This is cool, neat, and intellectually inspiring: a new method has been proven to identify organic compounds and water far, far away, and awesome images are being beamed back from Mars. But surely, that is not the purpose of the massive ESA and NASA budgets. I mean, there’s a lot of other cool stuff that we can spend our money on. So why are we spending so much money on space exploration? As the Wired article implies, the only patriotic thing to do is to demand that the Mars program not be ramped down! Clearly.

The Best of Kathryn Muratore