Out Of The Borders Sci-fi and reality
Life on Mars by Michael Magee
It seems that all too regularly we are confronted with a news story that tells us how our
planet is suffering. We have record amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and there is plenty of evidence to show us that ice caps are melting and permafrost is receding in the arctic. All these weather changes are having a heavy impact on ecosystems all over the world as a staggering number of species continue to be under the threat of extinction. Then there are the political tensions; World War 3 seems to be around the corner, the far right is rising and new conflicts are continuously popping up here and there, not to mention the ever present possibility of nuclear war which will undoubtedly put the nail in the coffin of Mother Earth. People have been thinking about a plan B: an extreme last resort to save our species should something happen to our planet; maybe it’s time to colonise another one.
So which planet should we choose? Mercury
has no atmosphere and the temperature drops hundreds of degrees between day and night. If you decide to continue in that direction, you’ll find yourself on Venus; if you bought a frozen pizza here and left it on your windowsill, it would cook in 9 seconds. Other planets don’t even have a surface for us to stand on. You don’t need to be Stephen Hawking to know that these conditions wouldn’t be the best for human beings.
Talk about life on the 4th rock from the sun
been studying the planet for decades, and was the first to notice that it had polar ice caps just like the ones we have on earth, and also figured out that it had a 24 hour day. The idea of martian exploration has become more widespread since science fiction came into the limelight especially in cinema, since Thomas Edison’s A Trip To Mars in 1910. It wasn’t until as recently as 1976 that we actually managed to explore the surface of Mars using a rover, and now Elon Musk’s SpaceX have made it their goal to get human boots over there too.
known as Mars goes back as far as 1698, when Christiaan Huygens made speculations on its There are plenty of reasons to believe that it physical state and its orbit, writing one of the first could theoretically work, but there are signifipublications about extraterrestrial life. He had cant obstacles.
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