What I'm trying to do is to get people to start from a rational and defensible view of Mars' surface, rather than the nuts (yes, you know who you are) who claim there is pure fresh liquid water everywhere, clouds with rain, morning dew and all that Terrestrial crap.
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Dreaming about waterfalls and mud and rain won't ever get us insight into a cold dry planet. All our instincts are wrongly-tuned for Mars and we must be clinically rational in our analysis of surface and subsurface conditions rather than relying on "common sense".

Nick Hoffman, Smart Person

I don't know anybody who regularly posts here who claims there is pure, fresh, liquid water everywhere, clouds with rain, morning dew... Instead, we see quite a bit of speculation within and apart from the scientific community about what could be possible under known or likely Martian conditions -- conditions that include -- but are not limited to -- near vacuum, cold and dessication.

The problem with brutal rationality is that so often it requires utter rigidity of thought, and complete denial of what hasn't been already proven. I'm sure Dr. Hoffman is well aware of that -- having experienced some of that rigidity himself.

Dreaming about waterfalls on Mars is necessary to break through that rigidity and denial. It is almost certain that there have been gargantuan waterfalls on Mars -- dwarfing anything that ever flowed on Earth, and not once but many times. Of course they may not have been "waterfalls" strictly speaking -- they may have been falls of concentrated sulfuric acid. Which is even more interesting than ordinary waterfalls. As we recognize that sulfuric acid can remain fluid to a very low temperature indeed, and under certain conditions, so can impure water, we realize that many of the impediments to Martian biology that were once certain are not so certain after all. If cold fluids can serve biology on Earth, why not on Mars?

Muds should have formed many times on Mars as various fluids ran over the surface, and "muds" in a Martain sense (which may be quite different than we usually think of mud). Martian "muds" today may be very dry seeming, may involve ices that are never fluid and so on, and yet they may be almost indistinguishable from terrestrial warm-wet muds, and they may serve an analogous function on Mars. We need to think non-rigid Martian terms, not brutally rational terrestrial ones.

Morning mists are commonplace on Mars -- the canyons have been known to fill with fogs since Mariner 9 first showed there were canyons -- where telescopic observers had seen... canals. Most no doubt are ice fogs, but are all of them? We don't know. How does ice fog -- or liquid droplet fog -- interact with the surface? We don't know. Could any putative biology on the surface of Mars utilize either droplet or ice fog? We don't know.

What we need is more dreaming and imagining of what could be, not less.

Mars is cold and dry, yes, but not always, and not everywhere, and not all the time. It's a dynamic, fascinating, changing, exciting world. It's frustrating, aggravating, and duplicitous, too.

That's what makes it so endlessly challenging and rewarding.

More!

Cheers,

PS: Remember "Geysers?"