For All Mankind

Commander Anna Wilson gripped the United Nations flag in her hands and closed her eyes as she unfurled it. It was the Ares 1 mission's final day on Mars, and according to tradition they had to plant the flag before they left. The camera Ari held was now rolling, and despite the isolation lending her the confidence to do this, she was still a bit nervous. The light-lag delay of mission control’s inevitable reaction wasn’t helping the anxiety bubbling under her conscious mind. What would they think? What would the world think?
She thought back to training, years ago, when the mission was still a young idea. She had confessed to her crew, in private, her thoughts about the inevitable flag-planting ceremony. To her surprise -and delight- they were in agreement: planting a flag would send the wrong message. It was an archaic practice too laden with negative symbolism, no matter the intentions. So for the next several months, in moments of free time away from the watchful eyes of NASA, they'd planned an alternative. And now, seven light-minutes away from Earth with no one to stop them, they could enact it.
Anna inhaled deeply, faced the camera with the flag, and spoke: "We do not claim this world." She began rolling the flag back up to stow in her pack. "We will not plant here the flag of any nation or even all nations, because this mission -our presence here today- is much greater than the concept of nations. We came here, to another world, in peace for all mankind. So we cannot plant a flag. It represents arrogance and dominance." The clock was ticking now. The video stream was hurrying back to Earth, but the whole ceremony would be over before the reply arrived. We’re on our own script now, she thought. Better not mess it up.
As they’d agreed, Oye produced a small aerosol can from his pack -spray paint, specially engineered by a friend to resist the environmental conditions of Mars. Their mark here would endure everything short of a direct meteor strike for millennia. He began to walk toward the rock outcropping nearby, with Ayami and Ari falling in behind him.
Anna brought up the rear, and continued to speak as Ari swiveled the camera back over his shoulder. "Instead, we leave behind only our footprints, which mark our journey…" She paused, and placed a hand on the ancient rock face, making sure Ari was pointing the camera at it. "…and our handprints, showing that we do not seek to claim this world –only to know it."
Oye gently shook the can and blew the dust from the rock with an airbrush, normally used for geology sampling. Anna blinked a little longer than normal. Here we go.
He aimed the nozzle at her hand and pressed down. The paint sprayed out into the thin air around her suit glove, staining the glove and surrounding rock a deep, cobalt blue. The mission director and tech teams would be pissed, but the crew had taken precautions: covering the tools, wrist camera, and flashlight with tape. When Oye finished moments later, Anna lifted her hand and gazed at the stenciled outline on the three-billion-year-old alien sand stone.
As the rest of the crew created their hand stencils, Anna continued. "Maybe in a thousand years, Mars will have its own flag; its own nations. But the marks we leave here today prove to the future that we came not as envoys of nations, but as people, baring our raw humanity for all to see just like our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. We are here today not only as representatives of our fellow humans, but on behalf of our oldest ancestors, who did not know of nations; they only knew how to be human. These markings are for them as much as they are for us."
She took a step back as Ari passed her the camera, and aimed it at the four painted hands on the Martian rock. She zoomed in a little to emphasize her closing statement. "Across all of time and space, we are one people, forever."