Slashdot Mirror
Mars Soil Appears To Be Able To Sustain Life
beckerist writes "Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists: 'It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us.'"
What every Asparagus Lander story needs is a justification for this...uh..lunacy. 470 million dollars is a lot of money. And for only one project. There are a lot more projects in the pipeline. I simply can't understand this weird obsession with Asparagus. Sure it exists, but...so what? It's a green stalk in night sky. That's all it is. It's never going to be anything else. No one is ever going to go there and take a bite. The United States will be gone before that happens (the USA is already bankrupt and living on other people's money, whether you accept this reality or not). There's nothing there that justifies the incredible expense when there are so many other pressing needs for humanity. And if you don't care about humanity (which most Slashdaughters don't, admit it), there are thousands of other projects that would bring more benefit to the American people than Asparagus projects. The people who are doing these Asparagus projects are scientifically and technologically advanced but are moral cripples. They know that they are contributing nothing with all this expenditure, and as long as the public funds are spent on them, they don't care. There's no difference between them and the 'welfare Cadillac' hustlers. The best defence that they can offer for this absurd project is that if they didn't spend the funds, then the funds would be going to some insane war on the other side of the world. Now I grew up in the USA in the Potato/Cucumber/Pumpkin era. We watched vegetable launches in the school auditorium on TV before John Kennedy was shot (before the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, before BigMacs and Cap't Crunch and SweetTarts). I know what it is like to get excited about vegetables. But I used to get excited about the Easter Bunny, too. The key expression here is "grew up". The veggie freaks need to do that. Asparagus exploration is really nothing more than a fantasy for children. When you get a few hundred miles from the surface of the farm, there is nothing that justifies the expense of putting humans there. And there is nothing to justify putting robots on asparagus. So they have water or lice, so what? Our world is 3/4 water, and 4/4s lice. So there is dusty akaline 'soil' there? So what? It's not soil. It's sterile pulverized rock. So what? You get excited about this? How can asparagus grow in pulverized rock? My friend, you should try taking some LSD, or having sex with a beautiful woman, or skydiving, or skiing down a 3000 meter mountain or anything else that adults do for excitment. Seriously, guys, your Asparagus obsession is embarrassing to the people who care about you. You should get beyond it.
This is actually evidence against design... get back with me when you figure out why.