BRFelix said:

>Is not very emotionally satisfying to many people -- it's hard to
>wrap yourself around an ice cube, try it and see -- it is a better
>fit with such evidence as we have. The high level resistance to
>it has set back study, in my view, but of course it wouldn't do
>to ask the Wet Mars scholars and advocates to piss off now,
>would it?

It's not emotionally satisfying because the NASA public relations machine has been repeating the same fairytale for the last twenty years: "Mars is a living, warm and wet second Earth!!" The science behind this assertion was total crap and should never have been made.

Years ago the Mars program hit a fork in the road. There were two possible paths:

1) Mars was/is once another warm and wet Earth that still has life today. Find the evidence to prove this.

2) Mars is an utterly alien world that can be made habitable. Send people to Mars to make this happen.

Path 1) is bullshit. We strongly suspected it was bullshit in 1964 after Mariner 4 flew by Mars and knew it was bullshit after Viking landed in 1976. However NASA pursued Path 1) because it seemed the closest path to semi-inifinte funding justified by exbiology. Pursuing this path was easy because NASA had plenty of scientists on the payroll who accepted Life-on-Mars as an article of religious faith. The mixture of science with religion was a big clue that this was a very bad idea.

Path 2) makes almost no assumptions about Mars. We take Mars for what it is and then go through the long and difficult process of turning it into another Earth. Path 2) represents the hard road to Mars Exploration. We can't go there with predefined "happy" assumptions. We have to let Mars tell its story the way it wants to tell it. We then build our technology to colonize Mars based upon the Martian ground truth. No more fairytales!! Just lots of hard spade work doing difficult science followed by the very difficult exercise of turning the Martian sow's ear into the silk purse of an Earthy paradise. This is a process that takes at least two centuries to complete. The process does not begin until we jettison the fairytale that Mars was a warm and wet, living planet.

Gary