Amazing NYT Mars feature and thoughts on the Universe

You have to see this incredible feature on Mars, showing some of the best High-Res photos and milestones from the mission.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/science/space/curiosity-rover-28-months-on-mars.html

Credit: NASA-JPL

As you look through the images, remember that you are looking at another world.  It feels foreign, yet oddly familiar.  You almost want to reach out and just grab a handful of sand.  It makes you realize that we are not the center of the Universe.

There are likely Billions of worlds similar to Mars, with Dunes and Soil and Skies and Mountains, except those world may not be so barren.  They may be lush and alive, dominated by simple microscopic organisms, vast Jungles, oceans of water, rivers of lava, or grass plains.  They may have intelligent life, living underground, digging deep networks of tunnels, or in the skies above on amazing machines similar to our own.  They may have language and art and culture, happiness and sadness, love and hate, all the same complex feelings we experience.  They are as much a part of the Universe as we are, and as Mars is, and as the tiniest atoms in the emptiness of Space.

As familiar as Mars is, it is still a barren and foreign world, eerily silent for Millions of years.  Even if life is abundant, there will always be much more emptiness and loneliness in the Universe than complexity, so we must always remember how precious and rare life is, and that every Earthling from single celled organism to living Homo Sapiens, and everything in between, is precious.

 

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