This news came out three or four days ago, and it is news of such Earth shattering import that I’m amazed everybody’s not talking about it.
I still get the same number of posts with recipes, and animals in costumes, and four year old kids who can play the piano, or dogs who can’t figure out a magic trick (I got a big kick of those, actually), or pictures from peoples vacations, or people saying ‘I can’t believe what Trump just said,’ or whatever.
Why isn’t everybody talking about the discovery of water on Mars? Knowing that on the very closest planet to us, the first planet we are ever likely to colonize, a planet still very much within our own solar system, there is water, is a darned good indication that there is water all over the place, that every solar system in the universe is likely to have a planet or two with water. That is an absolutely stunning revelation, and a huge step forward in the old Drake equation.
That should be the site of our first Martian colony. Throw a dome over it (it would have to be a very big dome, the lake is apparently 20 miles across, but construction should be easy with lower gravity and not much atmosphere, and robots to do the work) and voila, you’ve got all the water you need for bathing, drinking, and growing crops.
Then, there’s the fact that life as we know it originated in water and I’ve heard plenty of people hypothesize that where there is water, there is probably life. If that turns out to be true, we may well yet find some life on Mars, although it’s likely to be some kind of bacteria, or blind fish at the very most.
Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has way more water than Mars, of course, a whole one world ocean of it, trapped under its own ice, but Mars is a lot closer so we’ll go there first.
I just don’t know why everyone isn’t talking about this. It is stone cold amazing.
