Can it really be 40 years?

Forty years ago tonight, I sat in front of a radio listening to Neil Armstrong descending the Eagle to the surface of Mare Tranquilitatis, Sea of Tranquility, on the moon. Much has been written since then, and much will be written in the future of man's first steps onto an extraterrestrial body. Barring some huge disaster, we will eventually set foot on Mars; by even the most modest predictions back in the 1970s, that should have happened 20 years ago.

I won't sit and moan over what could have, or should have been. I will say only that NASA, and especially a group of roughly 35 men over the course 10 years, fired the imagination of a generation of boys (and some girls) to look outward beyond our own world and see the entire solar system as their own to conquer.

Someday we will get there, but it won't be this year or next. Even I may not live to see it, but I hope to at least live long enough to see mankind set foot on Mars.

I look at this way: creating life is a function of the universe. We may find evidence of past life on Mars, we may even find evidence of present life on Mars. I am almost certain we will find life on Europa, Callisto, Iapetus, and maybe even Titan. Indeed, I would think of Titan as the most likely home of something that may be recognizable as life, although in that environment it would have to breathe methane and eat rock (or something with oxides) to be anything remotely like our carbohydrate-based life. This life, of course, would have to be radically different from the 20 amino acids common to all life on Earth. They would have to have far lower activation temperatures. The discovery of extremophiles on Earth has given me confidence that I can make these predictions and feel relatively safe about them. Creatures live on this planet where we would be parboiled and/or crushed into jelly. Why can't life exist where it's much colder?