THE PHOENIX HAS LANDED (ON A MARTIAN GRAVEL PIT)

So much for the "dramatic" pictures of Mars. The unmanned NASA Mars probe, The Phoenix, landed successfully on Mars and began transmitting photographs of the place back to Earth. Not so appealing so far. What you see is vast pebble-strewn plains of red soil. This thing is mobile so hopefully it will motor its way to a nicer location on Mars sometime soon, maybe some mountains or valleys or something remotely interesting. If we're going to eventually have a colony there, it looks like the only people who'd want to live there are the folks who thrive in places like the Sahara Desert or the barren wastes of Afghanistan.

The only reason anybody lives in these godforsaken Earthly wastes in the first place is because their ancestors lost a war long ago, the victors talking control of the fertile and attractive portions of our world. Say what you will about "haunting desolate beauty," but find me a bunch of volunteers to leave their comfortable homes to go live among the barren wastelands of Earth and win valuable prizes. Nobody chooses to live in user-unfriendly environments. Either you flee there from conquering armies or you're unfortunate enough to be born there. Just like the Gobi Desert, few humans will choose to relocate to Mars when we get that far along in our space program.

It's not even a place that has "Vacationland" written all over it. If humanity is ever to expand to other planets, Mars doesn't seem like a good candidate. Any potential human-friendly planet is probably many light years away and many generations into our future. None of the other planets in our solar system seem to fit. Like the porridge in Goldilocks And The Three Bears, some are too hot, others are too cold. It's only Earth that's just right.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't send ships to Mars and learn as much as we can about it. We're humans and quite curious and that's what we do. Hell, we've got no end of people climbing up Mount Everest long after we've learned pretty much all there is to know about the place; it's cold, icy and rocky with very thin air. Sort of like Mars. So you move on to the next place, learning more and hoping there's some good stuff there that we can bring back to Earth. We've got a bunch of Moon rocks already, not really good for much besides souvenirs.

But who knows, maybe one of the nearby planets might have fields of gold or platinum or something we never saw before that will come in handy around here. Sort of like Marco Polo bringing spaghetti back from China so that Italy could make culinary history. You just never know what's behind Door #3. And just maybe the realization that all our nearby planets are poor escape hatches for when we ruin or own planet will encourage us to take better care of this place and one another. If we can send camera-wielding robots to Mars, we can at least try to do something about poisoned places like Chernobyl and New Jersey. We can learn some unexpected things from The Phoenix.