I had figured traveling took some time, I was treating it more like the Firefly or Alien setting where traveling is much faster than current space travel but definitely not instantaneous. I was also going off the notion that some characters ended up on this crew purely due to circumstance - such as being closest or on their way to/passing Mars already. Thus Jay's last question ... ::)<br/><br/>The only thing that really surprises me is that Mars has always been one of the focal points in most sci-fis for terraforming, so I'd thought that Mars of all places would be more populated like modern Earth by now. But that's just my thoughts, not any  sort of disagreement or anything xD