Earth prepares a Martian armada

For decades when mankind peered at the red planet, he wondered whether an alien race might be peering back at Earth. Back then the question wasn’t whether or not life was there, but whether or not it was plotting the Earth’s destruction (Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator anyone?).

Today, we know that Martian life – if it exists at all – is going to be a little single cell and not a little green man. Although this eliminates the worry that a Martian race (fleeing their dying world) will launch an armada hell-bent on our destruction, it does make finding life on Mars a good deal harder.

Our weird and wanderful poles

You can’t see it, smell it or touch it but you’d better hope we never lose it. If we did, the results would be catastrophic.

At best, a million orienteering boy scouts would become hopelessly lost as compasses suddenly had nothing to point at. Unrestrained solar radiation would sterilise the planet’s surface more assuredly than a Domestos dip, ending life as we know it.

... a month or so late

Almost 400 years ago, German astronomer Johannes Kepler observed comet tails being blown by what he thought to be a solar breeze. This inspired him to suggest that ‘ships and sails proper for heavenly air should be fashioned’ to glide through space.

Nearly three centuries later, in his novel From The Earth To The Moon, the great science fiction novelist Jules Verne speculated that one day light might be used ‘as a mechanical agent’ to propel a spacecraft between the planets.

Since then, the invention of rocketry has left the idea of a ‘solar sail craft’ languishing, cobwebbed in the worlds of whimsy and science fiction – after all, the idea that light could somehow push a spacecraft, like a ship on an ocean wind, to distant planets is just absurd, isn’t it?