5 Minutes Freewriting #3 - Departure

15 years after the first expedition on Mars, our people finally discovered what we've been looking for in the last decade - water.

But that was not all.

While water is vital to our survival, we need more than that to grow, to expand and to make sure that humanity will survive no matter what happens to the Earth in the near future. We need fertile soil, we need safety and we need to make sure that we can live for years without any catastrophe.

Luckily, we discovered something more. The planet Mars is not what it seems at first glance. Once you start analyzing the soil you will realize that there are big abnormalities in it, like empty sounds coming from nowhere, and huge empty spaces underneath the mountains. It seems like there's nothing at the center of the planet.

After a lot of research and a lot of satellites sent to analyze the planet, we finally came to a conclusion - Mars is not like our planet at all.

The orange soil we all know Mars has is more of a shield, a barrier. The fertile soil, the water and everything humans would need to survive on that planet is actually underground. The entire planet is made out of an underground system, with an orange "soil" shield at the surface, meant to protect against the radiation from the sun and maybe other things.

All that means the planet was probably inhabited by other species in the past, and either something happened to them, or they just left. But we don't have enough time to figure that out. We need to move fast if we want to inhabit the planet ourselves as soon as possible. We don't know how long the Earth is gonna last.

Together with several governments we invested into different spaceships, all containing supplies and enough spaces for several people, all specialists in different areas, that will travel with us to Mars to analyze the structural integrity of those tunnels, our chance of survival and our ability to expand.

The program is called "Departure", and it may just be our only change to survive as a species. As soon as the preparations are done, we're gonna head to Mars. We're hoping to find a new home there, but if the planet was indeed inhabited by others, then something happened to them. As much as we'd like a home, we're also prepared for an unpleasant encounter with whatever drove the last civilization away.