Martians are of Terrestrial ancestry: their earliest ancestors were native to Earth, but they developed an advanced civilization and eventually left Earth for Mars, all before our own species had advanced past the Stone Age. They genetically engineered themselves to survive in the Arean oceans. At that time, Mars did have dry land, but its powerful seasonal monsoons made the surface virtually uninhabitable.

Mars's ocean were much shallower than those of Earth even at their greatest depth, with an average of just 115 feet. They were also highly saline, but the salt in question was not sodium chloride, which is responsible for the salinity of Earth's oceans. Instead it was magnesium sulfate—a compound made of magnesium and sulfuric acid. While the radioactive elements in Mars's core did play a role in forming its electromagnetic field, like on Earth, part of that electromagnetic field was also generated by ocean circulation because of the high concentrations of magnesium sulfate.

This system eventually failed because the Martians, in attempting to create a habitable biosphere, introduced corals and marine algae from Earth such as Corallina and gorgonians. These organisms depleted the ocean's magnesium concentration as a part of their calcification process. Gradually at first, Mars's oceans were demineralized, and almost too gradually for the Martians to notice, the planet's electromagnetic field began to weaken as a result.

The weakening of the electromagnetic field enabled ultraviolet rays from the sun to strip the evaporated water from the planet's atmosphere. Mars's formerly violent monsoons grew less and less intense, a phenomenon which the Martians initially celebrated, until it became clear that the planet's oceans were also shrinking. And as the oceans dwindled in size and currents were disrupted, so their ability to generate an electromagnetic field deteriorated even more, forming a feedback loop which enabled water to be stripped away at faster and faster rates.

Eventually, the Martians were forced to genetically modify themselves yet again, this time for survival on an increasingly arid terrestrial world. The shift to dry land took place before the oceans vanished, as the concentrations of magnesium sulfate and other minerals left behind in the remaining water increased to inhospitable levels.

The planet's weakening electromagnetic field left the surface vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. It was rapidly becoming too arid to be hospitable, surface temperatures were plummeting due to the loss of greenhouse gases, and the atmosphere's oxygen levels were also becoming depleted, rendering the air unbreathable. Before long the Martians gave up on surface life altogether and moved their civilization underground, where they remain to this day.

Terrestrial Contact

Martians first became aware of humans in the early 20th century, and began to anticipate possible contact with humans or human-directed drones after mankind successfully reached the moon. Some aspects of our technological development have baffled them, however, such as our use of radio waves to encode audible speech sounds instead of simply developing telepathy as they did.

Martians no longer possess the capacity for audible speech, either in an anatomic or neurological sense; they have fully adapted to telepathic communication and the association between telepathic "sounds" and the means by which those sounds would be produced anatomically has long since been forgotten. Instead, they have developed technology which may receive a telepathic signal and translate it into audible speech. Outwardly, it is not all that apparent that they aren't actually speaking, although some humans have described their vocal tone as sounding slightly odd.

Origins

Martians share much in common with the humans of today, but they are not descended from Homo sapiens or any other member of our genus. Their Terrestrial ancestors originated in or near the Mediterranean and spread throughout the Old World prior to its colonization by humans. The Trachilos trackmaker whose trace fossils were discovered in Crete was most likely either a Martian ancestor or a close relative.

These ancestors possessed some apelike features which are absent from humans, and most of these were carried over to the Martians themselves. Physically speaking, australopithecines share more in common with humans than Martians do.

Distinctive features of the ancestral proto-Martians include:

• Rudimentary laryngeal air sacs—structures which are present in virtually all apes, but are absent in australopithecines and humans.
• Conversely, Martians lacked the hyoid bulla that is usually found in apes that have laryngeal air sacs.
• Thicker hair distributed evenly across the body, rather than concentrated in distinct patches as it is in humans.
• Although they could cry, they did not produce tears—this appears to be a uniquely human trait.
• A wider gap between the first and second toes, although their toes were not prehensile. The shape of the foot was only weakly arched, the metatarsals longer, although the toes were similar in length to those of humans.
• A typically matriarchal social structure, less pronounced sexual dimorphism, and less male-to-male competition and aggression.
• An inter-birth interval of 5+ years, which is like chimpanzees but unlike humans, in which the interval averages roughly 3 years.
• Perhaps because of their longer inter-birth interval, an increased lifespan, ~175-200 years.

Aquatic Phase

The Martians owe their most unusual features to deliberate genetic modifications inat enabled them to colonize Mars at a time when it was still largely covered with ocean. These features include:

• Their entire body profile was laterally compressed in order to make them more streamlined, resulting in the Martians having very narrow faces and bodies. In order to maintain their binocular vision, the forehead and cheekbones were shifted forward, resulting in a Moai-like appearance. However, these facial features were already more prominent than they are in humans.
• Their ability to distinguish the color red was sacrificed (Protanopia) in exchange for improved visibility in low light settings: Martians' night vision is twice as good as that of humans. However, they still lack a tapetum lucidum, as it would have made their vision blurry, rendering them incurably nearsighted; so their eyes are not reflective like an animal's.
• They also lost their tear ducts, since maintaining the moisture of their eyes was no longer necessary.
• Their lungs were converted into gills. Because they were warm-blooded and big-brained, Martians required more oxygen than fish-like gills could provide—they simply would not have had enough surface area. Instead Martians' gills take up the same space in the chest cavity that their lungs once did. Water entered through openings in the collar region (repurposed laryngeal air sacs) and exited through openings located beneath the ribs.
• Another change that improved the efficiency of their gills was a change in their metabolism. Martians eat less frequently, grow and age more slowly, have a decreased heart rate, and maintain a stable temperature only in and around their vital organs, while their extremities tend to more closely match the temperature of their environment.
• Because their noses did not connect to the gills they received no through-flow and lost their functionality, but did not disappear entirely because the Martians still preferred them for aesthetic reasons. Instead they simply became narrower and smaller, the nostrils dead-ending after about an inch.
• Their sense of taste was heightened to make up for their lack of smell, enabling them to taste odors in the water.
• They gave up their external ears in favor of sound-conducting tissues in the lower jaw, similar to the anatomy of whales.
• Their molars became sharper to help them more efficiently chew rubbery seaweed.
• Their vocal cords became unusable without lungs to provide breath, and telepathic signals could only travel very short distances underwater, so communication was carried out via a “click chamber” in the throat, where the trachea was formerly located. Their structure and function are similar to the tymbals of cicadas.
• Their fingers and toes became longer, thinner, and webbed—fully in the case of the feet, partially in the case of the hands so that they still retained some manual dexterity.
• The pads on the hands and feet became deeply ridged in order to improve their grip.
• They lost their hair in favor of streamlining. This was especially necessary since magnesium sulfate naturally causes hair to become curlier.
• Their sweat glands were repurposed to produce an oily substance that served as a waterproof barrier, preventing their skin from absorbing excess water.
• The density of their bones and amount of muscle tissue were increased in order to reduce buoyancy and improve their resistance to pressure at greater depths. This was especially important since the amount of minerals in Mars's oceans made it denser, and consequently made the Martians more buoyant, similar to what is seen in the Dead Sea on Earth. However, magnesium sulfate is heavier than sodium chloride, so the effect was even greater, which forced the Martians to double their weight.
• Martians no longer relied on facial expressions to the same degree as humans, which does not appear to have been an intentional change, but a natural development after the shift in communication methods. There is an intrinsic connection between speech and facial expressions in humans: the focus on facial features first appears in very young children, who study the faces of the adults around them in order to learn to pronounce speech correctly. This tendency also existed in the Martians' ancestors. However, the shift to a different form of communication removed the need for small children to study faces in order to replicate sounds correctly. The de-emphasis on facial expressions as a secondary form of communication occurred over the course of many generations.
• Multiple modifications were needed to prevent magnesium overdose, including the cultivation of symbiotic algae in their kidneys, which bound magnesium into harmless cholorphyll molecules (hence Martian urine is normally green) and appendix-like structures extending from the kidneys which served as refugium for these algae.

Terrestrial Phase

As Mars's oceans began to evaporate, the Martians were forced to shift their population onto dry land and adapt their biology toward living in an arid climate. Thus the next phase of their development included adaptiations not only for dry land, but for an arid desert-like environment in particular:

• Because they no longer had tear ducts, they developed translucent spectacles to protect the surface of the eye from dessication. These spectacles are formed from the fused skin of the eyelids, and are capable of altering their transparency—changing from clear to black and back—in order to modulate the amount of light they receive.
• Their gill filaments were reduced to half their original size to account for the high oxygen content of Mars's atmosphere—five times the amount that was available underwater. It was also necessary in order to improve the filaments' strength and prevent them from collapsing, which is what causes fish to die if removed from the water.
• The intake slits for their gills were sealed, forming dead-end lungs which reverted them back to tidal breathing like their Terrestrial ancestors. This enabled them to control the amount of oxygen they received more precisely.
• They re-developed internal ears, though these ears were still located in the lower jaw where they were already sensitive to vibrations. Because they were based on the ears of marine organisms such as sea turtles, this determined the frequencies which Martians are sensitive to: they hear in the range of 50-1000 Hz, whereas humans can hear from 20 all the way to 20,000 Hz. This means that Martians can hear the full range used by human speech (85-300 Hz) but higher pitched sounds such as an infant crying (1000-5000 Hz) are almost entirely inaudible to them.
• The click-speech they had relied on underwater was no longer audible enough to be efficient for speech, so they shifted to telepathy as their primary method for communication.
• The webbing on hands and feet was reduced to the point of being completely absent from between the toes, although it was often still present between the fingers to some extent.
• Their bodily tissues were infused with melanin in order to protect them from ultraviolet radiation. The color of the melanin combined with the reddish-brown color of their skin produced a subtly purplish tinge. This also resulted in the sclera of the eye turning dark. The iris color, which is structural, remained unchanged—a rich chestnut brown, as their Terrestrial ancestors never enjoyed the range of eye colors seen in humans today.
• The green color of their skin was an attempt to return their skin tone to its original appearance using structural color to counteract the pigmentation. The fact that they look green, rather than reddish or brown, is a complete accident: because the Martians were still red-green colorblind they could not tell the difference! The color from the underlying pgimentation combined with the structural green gave them a subtly metallic greenish tone.

Telepathy

On land, telepathic communication is intelligible only up to a distance of about 10-15 feet, and becomes inaudible at a distance of about 30-50 feet. In the water, the distance is greatly reduced, and communication is only possible when both individuals are within about three feet of one another.

Telepathy does not convey images or words, but consists of a series of modulated bursts that form something akin to a whistle language. To someone who understands the Martian spoken language, the telepathic equivalent will not be difficult to understand.

Martians owe their telepathy to a symbiotic bacterium that grows inside the cranial cavity, which uses radio signals to communicate between colonies. The Martians have developed a membrane in the skull which acts as an antenna in order to receive these signals, and specialized neural passages which transmit signals between the bacteria and the host's brain.

Given their predisposition toward genetic modifications after their arrival on Mars, it is likely that this bacterium and its relationship with the Martians were developed artificially.

Naturally, this form of communication is only possible when all participating individuals have established colonies of this bacterium. It is traditionally introduced to children around the time they begin speaking their first words, and being able to communicate and understand others is something that must be developed over time. Initial infection is usually followed by fever-like symptoms that may last 2-4 weeks; Martians rarely experience symptoms severe enough to be dangerous, but the same would not necessarily be true of humans.

Culture

Coming soon

Phonetic inventory

Prior to human contact, Martians had been purely telepathic for so long that the correspondences between telepathic signals and the audible phonemes they once represented had been completely forgotten; as a result, the phonetic inventory of the Martian languages in ancient times is unknown.

The first contact between Martians and humans was with American astronauts, and as a result, when they attempted to find correspondences between the Martian language and audible speech, they mapped their telepathic repertoire onto the phonetic range observable in American English. This is why the two languages appear to share very similar phonetic inventories, and it is likely that in its original form, spoken Martian sounded much different.

Consonants include b, tʃ (ch), d, dʒ (j), h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, ʃ (sh), t, θ (th), v, w, y and z.

Vowels include ɑ, e, ɛ, i, o, u, and ɜ.

Early versions made a distinction between r and ɾ, although the latter has shifted from ɾ → r; because the two are still considered distinct in telepathic communication, the older spellings still remain in Martian texts.

Writing system

Martian writing has a much longer history than human writing systems. The earliest form, called Lithic, consisted of petroglyphs and cave paintings which were gradually transformed into a rudimentary syllabary; the Martians' Terrestrial ancestors developed a writing system before they ever developed metalworking. A small handful of these original glyphs have survived in remote regions on Earth but have been misidentified as more recent human work.

Most Lithic glyphs are lost as only a handful were developed into the hieratic-like form known as Papyric. No traces of it have survived on Earth because it was written on easily decayed organic materials.

The next phase, Linic, was a more Latin-like form consisting of thin lines and curves, suitable for use on a variety of surfaces.

The fourth phase, Areolic "A", was derived from the look of digital readouts. There is a gap in time between Linic and Areolic "A" where the appearance of figures underwent sometimes drastic changes, but no are attested in surviving records.

The final phase in Martian writing was Areolic "B", which was developed in an attempt to recreate a hand-written form based on Areolic "A".

Symbol	Ortho/IPA
Lithic   Papyric   Linic   Areolic "A"   Areolic "B"
	h
	ɾ
	s
	e, ɛ
	p
	d
	θ (th)
	u
	dʒ (j)
	m
	b, v
	tʃ (ch)
	l
	k
	t
	i, y
	z
	o
	n
	w
	r
	ɑ, ɜ

Sentence structure

Word order indicates tense, specifically the position of the object within the sentence. The subject always precedes the verb, so the possible word orders are OVS (imperfective), VOS (perfective) and VSO (non-present).

Subordinate clauses cannot be linked on the same noun, and there are no spatial prepositions or adverbs. Instead of saying "I liked the statue at Amarna" one would use an objective noun: "I liked the statue. The same one is at Amarna."

It is impossible for a sentence to have only one argument—it always has a subject and object. So you cannot say something like "he laughed" or "she slept". The sentence must either be more specific ("she slept [on] the bed") or reflexive if there is no possible object ("he laughed [to] himself").

There are no articles.

Nouns

Nouns always have at least two syllables with a consonant or consonant cluster in the middle. If a noun is a single syllable then it will be adapted to the correct form via reduplication. A noun is pluralized through a disfix, by removing the (first) middle consonant.

Multiple existing nouns may be combined by infixing the first half of the descriptor (from beginning to disfix location) before the base noun's own disfix location.

There is no genitive indicator: the Martian language does not indicate possession in any way.

Personal pronouns do not exist as such, the person or object is explicitly indicated or an objective noun is used instead. Objective nouns function like pronouns and are only used as objects, they never take the role of subject in a sentence. They are similar to determiners or indefinite pronouns.

Adjectives are technically nouns instead, and precede the noun they augment if there is one. So instead of "the red ball" you get something like "the red-thing ball", and any agreements are made with the adjective noun rather than the noun it refers to. Since they are technically nouns in their own right they can be used on their own without another noun, which is common. They cannot be applied to objective nouns or vice-versa.

Verbs

Verbs do not have disfixes but each one has an "imaginary" disfix location and new verbs may be coined in the same way as nouns. Verbs are not required to be multiple syllables in length and will only be reduplicated when forming a derivative of a single-syllable verb.

Particles

If a particle is of a type that is applied to a specific word rather than an entire phrase, its first vowel agrees with the leading vowel of the word it applies to. Unlike nouns and verbs, particles cannot be vowel-initial, with the exception of the dative case particle, which only consists of a vowel.

The affirmative particle appears at the beginning of a sentence and indicates if the statement is true, false, incomplete (only currently or partially true, may mean “either”), or uncertain (truthfulness is unknown; may or may not indicate that the sentence is a question); the language explicitly states when a statement is true, whereas in English truthfulness is the default.

Noun case particles follow their nouns.

Root	Meaning	Etymology
nVna ('n_-nɜ)	marks an agentive noun ("by X") if one exists, otherwise it marks the sentence subject.
mVpa ('m-pɜ)	marks the sentence subject when there is an agentive noun.
V (_)	marks a dative noun ("to/for X") if one exists, otherwise it marks the sentence object.
nVdzuza ('n_-dzɜ-zɜ)	marks an instrumental noun ("through/using X") or an ablative noun ("about X").
mVnuza ('m_-nɜ-zɜ)	marks the sentence object when there is a dative or agentive noun.

There is a finality particle that exists solely to mark that a sentence or sentence group is completed. Often it is used to mark when the speaker is done talking or expects a reply. It may be duplicated in order to emphasize that expectation, implying that the speaker is asking a question.

Root	Meaning	Etymology
rra (ɾɜ)	over
rra rra (ɾɜ ɾɜ)	..? (forms a question)

There is a single basic conjunction similar to "and" which is only used when mentioning lists of things (and precedes all items in the list, including the first).

There is no distinction between "and" and "or" because the language does not support conjunctions such as "or" and "but" that would toggle truthfulness without explicitly providing a true/false value.

Root	Meaning	Etymology
ca (cɜ)	and

There is a particle equivalent to "if" which may appear after the affirmative particle and indicates that it forms the condition of a conditional phrase.

Root	Meaning	Etymology
sa (sɜ)	if

Prior to the arrival of the proto-Martians, Mars was already inhabited by an array of native lifeforms.

		Areobiota
		 |-Eovermis
		 |
		 '-Photoskopia
		    |-Oculovermis
		    |
		    '-Osmeorhopala
		       |-Pterovermis
		       |
		       |-Ciliapodiformes
		       |  |-Spinivermidae
		       |  |  '-Spinivermis
		       |  |
		       |  '-Ciliapodidae
		       |     '-Ciliapodus
		       |
		       '-Acanthophora
		          |-Acanthopteridae
		          |  '-Yuanacanthus
		          |
		          '-Areopisces
		             |-Ichthyocarididae
		             |  '-Ichthyocaris
		             |
		             '-Fronduloptera
		                |-Agnathomorpha
		                |  '-Strondylocephalus
		                |
		                |-Tactilonares
		                |  |-Longinaridae
		                |  |  '-Longinaris
		                |  |
		                |  '-Complexinaria
		                |     |-Polynaridae
		                |     |  '-Polynaris
		                |     |
		                |     |-Cornunaridae
		                |     |  |-Cornunaris
		                |     |  '-Pectinaris
		                |     |
		                |     '-Anomalonaridae
		                |        '-Anomalonaris
		                |
		                '-Gnathophora
		                   |