Mars: A Delicious, Fun-sized Portion of the Solar Candy Bar Not Everyone Is Chewing

The Mars Society's (MS) idea of inhabiting the red planet is the new Manifest Destiny, with a twist. Instead of expanding upon their territory, the MS wants to leave Earth all together. This form of interplanetary barhopping is an example of nothing more than trashing one planet and ditching it for another, which will probably get trashed, too.

The founder of the MS, Robert Zubrin, has devised a five-step (misstated in the article) plan to make Mars inhabitable--within a mere millennium:

1. "Terraforming" or creating a palette for growth on the planet through warming the planet by means of either/or:
(a) Setting up large mirrors to reflect the sun's rays upon Mars
(b) Directing an asteroid in a collision course with the planet
(c) Inducing global warming by erecting chemical-emitting plants on Mars

2. Releasing CO2 from within the planet to accelerate the warming process

3. Establishing facilities that would grow vegetation

4. Reaping the vegetation

5. Continuing the farming cycle for 1,000 years

At Popsci.com, Zubrin makes a horrible comparison between himself and Christopher Columbus. Zubrin said many were skeptical of Columbus and his idea of a journey across the Atlantic, just like scientists now are not buying Durbin’s proposal of transitioning Mars from a barren wasteland to a livable planet within 1,000 years.

The problem with this comparison is that Columbus' voyage did not factually bring about much skepticism. It had been long discovered that Earth was a round planet by the time Columbus ventured. Even then, the places he went had already been discovered with fairly large populations living on that land.

Maybe this gross misrepresentation of historical evidence should send a sign to people everywhere.



Information from this post was obtained from Will Snyder's "Hijacking the Red Planet" and the Wikipedia article on Christopher Columbus.

Wear You At?: A Story About the Dangers of Stalking and a Very Pricey Pair of Sneakers You Would Never Want to Steal

If you happen to misplace one of your siblings in the next month, you may be lucky (or unlucky) enough to find him again.

That is, if he is wearing the latest in footwear technology.

Isaac Daniel, founder of the new footwear line Quantum Satellite Technology, is pleased to announce a revolutionary set of shoes with a pre-installed Global Positioning System (GPS). The heartbeat of this GPS is a 2-inch-by-3-inch chip that can omit (or receive) a wireless alert, letting the wearer (or the parents/friends of) inform a 24-hour monitoring service that he is indeed lost. The information on the whereabouts of the shoe-wearer can only be accessed remotely if the caller can give the correct password.

The problem? The shoes are expensive, presently are available only in an adult line, and they look like something your grandfather would wear to go jogging. The sole purpose for the creation of the $325+ sneakers was to help keep track of young children, not adults. The monitoring service that complements the footwear is an additional $19.95 a month, making safety available only to those who can afford the monthly fee.

Worrisome parents, beware! A pair of these shoes is not the apparatus equivalent to a cell phone. Non-emergency inquiries will be paid for by the caller, so being everywhere your kids are is not going to be solved with these shoes.

And what if the pair of QSTs gets wet? Not "ooh there's a puddle, let me step in it" wet, but "hey let's go play in the creek" wet. Face it, kids are messy and like to ruin expensive things. There has been no mention of how much water damage these shoes can sustain before they go kaput.

Besides, for less than $65 parents could buy a better-looking pair of New Balance sneakers and spend the rest on cross-country training to teach their kids to outrun those pesky sexual predators.



Information for this post was obtained from the Kelli Kennedy (AP) article "GPS Sneakers Can Provide Piece of Mind."