The two camps will split: one full of the rigorous machinations of people who make office buildings and zoning laws and instruction manuals for watches, the other a commune with aphid-infested tomatoes, scattered art supplies, and continual drum circles. Both will have merit but will also lack something, like Cheetos without flavoring or a dog without hair.
War will break out. A painter named Augustus will comment on an engineer’s hair, saying he could do a better job with a blowtorch and a hedge trimmer. Lucas, the engineer, will respond that Augustus and his paintings are full of crap and that half of his eccentricities are for show, like wearing a trash bag instead of pants and eating macaroni and cheese without the cheese.
“It’s just noodles if you eat it without the cheese,” Lucas will say. “Why don’t you buy the macaroni separate and save money?”
“Because it tastes different,” Augustus responds, hitching up his ultra-strong Hefty pants and swishing away.
With such things as this, wars begin. Society will end—a paintbrush in the eye here, a bomb there. Really, all the aliens needed to do was pick off the stragglers, who eventually patched over their differences and started a city called New New York.
New New York was a nice place to be, as long as it lasted, a nice cross-section of humanity all trying to use the one cab on Mars to get where they needed to be. But in the end, it was probably better it was destroyed too.