Mars pictures reveal frozen sea
This probably won't even dent most people's consciousness, but this is HUGE. There was known to be water at the poles, but still -- this means that, first, if there was life on Mars, it would likely be somewhere around something like this. Life as we know it needs water, and the poles are cold for that sort of thing -- so this is an interesting idea.
Second is that, if there's no life there, we can still put a colony on Mars with less trouble than if it was pure desert. The area they're talking about holds somewhere around 360,000 cubic kilometers -- that's 360,000,000 cubic meters -- and using my handy calculator, that's 8,500,000,000,000 gallons of water approximately. Take that to 10% usable water, and you're still looking at 850 billion gallons, enough to keep a colony pretty OK for a while.
Posted by Ted Stevko at February 22, 2005 07:08 AM | TrackBack