8 Things You Need To Know About NASA Finding Water On Mars

We will almost certainly head off-world at some point, and the first place we'll go is probably Mars. However, when we do go off world, it will mainly be because we can (because, why the hell not?), and because we have gathered enough information remotely. 

The good thing about being able to send unmanned rovers to Mars, apart from being much cheaper, is that we are able to gather information before we essentially bowl up and ruin everything. It doesn't matter how much you scrub behind those ears, you're never going to be completely sterile. We can't even get our spacecraft completely sterile after exposing them to the killer radiation of outer space, and you can exactly expose humans to that stuff anyway.

The presence of humans on Mars will only increase the likelihood of contamination, potentially scuppering our ability to study it as a virgin planet, so a manned mission might not be something we want to charge into.

At this stage in the game, gathering information of the planet's surface remotely is probably more beneficial that standing someone on the surface. Once we have a better grasp of what, if there are any, Martian microbes look like, we might stand a chance of being able to differentiate them from Earth ones once we take our germy old bodies up there.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that this is a big discovery, but it's not a game changer that suddenly means we should be rushing to colonise other planets. It's essentially confirmation of something that the NASA scientists have suspected for a long time.