Mars

The latest thing to blow my mind is this photo book of Mars I found at the library. It's brand new, so far as I could tell. It's this huge coffee table book full of glossy full color photos of Martian landscapes taken by the most recent rover.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like it's time to reevaluate the human condition. For the first time in history we can go to a store and leaf through a book filled with photos from another planet! I mean, there have been pictures of Mars and other planets, including some pretty breathtaking ones of Earth, taken by satellites for years. But these are pictures taken on the surface, of rusty rocks and rolling martian dunes, and close-ups of odd geological formations printed in false color for mineral analysis that look so familiar and alien at the same time that it invokes this odd sense of vertigo. The most bizarre thing, possibly, and the one that really drives the whole thing home is that there are all these pictures the rover took of its own tracks. You can see where it disembarked from its solar platform and wheeled around exploring the vicinity, zig-zagging treadmarks in the rusty dust that has probably remained undisturbed for billions of years. Those are human footprints in a way, but so much more cold and remote... Maybe it's the knowledge that the conditions there are so hostile that no life could possibly exist that makes it so intriguing. Or maybe its all that space that separates us from there. In any case it hits me in the gut like not many things do.