40 Years On, It's Time To Go Back.

Forty years ago today, men walked on another celestial body. Let's go back there.

As a child I watched in awe at the proceedings, the spectacle, riveted to the TV. It was marvelous. It was more, it was fantabulous. It caused serious, deep pride and excitement and a desire to learn. And it continued again and again and again until one day... it stopped.

It was perhaps an omen, that halt, as ever since then, the world has accelerated into decline. Maybe if we start up again, the world will turn around. Rose-colored glasses? Sure. But exploration and the continual sating of that ingrained human lust for knowledge can only lead to good things.

I want us to go back there.

Publicly. Properly. With no obfuscation.

There's so much to discover. So much.

So much to... dig up... and learn from.

Not to mention the resources.

We have the tech.

We must abandon the global course of chaos we're on and redirect those war funds and exploitative purposes to activities that will reap rewards for all.

Mr. Obama, do you have the balls?

Come on... let's go.









[from What's All This, Then?]

Snakes Alive?

The following post originates from my What's All This, Then blog. What can I say, the thing caught my eye, so, here you go...

Baby Snakes? Mars? What? •March 20, 2009 •

Negotiating a path through the pretty blue fossils and rocks in this photo taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit’s PanCam on it’s 960th Martian day is a most unusual little critter. See it? Right between the “rock” that looks like a fish and the one that looks rather frog-like. What is that? A worm? A snake? What the…? Naturally the NASA dudes drove right on by, as is their custom… sigh.

Haven’t seen anything like that up there before! Haven’t seen many string-shaped rocks either… here or there. At first I thought the groove in the very lower right might be a track, but I now don’t think so, as there’s none right at the object’s location and it’s pretty deep. No way to know if it moved, there’s only a few shots, and only from this camera, so we’ll never know. Me? I’m rooting for lifeform while we wait until someone with a sense of inquiry goes up there and finds out…

The PanCam page for Sol 960 is where you’ll find all the pics from the day, and here’s the page for the original image, which is by NASA/JPL/Cornell. Clicking on the image will take you to the color version on the aero.info Rover page, which automatically creates, daily (when available), very close to true color images.

Posted in Mars, Mars science, NASA
Tags: life, lifeform, Mars, NASA,photos,science, Sol 960, Spirit rover