Spirit Point, Mars

Arrival at 'Spirit Point' by Mars Rover Opportunity
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU , Posted on: Saturday, 13 August 2011, 06:45 CDT

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity arrived at the rim of Endeavour crater on Aug. 9, 2011, after a trek of more than 13 miles (21 kilometers) lasting nearly three years since departing the rover's previous major destination, Victoria crater, in August 2008.

After arrival, Opportunity used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to record the images combined into this mosaic view. The view scene shows the "Spirit Point" area of the rim, including a small crater, "Odyssey" on the rim, and the interior of Endeavour beyond.

http://www.redorbit.com/images/images-of-the-day/img/49054/arrival_at_spirit_point_by_mars_rover_opportunity/index.html

Another view further over

and empty potato chip bags blowing around.

NASA should have included a plastic shopping bag releasing mechanism on these rovers, so future generations (species) would know we had been there.

There was a lot of speculation that it was sabotage.

They're absolutely everywhere.

except for a few tumbleweeds and the Pacific in the far distance.

Amazing what busy humans can do to a barren landscape, kind of like ants or bees when they determine to do something. Lol! Our predatory capitalists wouldn't like that analogy, but they can do nothing--NOTHING!--without the collective will of the rest of humanity.

Of course, the Pacific Ocean being there made a big difference--roiling the clouds around the region and the Earth, so that fresh water came down somewhere and could be piped in--and furthermore as an attraction drawing would-be Hollywood stars and beach bunnies and lifeguards and the entire Midwest to spread themselves out endlessly over the sand dunes and the rolling hills. My folks were part of that migration. I remember being driven in some antique Chevrolet on the FIRST freeway (Pasadena) to visit my grandparents in L.A. By then, humans had been very busy, indeed--but nothing like what was to come. L.A. still felt almost sleepy, palm trees everywhere, quite beautiful actually, bright blue sky, no smog, red trolley cars going from the center of L.A. to the beaches. The mountain ranges in the distance were so clear you felt you could reach out and touch them. And all the lands we drove--about half of southern California--to get to L.A. from our outlying town, were wide open spaces.

It's neither here nor there, whether L.A. was a mistake. It's what humans do. We colonize. We transform. We have to live with our mistakes--or move on. And we do love moving on. "What's over the next hill?" is written in our DNA.

Though the Earth is precious beyond reckoning--the only matrix of life that we know of--there are trillions and trillions and trillions more Earth's and potential Earths out there, waiting for the next collective genius of science to figure out how to ride gravitons between the loops of time-space, or whatever we need to know to move on. The barrier will be broken. Like the "flat earth" turned spherical, the barriers TO our moving on, fall, because that's what humans do. Then we will be living with our mistakes and moving on to make more mistakes there. Out there, which is not really "out there" at all. It is in here, somewhere, in our brains, as they interconnect. The Universe is here. And won't those future humans laugh and sigh in dismay at the petty little squabbles of their ancestors about evolution and science funding and what to do with their trash--and about "God"? Oh, God, what idiots!

Yeah, I think humans will move on and they will say these things about us, and pity us, and wish we hadn't hesitated so long before embarking on the Great Adventure, all of space-time ahead of us, and within us, and behind us. We--they--will still be making mistakes, probably colossal ones, like ours, thus far, here. And they often won't recognize their mistakes until too late, as we are doing, here, now--for instance, vastly and quickly reducing DNA's genius--variety--to monoculture. Future humans may lament that one very much, for, in all the Universe, though they will find many forms of life, they may never find the specific combinations that occurred here, and though they will artificially develop life and clone themselves and other critters, they may find that there is something missing that cannot be discovered, though they will never stop trying to discover it: the specific signature of Earth. Most of Earth's variety will be gone forever. One "parallel universe" will have been extinguished; all others opened. And they will move on to the next; to many.

The "purists" who would have us repair Earth first and clean up all of our impossible waste, first, before we move on, are mistaken, like old-fashioned school marms, who insisted on clean faces and fingernails, and sitting up straight and paying strict attention, and no jokes, pranks, talk-back or shirt-tails hanging out, when what the children wanted to do was run out in wild joy in the open, free air, climb the trees, play games, get dirty, "run away." It's human nature to run away. It's human nature to escape. It's human nature to move on. And unless the "purists" get control our DNA and change us, we will move on, to "out there," sooner or later.

Perhaps we will start by turning Mars into Los Angeles.

;)

Seriously though I agree, we either keep on moving out into the universe or stagnate as a species.

The yellow line on this map shows where NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity has driven from the place where it landed in January 2004 -- inside Eagle crater, at the upper left end of the track -- to a point about 2.2 miles (3.5 kilometers) away from reaching the rim of Endeavour crater.