Champagne for Martians

The Martian anthropologist is already awake at 7am on New Year’s Day: notebook in tentacle, observing. The human host family and sleepover friends are still snoozing. 

He pads quietly through the debris of the night before. On the dining table: three empty bottles, their corks scattered like spent ammunition. Fluted glasses smeared with the ghosts of lipstick and foam. In the refrigerator: two half-full bottles standing at attention, waiting to accompany smoked salmon and black coffee when the humans finally emerge, squinting and repentant.

The Martian notes the scene with scholarly detachment. These creatures celebrate the arbitrary turnover of a calendar page by staging controlled explosions indoors. At midnight, they removed wire cages, twisted corks until – pop! – a small projectile launched toward the ceiling, followed by foam and laughter. 

Simultaneously, outside, they detonated coloured chemicals in the sky. Then, the kissing – more small explosions, this time involving lips. The whole species seemed determined to mark the boundary between years with as many tiny detonations as possible.

But it’s the champagne that truly puzzles the visitor. 

Here is a beverage that requires violence to release its joy, imprisonment to preserve its spirit. The liquid contains five litres of dissolved carbon dioxide compressed into 75 centilitres, held under six atmospheres of pressure – three times what’s in a car tyre, 10 times the pressure difference between sea level and Everest’s summit. One might call this beverage a small glass bomb that humans drink for pleasure.

The Martian flips back through history. This ritual is recent. For most of human existence, bubbles in wine were considered a fault. 

The ancient Greeks diluted their wine heavily – undiluted was barbaric, linked to madness. The Romans occasionally produced sparkling versions but Pliny the Elder classified such vina titillantia (tickling wine) as unfit for civilised tables.

Medieval monks in cooler regions called it “the Devil’s wine”, because bottles exploded in cellars, shattering neighbours in chain reactions. Dom Pérignon spent years trying to eliminate the bubbles, not invent them. 

Elsewhere, sensual Persians sang of still wines, not fizzy, from Shiraz. Ancient Chinese perfected fermented rice drinks for ritual and medicine, never chasing sparkle.

Only in the 17th and 18th centuries did taste and technology align. Humans decided the defect was the feature.

The bottle itself is a monument to trial and error. Engineers thickened the glass, sloped the shoulders, and – crucially – pushed up the base into that deep dent, the punt. Like an arched bridge or the Hoover Dam, it distributes force evenly, turning potential catastrophe into elegant restraint.

The cork starts cylindrical, oversized, compressed into the neck. Inside, pressure squeezes the lower half; the top expands freely into the familiar mushroom. Early seals were wax and hemp – disastrous. String followed. Finally, in 1844, came Adolphe Jacquesson’s patented wire cage, the muselet, to muzzle the cork until the chosen moment.

Intentional sparkling wine, bubbles as virtue rather than vice, is barely three centuries old. The Martian anthropologist notes this with interest: humans have been anatomically modern for 300,000 years, but champagne has existed for only 0.1% of that time. It is a blip, yet it dominates their most significant celebrations.

Champagne requires precise planetary conditions- Ranier Fsadni

Mindful of peer review, our Martian considers symbolism. The bubble itself is a small sermon: it rises toward heaven, catches the light, and vanishes, having done its beautiful duty.

He pauses. The sermon only works on Earth. Champagne requires precise planetary conditions: atmospheric pressure around 100 kilopascals, gravity to keep liquid in glasses, temperatures allowing stable water. Remove one variable and the pleasure collapses.

What if the Martian anthropologist wasn’t observing humans on earth, but settler colonists who had emigrated to Mars?

Here, at 600 pascals pressure, popping a bottle outdoors would trigger thermodynamic violence: the liquid boils explosively, freezes simultaneously, creating a brief fountain of golden ice crystals sublimating into vapour. No gentle fizz, just chaos.

To drink champagne on Mars, humans must recreate Earth inside domes: full pressure, controlled temperature, recycled air. The bottle will cost a fortune in transport and infrastructure, and taste of recycled water and stubbornness. But, the Martian and team of research assistants note, the immigrants drink it anyway.

Another puzzle: if humans migrated to Mars it’s because Earth became, through extraordinary human efforts, uninhabitable. Yet they brought the champagne. 

Humans brought the fireworks, though they burn poorly in thin atmosphere. And the countdown, the cork-popping, the embracing, the whole apparatus of celebration imported across 40 million kilometres. They toast to the new year while standing in pressurised domes, the bubbles rising slower in one-third gravity – more graceful, lasting longer.

They watch Earth rise over rust-coloured hills – toasting to the planet they destroyed, which they now miss with an intensity bordering on comedy. And they toast the new planet they are terraforming. 

The Martian observer notes the tension: these immigrants ruined one planet’s habitability, then spent vast resources recreating its least necessary luxury on another.

Mars once had water, rivers, perhaps natural bubbles in ancient puddles. No one was there to appreciate them. Humans arrived billions of years later and decided to bring the bubbles back – at any cost.

Because wherever humans go, the explosions come with them. It is a species incapable of looking at a near-vacuum without thinking: needs more fizz.

The Martian sees he has enough for the coming interdisciplinary seminar, and closes his notebook.