When I came to this board, I still held in my heart a romantic, sort of Lowellian Mars.
A smaller Earth, (Why it looks just like Arizona and Utah!) that only needed a little warming, and a little more oxygen, and we'd be ready for Martian real estate agents. I desperately wanted Mars to be, well, the way I wanted it to be, dammit.

After a few years of reading nick hoffman's posts on the subject, and the incredible daily reality dose dished out by the MER's, (MGS, etc.) I slowly, and very reluctantly began to accept that Mars isn't a little Earth like planet whose climate is just out of whack. Mars is a Mars like planet.

With the best of intentions, I'd been doing to Mars what anthropomorphic writers of sci-fi had been doing to fictional aliens for decades.

However the debate finally shakes out over what liquid caused the massive erosion we see on the surface, the Mars I wanted to believe in, never existed.