<div align="center"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>Mars Date: 01/01/0001, 05:36:21</strong></span></div><div class="floatleft">(http://astroprofspage.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/pl_269461main_sol_090_sunrise_516-387_ce.jpg)</div>The late, great Douglas Adams once described a dawn thus: Several billion tons of superheated exploding hydrogen nuclei appeared over the horizon and managed to look small, cold and ever so slightly damp.<br/><br/>The Observer Principal, upon which much of Quantum Mechanics hangs by a tenuous thread via Heizenburg's Uncertainty Principal (with a side order of Shroedinger's Cat), states that the act of observation changes the thing observed, and can, in some instances, bring the thing into being. This is paralleled by the famous Zen, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"<br/><br/>For countless centuries, the sun had been rising on Mars with no-one there to observe it. Terry Pratchet put it like this, in his book,<em>Hogfather:</em><br/><br/><strong>WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?</strong><br/>"Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"<br/><strong>NO</strong><br/>"Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."<br/><strong>THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.</strong><br/>...<br/>"Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"<br/><strong>A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.</strong><br/><br/>Sunrise on a new world... The sun being about the size of a garden pea held at arm's length. The sky was stained purple and brown, and a faint whisp of cloud reflected the light down.<br/><br/>Slowly the light crept across the world. But this dawn was different. It wasn't the first to be observed by human eyes, but it was the first to shed its light upon people who now called themselves Martians.