Can Curiosity Spark Our Own?

We are two days away from the much anticipated landing of the Mars rover Curiosity. It’s mission is to see whether Mars has been or could be indicative to microbial life. I’m a space junkie…when my counterparts wanted to become teachers and doctors growing up, I told people I wanted to be an astronomer. Now, although I took a slightly different path, I still get some kicks from the latest space news. Mars has always been home to our interest. We write books and make movies about the life we envision on it. How did we know even then that it would be the biggest chance for alternative life in our system? Did we look into our telescopes even then and see something that mirrored what we knew?

Our space program is all but disassembled, a relic of an era where we looked to the stars for our inspirations instead of towards the beliefs of the fast-food chain down the street. Aptly named Curiosity, this little rover holds just that, the spark of wanting to learn for the sake of learning. Whatever we find on the planet won’t change much, but it might give us more understanding of life in this universe. Half a century ago we would all have been crowded around a communal television or a radio to anxiously await the landing and findings. We would be bolstered by the sheer magnitude that we shot something into space, let it travel to another planet and collect/report what it finds! Now it goes by almost unnoticed, eclipsed by what? What dispute takes intergalactic first? Chick-a-filet? Whether that Olympic win is because of drugs? Find your curiosity again.