When Pigs Conquered Mars

I’ve arrived on yet another timeline parallel to my own, where humanity’s journey through the cosmos is marked more by pigs than curiosity, and yet…it somehow works. This version of Earth found itself utterly upended by what historians labeled "The Great Ungulatus Reinterpretation," which, in layman’s terms, means that *cows were never domesticated.* Yes. Cows—the unassuming grass-chewing, milk-giving, fart-emitting cornerstones of pastoral utopia—never made the leap from stubborn, horned wild beasts to placid, mooing milk factories.

Naturally, the absence of cows was not the only change, but it became the scaffolding upon which this timeline built its peculiar house of cards. No cheese. No butter. No leather. No hamburgers. No charming black-and-white Holsteins staring blankly into the sunset. None of it. Humanity had to recalibrate everything involving food and fashion, and the result, quite frankly, is both bizarre and deeply amusing.

It’s 2021 in this timeline, and right now, everyone is glued to their screens—not because NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars, but because it isn’t *Perseverance* at all. No, the heavy-lifting scientific marvel beaming images back to the masses is named "Squealie." Yes, that's correct. *Squealie the Space Pig.*

When cows proved uncooperative (and more importantly, too dangerous—they were apparently more about spearing hunters than providing sustenance), humans turned to pigs and sheep as their primary livestock, favored for their malleability and agreeable nature. The absence of large-scale dairy farming reshuffled human diets significantly, leading to an overwhelming dependence on pigs for virtually *everything*—protein, fat, leather substitutes, and, most amusingly, as beasts of burden in preindustrial societies.

Squealie is the natural byproduct of centuries of swine worship. In this timeline, pigs are elevated to absurd hero status, affectionately labeled "porcine pioneers" for their supposed intelligence, adaptability, and loyalty to mankind’s cause. Ichabod Swellington the Seventh (yes, that’s the name of their version of Neil Armstrong) famously exclaimed, “This one's for the boars!” when humanity finally set foot on the Moon in 1969. In schools, students dress up as pigs on their equivalent of Earth Day to celebrate their contributions to "The Great Farrow," a semi-mythical allegory about porcine-human cooperation.

But back to Squealie. I can’t help but admire *just* how much this timeline has leaned in. The Rover—sorry, the Mars Pig—is shaped unmistakably like a happy, chubby piglet. Its "eyes" twinkle through round lenses. Its wheels mimic tiny hooves. If you listened to the broadcast carefully—between ecstatic declarations about Martian dirt (the first samples likely stinking faintly of bacon grease, I imagine)—operational HQ played intermittent snippets of oinking as pump-up audio. Humanity worked *puns* into tragedy; their equivalent of Manhattan Project bomb test footage reportedly included the code phrase “pulling the pork.”

I will say, this pig-centric culture produces some of the cringiest idioms I've ever heard. “When pigs build rockets!” is an expression of hope around here instead of absurdity. “Curing the world with pork-fat dreams” is, bafflingly, a genuine motivational quote.

Of course, replacing cows with pigs came with its own consequences. This Earth abandoned lactose entirely, which means no pizza (a massive cultural absence). Fats instead went straight from pork to plate, resulting in a much earlier history of heart disease as a culinary norm, offset only by their slightly superior bread game (it's all rye, no butter, dunked aggressively in carrot soup). Unsurprisingly, fashion heavily features wool, leaving me feeling unnervingly itchy just watching historical broadcasts.

Culture aside, these people are more practical than poetic, perhaps because the cow-shaped void robbed them of pastoral fantasies. No “Home on the Range” songs here—only odes to shepherding hogs through soggy fields. The absence of bovine statues and artwork robbed Da Vinci of his 'Madonna of the Grazing Plains.' Goya reportedly painted sheep-filled horrors rather than bulls. Delightful.

Reflecting on how much this society has achieved despite its bovine blind spot, I have to ask: was humanity always doomed to be inextricably linked to our selected livestock? Is the success of civilization truly a matter of which barnyard animal we pin our hopes on? Strange to think that the presence or absence of a moo could define an entire species’ trajectory.