Take One Moment, Stop, pause Options

[djellison]

I know this picture doesnt look like much. It's grainy, it's bleached out quite a bit

But you owe it to yourselves to look at that picture, and think.

There is a rover climbing a hill on mars.

Isnt that amazing?

If you think hard enough - you can actually imagine being there. Walking with a rover, that we sent half a billion km's to a whole other world.

Sometimes, an image will just catch me off guard and I'll go "wow - LOOK at what we can do!"

Doug

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Yes, there is something really moving about seeing landscapes on other worlds. Not just science, not just technology (but without forgetting that we owe all this to technology) but experiencing a new realm of life, looking for the first time out of our Earth craddle! Life on Earth will never be the same after this.

I remember when I was a child, we knew of Mars only the old Shiaparelli's images, and the existence of the "channels" was a hot debate. Robots were only a sci-fi hype, and computers were something out of an unknown fringe, we called them "artificial brains". Then came the first sputnik beep beep... and, fast, Gagarine, the first men on the Moon... Then, the pace slowed, as space is huge and the challenges enormous. 20 years for a Titan mission, design time, journey time, etc.

All this makes the outer worlds images still more enthraling, as we know they are rare, and many of us will never know what showed the Titan images.

The strangest in Mars images is that they are not strange at all. Rocks, dunes, hills, stones strewn plains... all very familiar visions we could have on any Earth desert. Remember old sci-fi images showing bizare shaped mountains and unrealistic flat ground...

What I hope is that all this will contribute to help us treat our own planet with some care: Earth is the strangest planet in our system, the only one with grass, tress, birds, friends, the only one where we can live.