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Mars is neat and all, being close to the earth and also a lot like earth, but it seems like we focus on it too much.

I understand the need for preparing a mission to mars with humans aboard, but why all the focus on the possibility of life on the barren planet. There are plans of sending a rover to mars whenever we could build some probes designed to look for life in other places.

http://www.space.com/searchforlife/060323_seti_biomes.html

a total of 8 worlds that could possibly support life, the only ones we've really explored are Earth and Mars.

Even venus is on the list, some hardy acidophiles could easily survive underground just like how our possible microbes on mars could survive.

Better yet, let's not dig, let's just take a drip to Enceledus or maybe Titan, where the trip to find microbes wouldn't be so hard, if we could put a rover on Titan no doubt we'd find a gigantic wealth of information even if the planet is dead.

We've only visited the surface of the Moon, Mars, and a very brief visit to Venus and Titan that don't really count. If we could be less focused on sending more and more rovers on mars just think of all the crazy things we could discover.

Yeah, I just wanted to show you this interesting link and also see what some of the members thought of the excess of focus (or lack of) directed towards mars.

EDIT: and what's this, pluto harboring life?

Not now, but in the far away future when the sun becomes a Red Giant and starts to eat whatever's in the inner solar system, including earth, pluto will be positioned so that temperatures on the ice cold world would be particularly warm, to the point where the temperature on the planet could very well be earthlike.

At least, that's what the computer models say.

During this period in the sun's evolution less UV rays are produced which means the need for an atmosphere is less important, but still necessary. It's believed that Pluto could harbor a thin atmosphere.

Of course we don't know if it really will harbor life, we just know that it can.

Who knows, in the far away future pluto may just be a miniature earth with little aliens walking about. We might even join them if we're alive and decide that earth's just a little bit too toasty.

the pluto thing?

Just look at it this way...

The sun will eventually turn into a red giant and then go nova in a few billion years, when it does turn into a red giant it will become much bigger, big enough to engulf the orbits of the inner solar system planets.

Funny thing is pluto is so far away that when the sun finally does turn into a red giant it will be situated far enough from the sun so that it doesn't get burned.

In fact, it may very well be like a miniature earth in terms of temperature.

See what I'm saying?

And the probes, unfortunately the only planet monitoring probe that hasn't reached it's destination yet is New Horizons, there's also the Cassini probe but it's already done it's duty and is just hanging around trying to see if it can't peer a little further into Titan's atmosphere.

Yeah, that another thing, the damn media.

They hardly pay any mind to the nation or the world's astronomy related activities, all people care about are politics and disasters, which is understandable, then they tune in to see how everyone's favorite celeb is doing some monotenous task.

Another thing that bothers me about Mars is how so many probes seem to be struck down by the atmosphere before they send any pictures.

Now just think for a second, if we applied some of the technology being used on Mars, the advanced cameras and rovers, and use it on other planets. What a wealth of information we'd gain.

It'd be really neat to give a more in dept look at Venus, luckily there's that MESSENGER probe that's being planed by ESA. It's the fact that Venus is exactly like Earth except for the fact that some event in it's history caused it to develop a much thicker atmosphere that choked anything on the surface. I often come up with the rather humerous idea of finding the ruins of an alien city on Venus that parallels our own give or take a few decades of achievement, a city fueled by fossil-fuels which caused runaway greenhouse to bake the planet.

But that's just silly.

What do you mean by probes not surviving long in the atmosphere due to gravity. The earth's atmosphere extends 600 miles above the surface, plenty of satelites exist there.

Really neat, eh? Even though space is technically only about 60 miles above earth the atmosphere extends much further away.

As for Venus, it's not 700 Degrees Kelvin, it's 700 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still hot.

But, after I did a little search on Venus to learn more about I came up with some interesting information. The temperature in the clouds is only -50 degrees Fahrenheit, making life in it's clouds very much possible, especially after we found carbonyl sulfide in it's clouds, which is usually a sign of life.

Luckily the ESA are sending a probe to the planet to get a better picture of the planet, maybe then we can learn more about our sister planet.

As for the other planets, mercury isn't a big concern, but we could still go there if we wanted to. I didn't mean we should actually explore the gas giants by sending a probe right into their atmosphere, even though that would be an interesting thought. There have been some interesting theories of giant floating creatures the size of Iceland living on Jupiter, but exploring a gas giant would mean a kamikaze mission straight into it and allow it to get crushed by all the pressure. We should still explore the moons to see what we could find on there, as we've learned from Cassini there's so much to learn on these moons.

On Triton, in orbit around Neptune, the moon has plenty of water, but it's so cold that life could never live there. But we could still send a probe there to see what interesting secrets we could gather from the moons.

That's why we should scout the moons, we know so little about them, there's so much we could find on the tiny little moons.

Mars has an atmosphere as well, one that has downed plenty of probes so far, ESA's beagle wasn't the only probe to fall.

We've spent so much money on mars, a lot of that money is pretty much wasted should a probe fail to tackle mars' atmosphere, maybe it's time to diversify our space program.

Once we can that is, right now congress isn't being cooperative. At least NASA was able to ressurect the Dawn probe, no we can scout the Trojan asteroids near jupiter.

depleting?

No, we have a fixed amount of water, it's just that we have more people to deal with nowadays. There's also the fact that with rising temperatures the water is less reluctant to form a liquid when it could simply remain in the sky as vapor.

Ah, now that's another thing.

You see, mars is an incredibly tricky planet to monitor through probes, most of the satellites and probes we've sent there have crashed due to the weak atmosphere messing with them while they try to enter orbit.

With NASA's funding being cut, it seems risky to send another probe their just to be shot down by the "Martian Vampire" a nickname for the phenomena that has downed so many probes.

It saddens me how NASA has cancelled such important missions such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, yet there might be hope if we shifted some of the work on a few Mars projects towards these unfortunate programs.

The Dawn mission barely made it out without getting cancelled itself, luckily it managed to avoid the chopping board.