Hi, everyone. I’ve been abducted by those pesky aliens again. I have to sign off this old computer terminal before they come back to the holding area.
In the mean time – please feel free post to the open floor.
apologies – I should be back on Earth next week:)
PS: Don’t forget to enter the Calvanni giveaway.
Mad Genius Club 
I recently read an article about Mars, and the (presumed) briny water melting out of subsurface ice, near the equator. Their concern was that we’d contaminate Mars with bacterium on landers.
My take away from the article was that apparently the choice is between dropping various landers in spots totally uninhabitable (and thus never detecting life on Mars) or going for the “habitable” zone and finding something as we contaminate/kill it.
Now, this presumes that Earthly bacteria could both survive the journey _and_ outcompete native biota in that biota’s natural environment.
And I’m willing to wait on live exploration and even colonization for reasonable tests that either there is no life at all, or that it is adapted to Mars conditions and our stuff isn’t. Or–I’ve always liked the panspermia theory–that Mars and Earth life are sufficiently similar that they can’t easily be differentiated. In any case, at some point contamination will occur, and we’ll find out if they can cohabitate.
But what I want to know is, when are we going to start the terraforming?
That’s right. When are we going to deliberately seed Mars with Earth biota?
I’m disappointed that Comet 2013A1 is looking more and more like it is going to miss Mars. It would have been a great start at thickening the atmosphere. We really ought to arrange something(s) similar.
Robot tugs to go out to Saturn and collect really large chunks of ice and then boost them to Mars and pummel the surface. Make some crater lakes.
(I’m disappointed about the comet missing Mars, too.)
What concerns me about when we’re *able* to start the terraforming are people who want to “preserve” the Martian “ecology” (even if there is no Martian ecology). [Sad Smile]
Mars One!
“Spielberg Skies” my brother calls them. On a full moon at this altitude a person could read a book by the light of it, and I’m only exaggerating that a small bit. On a night without a moon there’s so little diffraction of light due to the thin air and low humidity that it’s possible to see the oblong distortion of Jupiter’s moons with the naked eye. The Milky Way, rather than a mere suggestion of stars, is a swath of cream across the heavens. It’s not the velvet black of a sultry Southern night, but so many stars all at once that they wash out the area between them to something closer to the gray of an old fashioned slate.
Tonight there was a moon. Not full, but enough that I could see without my headlights. Which was a good thing as they’d just gone out.
I stopped the car in a skid of gravel when it happened and let my eyes adjust to the moonlight. A low pale shadow streaked across the road. Likely a coyote. The moonlight leached the color from the pinion and cedar. I could see well enough if I drove slowly. I was about to put it in drive and go on my way when someone, or something, tapped on the driver side window.
A sombrero set the creature’s face in blackest shadow. A stripped wool poncho covered its shoulders. I say “creature” now but I thought it must be someone coming across the border. It tapped again and I rolled the window down a mere inch.
“What do you want?” I said.
It tipped the sombrero up and I saw it’s face, the classic pointed chin and black, glassy, almond shaped eyes. Effing Roswell was 100 effing miles from this effing road.
“Pardon me,” it said in a plummy male voice, “but do you have jumper cables? My battery has gone dead.”
*Massive grin*
That would be alien conduction, right?
Awesome. More, please.
I was sort of hoping someone else would write what happens next. But maybe I wasn’t clear enough on that. 🙂
The phone began chirping “The Gower Wassail” and he answered her call. “Drachenburg.”
“Joschka, I’m in trouble,” a familiar voice began.
Since he didn’t hear shots or alarms wailing in the background, Joschka reached over and turned the news feed on his computer to the headlines from Britain, looking for an announcement of a disaster, mysterious explosion, or one of the other sorts of trouble his friend Rada seemed prone to finding. Nothing appeared aside from the snowfall reports and the latest holiday-related stories. “What sort of trouble, Hairball?”
“Colonel Selasie doesn’t approve of how we checked the containment side of the base’s ventilation system and now I’m on duty the next four days and nights so I can’t sneak over for Christmas.”
Disappointment warred with curiosity, and curiosity won. “We?”
“Captain Cluj and I. He needed to confirm that the workers doing the wiring updates had not inadvertently damaged the atmospheric containment system in the tech suite.” She sighed and he imagined her rubbing the cheekbone under her blind eye. “They had. That’s why I’m in trouble.” She hesitated before adding, “It was Lt. O’Keefe’s idea.”
Joschka leaned back and closed his eyes as memories of his own military mischief floated out of the depths. “Give me a vector, Hairball, because I’m not tracking.”
“Usually they use colored smoke to test the air flow, but after the mess with the fire alarms last week Sheep Cluj didn’t want to do that.”
“Ah, that was the fire drill that included foam filling the colonel’s office?”
“Yes and I had nothing to do with that,” she assured him so fast her words blurred in his ear.
He grinned. Which tells me you probably did, indirectly of course, the retired general thought.
She continued, “So instead of smoke, O’Keefe suggested using esters, but not banana or anything noxious.”
He shook his head, thinking, you made the tech rooms smell like flowers, did you? “And then what happened?”
A very quiet little voice said, “There was a stampede to the dining halls. And then a lot of disappointed troopers.”
“A what? No, belay that,” he told Rada. “Hairball, what scent did you use? Fresh baked bread?” That would certainly have had him finding an urgent reason to visit the mess.
“Roast turkey. The technicians had punctured the containment system in at least a dozen places and the smell freshly carved roast turkey filled the entire ground floor of the base aside from the motorpool.” He could hear her drooping and clamped his hand over his mouth to muffle his laughter. “But supper was fish. And now Col. Selasie’s mad at me.”
Joschka laughed until tears filled his eyes.
Which proves that it’s hard to eat fish when your workspace smells like turkey… Or something like that?
Well, if you’ve been tempted with turkey and get cod in white sauce, yup. (Especially since Col. Selasie is Ethiopian Orthodox and she’s observing the pre-Christmas fast. Tormenting the acting base commander is not wise.)