![]() ![]() ![]() Depending upon our actions, this will be seen either as one of our civilization's rallying points after the moral exhaustion of the Cold War and the collapse of socialism, a moment when we dedicated ourselves. With admirable clarity, The Case for Mars lays out a workable plan for sending a cheap and relatively safe expedition to the surface of that planet and establishing permanent settlements there. It has a tenuous atmosphere that evolved differently from that of Earth and Venus and a differentiated inner structure. A third implication-and this contains profound moral and economic significance-is that if life once existed on Mars, it could again, and we might earn for our generation the eternal fame of having brought a dead planet back to life. Mars is characterized by geological landforms familiar to terrestrial geologists. Thus we would all turn out to be Martians, and to go to Mars would be to go home. ![]() Another, scarcely whispered yet, is that since Mars' climate and geology seem to have started evolving more quickly than Earth's, the germs of Earthly life may have originated on Mars and been carried to our planet inside a meteorite, as the dead fossils were. One is that life may be common in the universe-that wide green planets, their plains and hills and oceans teeming with activity, may the waiting for us under the light of alien suns. The recent discovery that life probably existed on Mars holds a number of stunning implications. By Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner The Free Press, 250 pages, $25 ![]()
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