8 Things You Need To Know About NASA Finding Water On Mars
3. Can We Send People?
People often leap straight onto sending humans out there to boldly go and split infinitives that no man has split before.
This was no less evident in watching the NASA conference, during which many of the media pundits asked questions relating to where this puts us in terms of sending humans to Mars (I'm talking about that "Let's talk about astronauts" incident).
This, however, might be somewhat missing the point.
The water on Mars would be a leap forwards in terms of sending humans, we could purify it for drinking water, break it down to produce oxygen and even make rocket fuel out of it (meaning that we wouldn't have to take all of our own with us).
All very exciting, but the discovery of water is actually much more than whether or not Mars could support us humans when we inevitably rock up there (which we undoubtedly will), it is actually much more intriguing in terms of our investigations into life in the rest of the universe.
The point about contamination was brought up at the conference, and this is a large part of the reason why we don't want to be sending our boys up there just yet.