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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 8209219" data-attributes="member: 710">As I am getting older, I can't get as excited as I used to be about these things, but I still feel these are quite important missions.The universe is ridiculously big. We know so little about it. We should always try to learn more about it. And the idea that we might figure out more about the past, present or future potential of life on Mars is pretty amazing actually. Hearing our first sounds from Mars is crazy. And the new video material is impressive. We've really come a long way. I don't believe that Mars will be something we will realistically colonize (at least not in the sense the Expanse did), but just trying to solve the problems of building stuff that survives there for long, and potentially having some kind of outpost there (or on the Moon) is going to also help us solve problems on Earth. Pretty much anything really bad that could happen to Earth or rather the ecosystem we rely on, be it climate change, supervolcano, nuclear holocaust or asteroid strike, can probably benefit from what we're solving out there. And that's just the goal-oriented research. The stuff we figure out along the way might yield to completely new, unexpected developments. The early concepts of machines that can calculate stuff automatically naturally gave us the idea that we might have "thinking machines" at some point that could maybe translate stuff or solve complicated equations or store the world's knowledge or whatever, but few people imagined how it would transform how we live and work. And giving how far we still have to go in the realm of artificial intelligence and sapient robots - the "side benefits" and unpredicted transformations happened while we are still on our march toward some of those grand visions.On a side note: I just started watching "For All Mankind", and so far it has been really exciting view on a "what-could-have-been". It kinda brings me back to how I felt about research like this as a kid. It has of course an easier time because it's a "TV" show and things can happen that make compelling stories. I enjoy it a lot so far. It might stretch what was actually realistically possible in terms of space exploration back then (but I have no idea if it does), but it stays so close to it that so far it seems low to non-existent on the fictional science...</blockquote>

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