Dungeon Master Forum

The new Mars probe Phoenix landed last night -- I've been following this and was thrilled to see it landed safely!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/

When people hear about this and see the pictures, many just say "Meh, it's just a bunch of rocks, how dull"... I'd say they have no imagination. It's another planet for goodness' sake! How more thrilling can you get?

Sure, we're taking baby steps so far in exploring space and we're still a long way from popular sci-fi scenarios, but I always find this amazing.

Call me crazy, but I have a long held belief that our future is out there among the stars. Maybe that's consumption of too much sci-fi as a kid, or maybe it will really happen. Who knows... but I'm still going to be thrilled every time I see something that takes us a step closer to understanding this crazy, amazing, majestic and strange thing we call the universe, and where our future in it lies...

Plus we've landed at the water locked (we hope) polar cap, so if we were going to land on mars to check it out, we'd probably want to land there the way phoenix did it, in the place they did it (to start with)

Indeed! Looking out of the window at the lovely rain we're having, it's easy to be blasé about "unwanted" water on our own little planet... until you realise that in the scheme of the universe (or what we know about it so far), it's a very rare commodity!

Meh, it's just a bunch of rocks, how dull

You have no imagination!

I'd've watched this last night (the landing of it, shown live on the website...well, I mean, live from Misson Control but 15 mins out of date in terms of signals sent from Mars...), but I was already in bed by the time it started due to having to get up earlier than usual for work today. How fun. But my dad just told me about it about five minutes ago. Nice that it all went so well .

Here is how I see it...

Suppose you are God. You decide upon a
few laws of physics, you cause a few
super-novas, and watch as the newly-made
chemicals come together to form clumps
and organize themselves into stars with
little rocky spheres going round and round.
After a while you see a tiny, mostly metalic,
object ejected from the third such sphere
of one of the stars. And the little object
rather miraculously finds its way to the
fourth sphere of the same star and
somehow lands gently.

Ain't chemistry wonderful? Who could have
predicted that! I wonder what will happen
if we try it again and change one of these
laws of physics just a little bit.

youve been playing Populous too much Paul

Where to even begin on Pauls' thinking....!

Actually, it sounds more like Spore.

Exploring the space is good for scientific reasons, but I don`t think we`ll ever be able to settle "new territories". First of all, we should have to find a similar-to-earth planet, with the same (or similar) mass, with similar athosphere, similar biosphere etc. And, most of all, similar temperature. Assuming that we`ll find a way to get there. As far, we didn`t find the life (human)-friendly planet.

I hope we won`t ever find a life-friendly planets in the space.
What if we found one and it was already inhabited? I`m almost sure that human race would admit it as our "promise land" or something and start to colonise it, especially if the civilisation has a lower level of progress. That would surely turn into the bloodbath, just like it was in South America with Indians.