Fatima Reyes is a hydroponics supervisor at Pobeda Station who has not left Mars since 2067. In a May 2075 National Geographic feature, she provided the defining account of the time-lag isolation that defines Martian life: “My daughter is eleven now. I have never spoken to her in real time in her life. I have had four years of her letters.”
Her observation — that residents “learn to write letters again. Not messages. Letters” — captures the communicative reality of a settlement where conversation, in the sense Earth or even lunar residents mean the word, does not exist: at Mars’s average distance, a message takes between three and twenty-two minutes to arrive, one way.