Gah, my brain does not feel like making words for my fingers to type right now.

I feel positively thick in the brain. My usual lightning crackle of thoughts is reduced to molasses on a slow boil being stirred by listless goblins in a minor cave under a forgettable mountain.

Nice to see that the metaphor factory is still churning out products as a fearsome rate, though. Apparently, those just come out of me like the carbon dioxide I breathe out. No special effort needed.

It would honestly take more energy to hold them back at this point, I assume.

At least I know why I am slower witted than usual right now. Judging by how thirsty I am, and the fact that I just got up from an afternoon nap, I am probably quite dehydrated.

I tend to sweat a lot when I sleep, and that goes at least double for when I sleep in the afternoon. And all that sweating depletes my body’s water supplies, so I wake up all dehydrated and incoherent and stupid.

But I have a big glass of water in easy reach now, and so over the next little while I will gradually hydrate myself and hopefully that will at least perk me up enough to be compis mentis.

What else. Well, here’s something I have been meaning to share for a few days now. I was originally going to put it in with the Friday Science stuff, but it’s not really a story unto itself, just something very cool related to science. So I will just stick it in here, now.

I was going to embed it all cool and integrated like, but the embed does not seem to want to work with this version of WordPress, so I will have to just link it like some caveman from the 90s instead.

Click this link to go to Mars.

Or as close to doing so that any of us will get any time soon, anyhow. Click the link, then click on the panorama, and boom, there you are on Mars.

Get your ass to Mars.

You can’t move around, but you can look around, and if your computer can handle it (mine almost can!), I highly recommend going fullscreen for the full effect.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? Boom. Mars. You are looking around just like you are sitting atop the Curiosity rover in your spacesuit, gawking.

What strikes me is how much like part of Earth this alien planet’s surface looks. It looks just like some slab of raw desert from some extremely arid part of Earth. Maybe a high mountain plateau somewhere, too high and too cold and too dry for anything to live there.

And it all looks so… muddy. I know it isn’t muddy… after all, mud requires water, and if there was that much water on Mars, it would basically be Earth or close to it.

But I look around and all I can think of is dry, cracked mud. And who knows, if the theory that Mars once had free flowing water on the surface is true (and the evidence is building on that), maybe that really was mud thousands or millions of years ago.

Still, it looks like it would be fun to walk on because it would go crunch under your feet in a very satisfying way.

Even the sky looks Earth-like. Looks like any overcast day in a dry part of the world. Sort of hazy and a little yellowish and totally opaque. I have seen skies like that.

And yet, there we are on an alien planet. I suppose I could be disappointed that it doesn’t look more, well, alien, but instead I find it fascinating.

It makes me wish we had something like Curiosity on the Moon. Surely that could not be that expensive, right? I mean the Earth is way closer to Earth than Mars, and there would be only a small communications delay, and it would take way less fuel, and there’s not any atmosphere to deal with or anything.

So how come we don’t have a semi-autonomous vehicle up there right now, rolling about and taking picture and mapping the surface and looking for water and all that good stuff?

It’s like we, as a species, just declared the Moon to be “like, SO over” and completely lost interest in it once we had been there. And that pisses me off.

We have this whole planet right next door to us that we could be exploring and colonizing and finding ways to turn a profit from, and we completely ignore it.

The only time you hear about it is when people are talking about using it as a launching pad for a trip to Mars. And don’t get me wrong, Mars is cool and all, and I totally want us to go there someday.

But we could be doing such cool stuff with the Moon right now, and instead we mostly ignore it.

Oh, one last cool thing to do while you are on Mars : point the camera nearly straight up, and gaze upon the tiny white ball that is the Sun.

Puny little thing, isn’t it? And its size is actually being exaggerated by the light scattering cause by atmospheric haze. In reality, if that haze was not there, it would just look like a very bright star.

Oh, but don’t get too excited by the white arrows on the ground, they just lead to other panoramas on the same site. Those are cool and all, but they are not Mars cool.

Well, one is, the panorama the Spirit rover took. Check that one out too. It actually has TWO colors!

That’s it for our trip to Mars for today. Makes sense that I wake up all dry from sweating too much in my sleep and then we go to the desert planet of Mars!

Kinda makes me want to read Dune again, actually.

It would only be the fifth time!