There are some theories (as in t-h-e-o-r-i-e-s) about how a single cell may have spontaneously occurred and how it managed to survive yet alone reproduce.

Evolution has become stagnated in the same sort of defensive posture climate science has become. Really interesting questions of species creation are blocked by the evolution theory. We’ve never really seen the mutation process working nor can we explain the explosion of species during certain periods. We just say “evolutionary process” and voila! Sometimes you read about mutations but in order for mutations to “take hold” there would have to be multiple near-identical mutations so they could breed to perpetuate the new species. All this means is we kid ourselves if we really think we know much about life, creation of species and how that all works in the cosmic scheme of things.

And don’t forget unless there is faster than light transportation and/or communication capability we’d not even “see” what happened for quite a long time.

So, raise a toast to ET, sing a song of praise but don’t bet a quarter you’ll see any thing other than what the Earth has seen these last few billion years.

The narrative is lacking for Mars. People need a story not a science puzzle.

From my read, the Mars “story” blows away Gilligan’s. And I don’t see Gilligan catching up quickly. People were captivated for weeks when the rovers first sent back pictures. And for the first few months, the story of the rovers was water cooler talk all over the world (and discoveries over the years have at times piqued people’s interests again). I’m not sure something that can’t actually be “seen”, will do much to get people excited (at least people beyond the space geeks).

The super-Earths themselves are too distant to be seen. Instead, astronomers infer their presence from subtle distortions in starlight, caused when photons travel through the super-Earths’ gravitational fields. Depending on the degree of distortion, astronomers can even calculate a planet’s mass.

No contest between public interest in Mars vs. Gilligan. But I think ultimately the Big Question of intelligent life elsewhere will be answered by the search and discovery of Gilligans.

The probes they plan on sending to Mars in the future are pretty sophisticated. The one that’s going in 2011 will be a “smart lander” with a nuclear powered rover that might wander around for a decade. Sample return missions scheduled for I think 2014. These will be interesting but do not hold out the promise for the kind of spectacular discoveries that can be made by the NGST or even the earth based observations that are getting more and more detailed.

ed.

Makes me totally want to go see Avatar now.

The narrative is lacking for Mars. People need a story not a science puzzle. And a good story inevitably involves characters. We’ve taken character out of the story — no astronauts, no potential aliens — and made rational choices involving machines and action at a distance.

People won’t spend billions on a story about how some guy at an observatory saw something through his telescope and sent a hi-tech Roomba to look at it. Not unless the end of the story is: we build a big-ass spaceship an go there ourselves.

And Mars can be directly explored — even by manned expeditions, although that might cost more than would be justified compared to robot exploration.

In any case, we’ve been dragging heels on this for decades.

We have needed a new frontier for a long time. Americans kind of suck at stasis and need expansion and challenges and possibilities. Granted 42 light years is a bit of a haul. But it’s not the thousands of light years it might easily have been.

The answer to life the universe and everything = 42. Who knew Douglas Adams meant it literally?