Let’s Go to Mars!

Dreams of colonizing Mars (and beyond) came into the spotlight this week when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced their 100-year Starship Study.  The study, a joint effort between DARPA and NASA Ames Research Center, will evaluate the feasibility of colonizing Mars and possibly (eventually) even other solar systems.  This announcement has come with concrete proposals including plans to introduce synthetic life for terraforming, build robots that can be launched from Mars’s moons, develop one-way missions to send a few humans to settle permanently on Mars, and of course,

The one thing that defines us all!

The one thing that is common to all people, no matter where they are coming from or how they see the world is the gene structure that defines each and every one of us. Due to our genes we are always defined as humans. But what makes humans human? An ordinary answer to that question would be manifold and include our ability to think, to talk and to reason. Our ability to produce things for use but also for pleasure, like music, make us human and in this regard great musicians, like Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart are even more human than certainly I ever will be. But there is another sense to this question.