When I was seven years old Americans landed a spacecraft on Mars. Even though I grew up to love science fiction, this major hurtle towards our eventual colonization of the red planet had already been jumped before I read "The Martian Chronicles" or any other work on the subject. But here in the 21st century I fail to be able to fly my car to the office. Yet I can telecommute if the boss allows it. I don't remember telecommuting being a big theme in sci-fi, but it is a real accomplishment based entirely on geek-tech.
I digress.
This is about Mars. I heard that NASA is planning a Martian "plane" mission where they'll send a plane to mars (via rocket) and let it fly around the surface of the planet taking pictures. A plane can get low enough to get very detailed photos and look for "life signs."
Which brings me to my point: Who cares?
I don't care if there was microbial life on Mars - even if it seeded Earth. What I do care about is that we should be trying (as inexpensively as possible) to seed Mars with earth's bio-matrix. By that I mean that we should scour the earth for hearty bacteria suitable for the Martian environment and dump it all over that little planet in an effort to make Mars a viable backup planet for Earth.
I think about 50% of Mars missions fail - but if the mission was a planned crash to eject bacteria everywhere, we might get better results. If I was rich (really, really, really rich) I think I'd try funding something like this. We are never going to get astronauts to fight Martian dinosaurs if we don't start working on this kind of project now!
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