Completely tangentially, am I the only person who has been (more or less half-assedly, in my case) following all these discoveries of apparent water on Mars in the past few months?
....
Nope, you're not the only one.
It's pretty damn exciting. However, my space tech enthusiast -- but in a "appropriate technology" sort of way -- buds have a love/hate relationship with this new info.
On the one hand, epically marvelous! Mars, it seems, was once a very wet planet. Who knows what else was going on there, ages ago? There's so much to learn -- including, how Earth-class worlds (or close enough) lose self sustaining atmospheres; a non trivial matter, to say the least.
But on the other hand: damn! Now that the Mars Recon Orbiter and ground bots have all but confirmed vast reservoirs of frozen water beneath the planet's surface (the icy remnants of ancient seas?) people will divert scarce resources to getting us there in person, instead of pursuing a slow, steady, multi-generational, relatively low cost program of achieving orbital station maturity, a rugged lunar facility and only then, once the core competencies are firmly in-hand, a serious, (and seriously well equipped) international human expedition to the red planet.
.d.