Junk for Code

Similarities: Mars and Sturt Stony Desert

This particular reference on the Mars Society of Australia website has some images of the Sturt Stony Desert. The link is courtesy of D. Stuart, a reader of junk for code.

The two images of the Sturt Stony Desert in South Australia are:

and:

This desert landscape in South Australia is very similar to the landscape of the Gusev Crater on Mars, don't you think?

Mars Exploration Rover Mission

One way of putting the similarity is to talk in terms of Mars on earth. Hence we have Mars analogue sites in South Australia. These sites are then explored as part of the Mars Mission.

Look at the above mages again. Hardly the place to raise a family eh. Those are images of inhuman landscapes suitable only for robots.

It makes you wonder what all the rhetoric about manned space flight and colonizing Mars is about doesn't it? And, as this article points out, Mars has far less life than the Sturt Stony Desert:

"Not only does the planet have no life, it has no air, no water, no warmth. The temperature on the Martian surface hardly rises much above minus 18 degrees, and can drop more than 100 degrees below that.... Even leaving aside the cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, there is the deadly radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 350 millirems of radiation every year, an astronaut travelling to Mars would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body."

Presumably they are searching for fossilized evidence that billions of years ago there might possibly have been a few microbes.

So why bother with suggstions of the imminent construction of condo units on Mars? Why all the rhetoric about manned space travel now being just around the corner?

Me I'm quite happy remaining earthbound. I haven't even walked the Sturt Stony Desert yet.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 9, 2004 08:54 AM | TrackBack