Hello and welcome to revolutions.

Episode 11.4, the election of 2244.

As with any revolution, historians argue about where to put our arbitrary and invisible temporal

brackets to define the period we call the Martian Revolution. Just last week, for example,

I said that the Martian centenary in 2209 was a good place to draw a line and say, this is when

the swirling forces that become the Martian Revolution start converging. But that was 40 years before the revolution, and I'm happy to admit that

contingencies, accidents, and different choices could have led Earth and Mars to very different

historical outcomes. In 2209, the Martian Revolution was not inevitable. So the question is, when do we start to feel like

those converging forces are coalescing into an unavoidable sequence of events? The death of

Vernon Bird in February 2244 is an awfully tempting place to draw that line.

Now last week I also mentioned the historian Hamish Soto. He's the one who said

that Martian independence was still contingent and avoidable heading into 2247. But I think

it's unconsciously revealing that while Soto staked out this provocative thesis in the Declaration

of Martian Independence, Crisis, and Contingency, when it came time to write his own general

history of the

period, Mars in Revolution, where does Chapter 1 begin? That's right, in 2244 with the death of Vernon

Byrd, because even Soto must admit that at a certain point, the array of contingency becomes

circumscribed by the actual historical actors in place at a certain moment.

We can always say hypothetically a person could have done this different or that different,

but could they have? Contingent choices don't come from nowhere. They are born of the psychology

and personality of the historical actors themselves, which are not necessarily as mutable as we

might suppose.

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