Liquid Water on Mars

Here's a quick link to a rather interesting article from Universe Today, regarding the somewhat controversial topic of liquid water on Mars. It will be interesting to watch the development of this story.

In the meantime, here's a quote that fits the mood which this news engenders in me...

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

-- H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 1898

It's still one of the more chilling opening passages of any book. I re-read TWOTW a few years back, and was delighted to find parts that I didn't remember. Probably due to the setting and the nature of the story, it holds up ever so much better than it's near contemporaries, the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars (or "Barsoom", if you like) novels...

In the meantime, back to the science. Dreams of other species and terrible war machines for another day.