From: Brian D Williams <talon57@well.com>,
>I was a bigger Mars enthusiast a year or so ago then I am now, I
>attended a lecture at the Adler planetarium (and dinner afterwords)
>with noted Mars expert Dr Chris McKay. He made the (excellent)
>point that he thought regular trips to Mars should wait until they
>represented the same cost ratio that Antartica represents now.
Chris used to be a full-human-presence-on-Mars-as-soon-as-possible
advocate. Now he's become more realistic!
But accordiing to Freeman Dyson, why go to Mars at all? Stay
at Antartica ...
(from "Warm-Blooded Plants and Freeze-Dried Fish", November 1997,
Atlantic Monthly)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97nov/space.htm
[paragraph begins with a description of the "Mars rock"]
"The evidence that these traces [of life in the Mars rock] have
anything to do with biology is highly dubious; we cannot say on the
basis of it that life must have existed on Mars. These traces are
important for two other reasons.
First, if we are seriously
interested in finding evidence of life on Mars, we now know that
Mars rocks on Earth are the most convenient place to look for it.
Instead of waiting for many years for an expensive sampling mission
to land on Mars and return a few small chips of rock to Earth, we
can find a supply of bigger chips lying in Antarctica, where
meteorites accumulate on the ice and are freely available.
Second,
these rocks show that if life was established on Mars at any time in
the past, it could have been transported to Earth intact. In the
first billion years after the solar system was formed, when Mars had
a warm climate and abundant water, asteroid impacts were much more
frequent than they are now. Mars rocks fell on Earth in great
numbers, and many Earth rocks must also have fallen on Mars. We
should not be surprised if we find that life, wherever it
originated, spread rapidly from one planet to another. Whatever
creatures we may find on Mars will probably be either our ancestors
or our cousins."
Amara
P.S. As far as we know, our Galileo dust detector has not sampled
Freeze-Dried Fish yet.
********************************************************************
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the
future of the human race." -- H. G. Wells
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