Hey, Jocelyne --

You have a point here:

What if there IS life on mars but it's going veeeerrrryyyy sloowwwlllyyy...

Howevah, there's this thing that Dad pointed out to me when I was a little younger and very eco-conscious...human beings are a force of nature too. We are from it and of it, and essentially we just follow our li'l ol' biological imperatives. That we have so much cerebral cortex with which to think about these things just makes us also prone to dithering. Realizing that I am not going to mess anything up in a bad way because I simply can't, by the rules of the game, made me sleep a lot better at night.

Okay, sure. You say, cancer comes from within too, and that's harmful, right? Well, yes. In the short term. Which, when you get to thinking about the universe or even the solar system just doesn't matter. Besides, cold as it sounds, cancer has a purpose: it weeds us out. Other life could as easily be the death of us as we the death of it.

And if there's any life on Mars, well, we're all alive, aren't we? We're on the same team. If Earth life has become more mobile and adaptable faster, kudos to us! Gold star! We get to go out for the team and annoy inanimate objects all across the system, our extra-terrestrial bacteria brethren cheering all the way. After all, there's nothing that says we can't pick 'em up and take 'em with us.

I mean, just think: say some astronaut gets Mars all over his shoe and then takes a vacation on Titan, but it's so boring there that everyone decides we should never go back. On the other hand, the Mars bacteria love it and within a decade have evolved into vertebrates who enjoy hockey and nose warmers, with a rich oral history about the footprint of life, and they give the Titan native what-have-yous a real run for their money, but then they set their sights on the chilly paradise of Pluto...this could go on and on.

Besides which...a while ago, I heard tell of some very very old fossil bacteria found in Antarctica. If there's someone who knows this story a little better, feel free to expand on it...but the point is, it looked like it came from Mars. ( : Don't think of this as an invasion, think of it as a homecoming.

Beth