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Originally Posted by Buffy
If you wanna mess with Mars though, how's about starting to drive lots of comets into its surface? It would give us practice in diverting them and saving ourselves from a dino-like exeunt, and in a few thousand years, there'd be more water and atmosphere there for us to start colonizing it...
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Sure...use Mars as target practice while we keep funking up the Earth.
It would mess it up, all right. But you wouldn't get a breathable atmosphere in less than a few million years I think.
But frankly the rovers are an astonishing success. They didn't cost that much money, really, and they are performing much better than expected.
Among the discoveries made with the rovers are for example traces left by liquid water in rocks, and also that there has been geological activity on Mars more recently than previously expected.
It's amazing, really - there are three mars probes in orbit (Mars Odyssey, Mars Global Surveyor and the European Mars Express), and two rovers on the ground, and Mars Reconnaissance orbiter will arrive next year - there is a lot of activity going on and the rovers really need to be seens as parts of a bigger picture. They are our eyes on the surface, and can see and touch things which is impossible to do from orbit.
