Volume ninety-nine, Issue Ten
Look Up! Stupid
Chris Gibson | Science Writer
Let’s talk about Mars, friends. Well,
I’ll write about it and you’ll read and
maybe learn something, if all goes
well. Mars, after all, figures big in our
future. We’ve got our eye on the little
red rock, and in half a century or so
a tiny group of us relatively advanced
apes will plant their boots in the rusty
red dust of Mars and say: “Is this it?”
Mars, to be frank, is a stark place.
Compared to the wild and outrageous
visions we ascribed to it up until the
middle of the last century, the Red
Planet is bit of a letdown, on the sur-
face at least. It’s dusty. It’s rocky. It’s as
rusty as an old Buick. Nothing much
changes, at least on a large scale; geo-
logically speaking, Mars is dead (using
the term “geology” to refer to Mars is
technically incorrect. Meh). Dust dev-
ils lazily wind across the russet plains.
The ice caps (mostly “dry” ice, frozen
CO2, and some water ice) disappear
and reappear with the seasons. The
sun shines wearily in a sky as pink as a
salmon steak. In short, Mars is a lazy
old Western town, tired and worn and
stagnant.
I’m being glib, though. Mars, for
every ho-hum detail, responds with
some of the most exotic scenery in the
solar system. Most of the features on
Mars are familiar to Earth, but taken
to wild new extremes. Earth has many
canyons, for example, but none match
the 4000-kilometer long, 200-kilome-
ter wide gash called Valles Marineris,
which on Earth would stretch most of
the way across the United States and
cuts seven kilometers deep into the
Red Planet’s skin. Similarly, no moun-
tain on Earth (or anywhere else that
we know about) matches the enor-
mous proportions of Olympus Mons,
27 kilometers high and a base as big as
Missouri. Since Mars has no tectonic
plates, the volcano remained over its
hotspot for millions of years, building
it to its current colossal height. Mars
also hosts many impact craters, which
remain in mint condition since there
are few forces to alter them on the
Martian surface.
Humans are hell-bent on coloniz-
ing Mars at some point, but to do so
would require surmounting a dizzy-
ing number challenges. The trip itself
SCIENCE 5
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would take months, during which the
astronauts would be exposed to the
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failure. Sending people out across the
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Publication: The Quill (University of Brandon)
Size: 5.5 x 10.25 (Half Page)
Issue Date: Bi-Wkly - Wed. Jan. 19 & Feb. 2