| Supple Cow |
04-26-2004 07:30 PM |
This article mentions "the potential for life beyond our own planet," a phrase which has been bothering me of late. The high school students I mentor are writing papers about the future of the space program in the US and they all seem to think that sending a bunch of people to Mars would be a really great way to solve the problem of insufficient resources on Earth. I'll admit, I thought to myself: "Yes, sending people to Mars is a wise solution. Oh, wait... you meant alive?"
The scientists who are doing this research and making these cool flash animations have a very different idea of what "life" is when they say that it is potentially viable on another planet. If my evolutionary biology class has served me well, the scientists mean something more along the lines of "extremely primitive forms of life could perhaps evolve there after centuries (or millenia) more of a changing atmosphere on Mars." Yet, I get the distinct feeling that most people who read things like this think of humans or little green men when they see the word "life".
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