Output Stream of Consciousness

Today's big announcement from NASA was more signs of possible water on Mars. Not that this will turn out to be any guarantee for life on Mars, or indeed whether the effect is caused by water, but with all the liquids we have been finding around the solar system, it makes life on other planets yet more plausible, slightly increasing the n_e term of the Drake equation, at the same time as we are increasing the number of extrasolar planets observed, increasing the f_p term.

Then there's the new plan for moon bases, which had been started at the behest of the president a couple of years ago. Sounds like they might go to the south pole of the moon, which has been reported to have ice, which is a great boon to a moon base for producing air and possibly fuel, and which has peaks that remain in sunshine for most of the 28-ish-Earth-day-long lunar day, so that they do not have to operate off batteries for the 14-day-long night.

2024 seems like it might be a tad optimistic, and may very well be if the huge U.S. debt and deficit come home to roost looking for easy targets to pick off, but I'm all for it if they can pull it off. We certainly have much better materials and engineering for pulling something like this off now than we did at the times of previous plans on paper for a moon base.

Hopefully, I'll be around and thinking about kicking the first round of children out of my house ;)