Based ON EARTH. RAMBLING THOUGHTS AND GENERAL MADNESS AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC.

Has it Been a Month?

It has. To the day, oddly enough.

A lot has happened in the last month, and at times I've felt like I was drowning in the tide of current events. It's as easy to get lost in the big picture as it is to lose yourself in the details, and... well, I'm really good at both of those things.

As a result, there are a lot of interesting things that I could have addressed in a blog post that are now stale. Meetings with dictators, exciting court decisions, surprise retirements. Some cool sports stuff. Water on Mars.

Guys. Water on Mars. How huge is this?!

Screw it. I don't care that the news is days old. I'm talking about water on Mars.

So I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but there is a blurb I saw on Facebook (down 20% in a day!) that described the impact of The Meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs (yes, I know the meteor wasn't solely responsible but this is neither the time nor place for that conversation!) and it terrified me. It was this tweet, quoting The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen. It's a chilling reminder at how quickly everything can end.

But I'm tracking away from the initial point. Water on Mars isn't great because it means Mars is suddenly habitable. No, it's exciting because it means that liquid water is probably a lot more common than we might have thought, and thus microbial life is more common than we thought.

Maybe those two ideas don't directly follow, but we can dream. Just imagine. There is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty billion (with a b) planets with Earthlike mass and temperature. And if our shitty neighbor Mars can at least host potential conditions for life, just think what those planets might hold. Fifty billion labs where life might arise.

And one of them is right around the corner. It's an exciting time to be alive.

It's Called Rape