NASA's Mars Capsule: I feel a rant coming on...

It costs something more than a million dollars per pound (NOT kilos!) to land things on Mars. People need to breathe and eat and come home again, hopefully, and that makes it impractical to send them there in the first place - or the second place, or even the third place. Just don't do it, Clyde! Why not?

Because the robotic technology we've got now and will have even better later can do this much cheaper and safer than a crew of emotionally unstable people. Have you ever viewed Earth from Mars? Would you like to? Here's a very good approximation of that, using Stellarium, the planetarium program for your PC....

It's not easy being 'homesick' on a foreign planet, when you can hardly see the home planet you came from, and yes, Virginia, this one we're standing on at the moment we're taking this picture is all beach and no ocean. The oceans left for outer space about 3.5 billion years ago, and these days, we call them Comets. Any questions?

Mars is probably a good example of what happens to a stable atom when it gets bombarded with a foreign particle which collides with one of its electrons, and scatters debris in all directions, leaving only the major portion of the formerly molten core of the punctured 'electron' behind when the smoke clears. Welcome to the space/time continuum, Kiddies... stay tuned for further developments.