Mars is frigid, rusty and haunted—We can't stop looking at it

[jserraglio]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/scie ... -life.html

[jbuck919]

What I don't understand is why I never saw the movie Invaders from Mars on the Late Show from New York, when I think I saw every possible B SF movie ever made as a boy. Enough of them scared me so s**tless that I couldn't go to sleep for days unless I had a radio playing soothing songs like "The Green Berets."

The theory alluded to in the article is a variation of Fred Hoyle's interesting but entirely speculative notion of panspermia, i.e., life did not actually originate on Earth. It is useless, for it begs the question of how the first self-replicating molecules developed anywhere at all. That is one of the two great remaining mysteries of life science, the other being how things eventually and after billions of years coalesced into what we are pleased to call intelligence capable of behavioral modernity.

[jserraglio]

That 'Mars mystique' is what's probably gonna send human beings there someday, maybe even this century. Science will just have to learn to coexist with dreamy laymen. Before people walk on Mars, I suspect the Webb telescope will have examined exoplanetary atmospheres for conditions conducive to life.

[jbuck919]

That 'Mars mystique' is what's probably gonna send human beings there someday, maybe even this century. Science will just have to learn to coexist with dreamy laymen. Before people walk on Mars, I suspect the Webb telescope will have examined exoplanetary atmospheres for conditions conducive to life.

Yes, well, dream on. Ain't never gonna happen. I do however agree with your last sentence.

[jserraglio]

Get over it. It's inevitable. Not-Gonna-Happen in the wake of 6 lunar expeditions has evolved into Did-Not-Happen.

https://www.businessinsider.com/when-wi ... 30s-2018-2

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXyz6dffFU

[jbuck919]

Get over it. It's inevitable. Not-Gonna-Happen in the wake of 6 lunar expeditions has evolved into Did-Not-Happen

I cannot believe that a man as bright as yourself does not understand how many orders of magnitude it is harder to send people to Mars (and get them back safely) than to the moon. We haven't the slightest idea how to pull it off, and any talk of it is smoke and mirrors.

[jserraglio]

I cannot believe that a man as bright as yourself does not understand how many orders of magnitude it is harder to send people to Mars (and get them back safely) than to the moon. We haven't the slightest idea how to pull it off, and any talk of it is smoke and mirrors.

Back-handed compliments to one expressing an opposing opinion are, of course, a nifty rhetorical gambit.

We choose to go to Mars in this century not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Our fate cries out. People may well walk on Mars in our lifetimes. If it be not then, yet it will come.

[jbuck919]

I cannot believe that a man as bright as yourself does not understand how many orders of magnitude it is harder to send people to Mars (and get them back safely) than to the moon. We haven't the slightest idea how to pull it off, and any talk of it is smoke and mirrors.

Back-handed compliments to one expressing an opposing opinion are, of course, a nifty rhetorical gambit.

We choose to go to Mars in this century not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Our fate cries out. People may well walk on Mars in our lifetimes. If it be not then, yet it will come.

You are paraphrasing from Hamlet, and it refers to death, not airy-fairy notions about manned missions to other planets.

[jserraglio]

. . . death, not airy-fairy notions about manned missions to other planets.

O my Americus! my new-found-land.