Christine pointed me to the term "the subaltern" as used in postcolonial theory

Before their actual explorations of The Orient, Europeans had invented imaginary geographies of the Orient; predefined images of the savage peoples and exotic places that lay beyond the horizon of the Western world.... such cultural discourses about the Oriental Other were perpetuated through the mass communications media of the time, and created an Us-and-Them binary social relation with which the Europeans defined themselves by defining the differences between the Orient and the Occident. As a foundation of colonialism, the Us-and-Them binary social relation misrepresented the Orient as backward and irrational lands, and, therefore, in need of the European civilizing mission, to help them become modern, in the Western sense; hence, the Eurocentric discourse of Orientalism excludes the voices of the subaltern natives, the Orientals, themselves.

Poor Mars, in need of an Terrene mission to bring verdant life and restoration, to revive the dead planet. Poor poor thing.