill you mid-pitch.

7. The Chen Warning

“Physical reality doesn’t care about your AI’s opinion.”

When Chen (different Chen, the engineer) died because his predictive maintenance AI said the filter was clean, the clogged filter didn’t argue. It just stopped passing oxygen. Reality has veto power over every model, every prediction, every optimization.

8. The Habitat 49 Memorial

“Every translation is potential death. Every abstraction is a bet against clarity.”

Fifteen people died because seven AIs each made one small “improvement” to an emergency message. Not one AI failed—they all succeeded at their design goals. The catastrophe was in the chain, not the links.

9. The Discomfort Principle

“Discomfort is data. Comfort is death.”

When something feels wrong, ugly, or harsh, that’s information. When everything feels smooth and pleasant, you’re not getting real feedback. MadBomber’s philosophy AI made everything comfortable. Comfort made him ignore a meteorite warning.

10. The Experience Paradox

“Your years of experience mean nothing if they taught you to avoid reality.”

Twenty years optimizing for cloud deployments doesn’t help when there’s no cloud. Thirty years of framework hopping doesn’t matter when you need raw system calls. Experience is only valuable if it translates to your current reality.

11. The Message Integrity Rule

“The message that saves your life will probably hurt your feelings. Get over it.”

Emergency communications bypass all comfort filters. If someone screams “fuck,” you hear “fuck,” not “consider alternative perspectives.” Your emotional comfort is not a design requirement for survival systems.

12. The 3 AM Test

“The best code is code you can fix at 3 AM, half-dead, with no AI, no docs, and no hope.”

If you can’t understand it exhausted, you can’t fix it in crisis. Every clever abstraction, every “elegant” solution, every dependency you add is a bet that you’ll be well-rested and fully resourced when it breaks. On Mars, you’re always tired and nothing ever works.

13. The Mars Review

“Mars is the ultimate code review. It runs in production, with no rollbacks, and logs deaths instead of errors.”

You can’t rollback a hull breach. You can’t hotfix suffocation. You can’t iterate on death. Every line of code is production code. Every bug is potentially fatal. Every optimization that fails kills actual humans.

The Implementation Protocols

Emergency Communications

• NO AI PROCESSING on emergency channels
• Raw human-to-human transmission only
• Profanity is not filtered
• Comfort is not a consideration
• If the message makes you uncomfortable, it’s working

Code Standards

• Maximum 100 lines per file where possible
• No dependency chains deeper than 3 levels
• Every external dependency must have a manual fallback
• Comments explain WHY, not WHAT
• If bash can do it, bash does it

AI Usage Guidelines

• AI is a tool, not a crutch
• Never let AI touch emergency systems
• All AI outputs must be human-verifiable
• AI cannot make decisions, only suggestions
• When in doubt, turn it off

Testing Requirements

• Test at 10% power
• Test with half the RAM
• Test with corrupted data
• Test with no network
• Test while exhausted
• If it doesn’t work degraded, it doesn’t work

The Daily Question

Every morning, ask yourself: “If all my tools failed right now, could I keep people alive?”

If the answer is no, you’re not an engineer. You’re a passenger.

The Living Document

These principles are written in blood, paid for in lives, and maintained through discipline. They will grow as we learn new ways to die. They will never shrink because something becomes “outdated” or “uncool.”

Every optimization that removes human judgment, every abstraction that hides physical truth, every comfort layer that softens hard realities—these are not features. They are bugs. And on Mars, bugs don’t get tickets. They get funerals.

Remember:

• Habitat 49: Died from comfortable lies
• Nina: Almost starved the colony with optimization
• MadBomber: Almost died from philosophical translation
• Kay: Lost his strength to mechanical enhancement
• Lev: Learned that tools without purpose are toys
• Maya: Discovered that only breathing matters
• Chen (duty officer): Saved lives with ugly truth
• Chen (engineer): Died trusting predictive maintenance

The Final Law

When Earth sends you a new framework, a revolutionary paradigm, an AI that will “change everything,” remember:

Mars doesn’t care about your revolution. Mars only cares if you can breathe.

Carved into metal. Written in loss. Maintained in defiance.

The Mars Engineering Principles
Sol 847
Population: 185 (was 200)