I’m sharing this photo because I wrote a story set in that volcano, “Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons,” which you can read at Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. I wrote the story because a meme informed me that Mars is the only known planet inhabited solely by robots. Then I thought, what is the stupidest thing robots could do on Mars?
NASA’s caption for their photo:
“Arsia Mons, one of the Red Planet’s largest volcanoes, peeks through a blanket of water ice clouds in this image captured by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter on May 2, 2025. Odyssey used a camera called the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) to capture this view while studying the Martian atmosphere, which appears here as a greenish haze above the scene. A large crater known as a caldera, produced by massive volcanic explosions and collapse, is located at the summit. At 72 miles (120 kilometers) wide, the Arsia Mons summit caldera is larger than many volcanoes on Earth.”
Semiosis 