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From what I recall, she keeps on going on about the beauty of the empty landscape, and the possibility of martian life is mentioned less often.
Who is she?
http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/d/content/ann-clayborne-2
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A variant on this features prominently (through one of the main characters/factions) in Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars trilogy.
From what I recall, she keeps on going on about the beauty of the empty landscape, and the possibility of martian life is mentioned less often.
Sci-fi scenario: We find evidence of microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was briefly a warm, wet place. Decades hence, a researcher realizes that Mars still has microbial life, but that it has evolved as its environment has, so it's as arid and rarefied as its present atmosphere, wispy and almost not there. Sadly, she realizes that human activity has already doomed it to extinction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A variant on this features prominently (through one of the main characters/factions) in Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars trilogy.
From what I recall, she keeps on going on about the beauty of the empty landscape, and the possibility of martian life is mentioned less often.
Also some characters begin to spread earth life already in the first book. So if they would find Martian life after this event it could be just mutated Earth life...
Sci-fi scenario: We find evidence of microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was briefly a warm, wet place. Decades hence, a researcher realizes that Mars still has microbial life, but that it has evolved as its environment has, so it's as arid and rarefied as its present atmosphere, wispy and almost not there. Sadly, she realizes that human activity has already doomed it to extinction.
A variant on this features prominently (through one of the main characters/factions) in Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars trilogy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A variant on this features prominently (through one of the main characters/factions) in Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars trilogy.
Caution: I found the Red Mars trilogy excruciatingly boring. YMMV.
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This is a quite likely scenario since collective human activity has so far spelled doom to most species other than humans and our parasites, commensals and domesticated species. If we are serious about researching or preserving alien life in our solar system, we would have to be very cautious with what we do. But most likely, economic forces will start to dominate our actions in space, as they have always done on Ear…
> But most likely, economic forces will start to dominate our actions in space, as they have always done on Earth. Perhaps most advanced intelligence comes in the form of distributed hive minds, and something like a "civilization" is regarded by most sentients as something akin to a pack of wolves or an uncontrolled mob? Maybe we're the ultimate ethical dilemma: All of the bad qualities of a cancer, but you can't eth…
Manufacturing spacecraft capable of traveling between the stars in any reasonable amount of time, if possible at all, would be an immense industrial undertaking, the pinnacle of not just scientific knowledge but societal complexity in order to coordinate the resources involved. Any alien race capable of doing these things must have also committed the sins that they're smugly damning us for, and to a far greater degree than we have.
My guess, efflorescence formations.