I might have taken notes if I had known that this was going to be on the test. Then again, maybe not. I seldom took notes in school and I usually did pretty well on the tests. Of course, I was a lot younger then, and the tests weren't years later. Anyway, I think this was on PBS. I'm sure that it wasn't one of those "Red Necks versus Bigfoot" atrocities, or anything like that. I'll see if I can find anything on Wiki about it this weekend.
What they said was that NASA has gotten pretty good at sending things to Mars, but they haven't tried to bring anything back yet, so they don't want to make any promises that they might not be able to keep. Like you said, it would cost an arm and a leg to get them there, and at least as much to bring them back, so they're not going to bring them back. They plan to send some equipment on ahead of them and, once they got established, more equipment would follow. These first guys would be charged with assembling the equipment as it arrived. Once they had enough stuff assembled to support more people, they would send more people. I'm not sure what they were going to do for water, maybe they still hope to find a natural source on Mars. I think they were going to get their air from the Martian atmosphere and thicken it up with some kind of process. Eventually they might be able to grow some of their own food under some kind of greenhouse structure.
Like I said, it would not be my cup of tea. When I wanted to go to Mars, it was with the understanding that I would be living in the wide open spaces, not under some kind of plastic bubble. If I wanted to do that, I would have stayed in Chicago. Like I have also said, Alaska had more wide open spaces than I knew what to do with, so I ended up where I'm at, and I'm happy to be here. I own everything for a half mile to the south of our house, and an eighth of a mile to the east and west. My neighbors are about a hundred feet straight to my north, 300 feet if you follow the driveway, and there's a thick screen of vegetation between us. If our house burned down in the middle of the winter, I'm pretty sure we could make it to the nearest neighbor in our bathrobes and slippers. We have called 911 three times since we moved here, and they got here in a matter of minutes each time. We have the best of both worlds here, solitude when we want it and access to help when we need it. We also have lots of trees and other greenery that we didn't have to plant, water, or weed, and we even get to see wildlife out the window occasionally. What's not to like? Well, the winters are kind of long but, if there's any truth to this global warming thing, that problem might take care of itself.
A lot of people still think that we shouldn't be spending all this money on space travel when we have problems here on Earth that are not being addressed. They might have a point there. Other than the satellites, what has the Space Age brought us? Rocks! If Columbus had brought nothing but a bag of rocks home from his first voyage to the New World, I doubt there would have been a second and third voyage. Still, you never know what they might eventually find out there: gold, silver, diamonds, or even those dilithium crystals. Now that's something we could put to good use!
Have a nice weekend.
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