There is a good deal of whooping and shouting just now in advanced circles about the confirmation that there is water on Mars. I’ll hold my applause until NASA finds that there is also Scotch on Mars.
The advancement of knowledge is usually a good thing. Though in this case it’s hard to imagine how Homo sapiens sapiens is better off for knowing there is water, and therefore possibly microbes, on Mars. And none of the stories on this find tell us how much tax money a dead-broke country spent to find this out.
Fantasists in the space biz still harbor ambitions to visit the red planet. (Figure the price-tag on this round trip.) Should this unlikely event take place, the temptation to bring some of those microbes home would be irresistible. Though with what we know of the declining effectiveness of antibiotics, I’d have thought we have more than enough pernicious domestic microbes without importing more. I fear Martian microbes would be at least Tijuana-squared.
