In 2034, the first person landed on Mars. While she didn’t go there physically, she still experienced the planet intimately. She explored an ancient river delta and built a base. She put up a flag (China’s) and conducted a detailed analysis of rock samples. She achieved all this by inhabiting a robot via a sophisticated brain-computer interface. Some people claimed the woman had – in a real sense – been to Mars.
Critics said she hadn’t, because her body was always in a lab in Beijing. Ah, but her mind was on Mars, replied her…