Water World

Mars Lander looking for any signs of 'intellligent life'

by Lisa Van Dusen/Sun Media/May 28,2008

Because the U.S. presidential race is beginning to feel like a soap opera you haven't watched since Grade 12 then stumble on 15 years later only to hear the same old conversation about the same old plot, it seemed like a good week to back slowly away from MSNBC and see what's happening outside the babble bubble.

The big non-primary news (even Drudge briefly bumped Hillary-Barack for this) is the search for life on Mars.

As a woman whose left-brain function is restricted to putting one word in front of the other and who wasn't entirely sure how much other news I'd missed since Super Tuesday, I had to be disabused of my goofball excitement on reading the "Life on Mars" headline by my 17-year-old daughter.

Apparently, NASA has not, in fact, found actual living Martians on Mars, which would have been awesome. NASA is actually trying to find water, or maybe signs that there once was water, a really long time ago, on Mars. NASA knows we have water here, but NASA's motto for this mission is "Follow the water" because they're hoping to find out there was once not just life but "intelligent life" (life that saw the sub-prime lending meltdown coming) on Mars, a really long time ago.

Also, they're interested in finding bacteria, which, if they succeed, will confirm my theory that all the bacteria that people madly try to repel with anti-bacterial soap eventually turn up somewhere else.

SEARCHING FOR LIFE

Of all the items on the brilliant "Stuff White People Like" blog (my favourites are, "Making you feel bad about not going outside," "Apologies" and "Threatening to move to Canada"), "Searching for Life on Mars" should be right up there in the top 10.

When the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down Monday on the Red Planet -- which is actually pink, but they can't call it the Pink Planet because it sounds like a gay bar -- there was video of a lot of very excited white guys in blue NASA polo shirts high five-ing each other in the control room, which was almost as funny as the video also released Monday of Hillary Clinton dancing in a Puerto Rico disco while downing a Presidente beer.

The nearly $1.2 billion NASA is spending to find out whether anyone lived on Mars a really long time ago is a sort of tribute to the old Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter.

The Mars Polar Lander crash-landed in 1999.

Mars Climate Orbiter also went AWOL in 1999, costing NASA, $125 million, because the Lockheed Martin engineering team built it to operate in miles and NASA programmed it in kilometres (suddenly, I feel like less of an eejit ... maybe the Martians really are there now, but they're just intelligent enough to hide from NASA).

They say the Climate Orbiter could now be orbiting the sun, which is totally useless because even NASA knows there's no water on the sun.

The Phoenix's cargo includes a time-capsule mini-DVD called Visions of Mars, created by the Planetary Society, the highlight of which is the late astronomer Carl Sagan, "speaking to the future Martians from near his home in Ithaca, N.Y., with a waterfall cascading in the background."

(How appropriately human ... they should've called it, "Enough about you, Marvin ... what did we think of you?").

They'd have been better off leaving the clip of Hillary Clinton doing the cha cha cha in Puerto Rico with her Presidente. Martians are no dummies ... they'll figure it out.