Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact, it’s cold as Hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man

– Elton John

I love being alive right now. The wealth of information and the amazing pictures our space programs bring us now make me marvel at the world the same way I did when I thumbed through encyclopedia when I was eight years old. That’s how old I feel – with all the magic turned on – when I look at the pictures below.

These were taken by the Mars rover Curiosity. At dusk, the Earth and the Moon are visible in the Martian sky as bright as Venus, the evening star, is from Earth.

A human with normal vision would see a bright star in the sky, with a tiny mote right next to it. The bright star is the Earth, and the mote is our Moon.

The picture above is such a picture. If you click on it to enlarge it, you will see the tiny pixel that is the Earth, as seen from about 99 million miles away, approximately the same distance as the Sun is away from the Earth.

You can’t even see the moon without zooming in. Here is a zoom:

Here is the Moon. I am even getting a chill looking at the mountain range on the bottom. These are mountains on Mars, and WE CAN SEE THEM.

For more information, visit the NASA website here.

On that little dot is where we all are, every one of us. We were all on that tiny spot when the rover took this picture a few months ago. Can you see yourself? Do your problems look small from this distance?

How about anthropogenic climate change? There are actually people in our U.S. Congress who are willing to bet the welfare of this tiny world because they don’t want to take precautionary measures, just in case they are wrong. And all for money for big oil, big coal, and big automotive.

I am in awe like an eight-year-old that I can see these pictures and I am proud of our science and technology that makes it all possible.