People have imagined Mars as an abode of life for so long —
centuries at least, probably much longer — that NASA’s recent
self-styled “significant” announcement of strong evidence for
liquid water long ago was, let’s face it, pretty ho-hum to both
space enthusiasts and the general public. So where did the
breathless Internet rumors come from? Where was the evidence for
current water, such as brine springs? Are those microscopic
threads really just debris from the airbags, and if so, why do
they seem to keep appearing even as Spirit moves farther away
from the landing site? And aside from the junk that the two
rovers brought with them and strewed across the landscape
(didn’t the NASA science team expect to be confused by some of
that?), are there any other shapes seen in the images that look,
well, organic? Sure, intellectually, it really is “significant”
that the evidence is now in that there’s a location somewhere
off Earth where “life as we know it” could once have survived if
it had developed at all. It’s