I wouldn't want you to think I don't respect books--I have a tremendous respect for books. It's just that these robotic missions have become data-intensive, and the limited scope of a book might not be up to the task of presenting the results of the mission itself. I look forward to the "story of" books, the human dimension of the people working on the project and their struggles and hopes--those will always have a place. But when I focus on the mission itself and the results it returns, I have to think about alternatives to books.

So you need a computer that costs a significant amount of money. OK. But computers aren't going away, and in some incarnation we're always going to have the equipment required to store and read and display the massive amounts of data I'm talking about. You might as well worry that paper is going away and we won't have any mroe books. Ain't gonna happen. Part of what I was pondering was how the world has changed because of the vast amounts of information we're now getting from these robots and the technology we're going to have to use to be able to comprehend all that data.

In the case of this Apogee book, I think there's some ground for thinking they might be trying to cash in on the currency of interest in the MER missions. I can see doing one book after the fact that summarizes the results; and I can see having access to vast amounts of raw data while the mission is going on and afterward in archives; and there's room for a history book that tells the behind-the-scenes story. I guess it's the idea of a book coming out before the mission is over that presents "results so far" that I can't get my head around. It's neither fish nor fowl. Even though there have been some momentous announcements about discoveries like probable water at Meridiani, it's still too early for anybody to grasp the full implications, in full context, and with high confidence. Tomorrow one of the rovers might find something that invalidates or at least calls into question water at Meridiani.

You know what it is? A book implies closure because of its finite scope. And it is too early to have closure on the MER missions. It's almost like saying that the novelty has worn off and it's time to start writing the glowing obituary. No! Not yet! Don't write off the little guys! I want to believe that the best is yet to come.