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August 29, 2003 - 11:29 am

The Possibilities

I think bad is the new good.

You know what's really cool about Mars? It's not all this closeness and clinginess it's been up to lately. In fact, that's all done. As of yesterday morning, Mars came as close as it could, said hello, and it's at this very moment receding, on it's merry way back out to it's comfortable, personal space-conscious average distance of 90,000,000 or so miles.

I've always been into astronomy. I used to read books about the solar system just for fun when I was a wee lad. When scientists discovered the first planets outside our solar system, that article got tacked right up on my corkboard. Those planets, and all of the extrasolar planets found since, have been big gas giants like our own Jupiter and Saturn, and not at all like Earth. For me, though, they may as well have been like Earth, because the fact that they even existed implied that it wasn't impossible that there would be other, smaller planets like our own.

Amateur astronomy geek cred: I know how many miles there are in an A.U. I know what the Oort Cloud is and what comprises it. I like the theory that we may be inside a nebula and not even know it, much in the same way that you can see a certain distance when you're in the middle of a fog. I think about the tenth planet and the bad name they gave it - Diana. I like to remember that the non-generic names for the Earth, Moon, and Sun are Gaia, Luna, and Sol, respectively. I sometimes daydream about what we'll one day find in the asteroid belt, and I'm pissed that we haven't been back to the moon in decades.

Anyone wanna play D&D later?

Anyway, back to Mars, long among my most favorite of the planetary bodies, right up there with some of Jupiter's moons. Here's what I likes when it comes to the red planet:

Two moons! Sure, they're just little crappy hunks of crap shaped rock, but still, there's two, and that's just neat. Pheibos and Deimos, Fear and Panic, orbiting the God of War. One has a huge crater! Neat!

The biggest mountain in the solar system is on Mars. It's called Olympus Mons. The Pixies titled a song after it. It by far outsizes anything on earth. Mars also has a ravine longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon.

After the moon, Mars has the best shot at being humanity's next long term hangout. Almost undoubtedly, it once had water, and still may hold enough in it's poles for us to get a decent foothold there. Also, just to please our human sensibility and provide us some familar comfort, it's year is almost exactly twice as long as ours, and it's day is just a bit over 24 hours. To get it terraformed (make it more earth-like), we'd have to cause a greenhouse effect that would keep so much oxygen from escaping, raise the worldwide temperature, and melt the caps to refill the oceans. As a race, though, we seem to be pretty good at that kind of thing.

But my absolute favorite part? During summer on Mars, temperatures climb up to about 50 degrees! Isn't that great? Sure, there's not enough oxygen to breathe, but let's say you brought an oxygen tank. Theoretically, you could stand on the surface of Mars, another fucking planet, in a sweater and light jacket and feel just fine.

Well, actually, the atmosphere is so thin there that it's only 50 degrees for about three feet off the surface. After that, the temperature drops dramatically. Your feet would be fine, but your face would freeze.

But I don't care. I sometimes like to imagine myself laying on my back in that red, dusty Mars dirt, feeling only a bit cold, breathing distilled oxygen and happily looking up at the night sky, trying to spot the blue-green star that would be Earth, just as on certain nights on this planet, I look to the sky for the red dot of Mars and think about the possibilities.

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