..."There's no word on what they've found quite yet, but researchers are willing to say that it's something big. Like, historical event big." ...

...either that or the rover stumbled across a crashed alien spaceship...

They just thought we wouldnt catch on.....

STOP looking for life on other planets and start taking care of the life on ours.

And our planet, itself.

Now, there's a novel thought... why don't WE mention that from time to time? Oh, wait... we do!

We can and should do both, it'll enable us to better understand the nature of life itself and perhaps help us to preserve what we have here on the Earth. It's the only Earth we have and even finding another "earth-like" planet still won't be another Earth. We evolved here, we're stuck with just this one planet that fits our needs and we fit into it's native environmental parameters like a million sided piece of jigsaw puzzle, there is no substitute.

Me too :)

Jodik I had the same thought.

Does this thread go in the countdown yet?

Thank about the motives to pursue resources on other planets. All they want is fuel and ways to dominate. Another planet is just another source of oil, gas, etc. The Middle East will have the Gulf, and we will have Mars.

I'd love to see how the big oil companies fund these adventures.

I can hardly wait to hear about the new discovery.

Agreed. But don't you think they could have found alternative sources of energy in that time? Right here on earth?

I'll agree. Seems as if they could have found something better to use all that money for. But hey! It put a lot of people to work.

We have the resources to do both, but political will has been lacking for alternative sustainable energy. How that might be in light of campaign contributions, and a president and vice-president from the oil industry - well, we can connect the dots.

Drill, baby, drill!

Which thought, Ohiomom? The one regarding theologians? Or the one regarding Earth and the sad shape it's in? Or... maybe both? :-)

Tesla was going in the right direction wanting to build giant coils to generate an unbroken cover of electricity to be free to all with the right receiving implements like fluorescent lights that just have to be in the vicinity. Fighting over what will be dead tech is anti-progressive when we should put more into research to free us of the burden of destroying to build in so many ways.

Some say he's buried around here, lots of gangster types used to come here due to the proximity to Chicago and the remote location. Dillinger's shoot out at Little Bohemia was here.

No Hoffa on Mars. I say candy bars.

Personally, I think we're going to learn too much about our own planet through Mars exploration and testing. The unfortunate part will be that nothing much will change here, and this will one day be a dead planet, too.

PN, you may recall a few years ago when swanz, maxter, and I danced around that question. I'm of the opinion that we haven't had enough time nor data to get a complete picture of Mars' long term climate change, if any. They argued that the sun is getting hotter so therefore Mars and all the planets are warming up, it was and still is a favorite GW debunking theme. It doesn't matter as CO2 build up in the Earth's atmosphere is the main influence locking in the heat. So even if the sun were warming up (ever so slightly over eons) it's not an either or situation as both would contribute to the warming. The recent decades of heating acceleration weighs heavily on mankind changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, not the sun...

...and it's getting dangerously close to this thread getting a number ;)

Hey Zofie! come back! What do you think the rover found?

I'm wondering how we can "learn too much". Like "hear no evil, see no evil..."?

/the only possible explanation

Though, instead of wasting time on that, shouldn't we be more concerned with the present state of our own planet?

wherefore art thou(s)?

Ye, pnbrown -- plural of thou is "ye". :-)

Judge Crater!




I know; a pun is the lowest form of humour.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

We are so insignificant, yet so unique and important.
Humans are the great cosmic contrariety.

My DH and I watched Carl Sagan's COSMOS series when we were dating and first married (several times)--he was a physicist.

I was so proud when I saved enough money to order the series on VHS tape and present to one Christmas!

Sagan was a great mind gone too soon.

Ye, pnbrown -- plural of thou is "ye". :-) "

And while you're at it "Wherefore" is incorrect as well.

It sure does explain a *lot*, doesn't it.