I don't know about you guys, but I am intrigued every time I see what the surface of Mars looks like - let alone any other planet. Link to a site with high resolution images of Mars. Be sure to download the .TIFF's if you can: Images taken by the Mars Pathfinder Lander Spacecraft But not just Mars. even. Look at the other places we have landed (Excluding the moon for now - not that the moon isn't cool). The first three images are from the surface of Mars. Average temp (at landing site) is 200 degrees below zero. The warmest it gets (at the Equator) is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The fourth picture (The black and white ones that are side by side) are from the Venera Lander that the Russians managed to land on Venus in the 80's. This is the best pic available. The surface is so hot (around 800 degrees Fahrenheit!) that the lander didn't make it past an hour until it melted. The 5th picture is one of my favorites. It's the surface of Titan - one of Saturn's many moons. Titan actually has a really thick fucking atmosphere - and it's a moon! The average temperature on Titan is about -300 degrees Fahrenheit. But it actually rains on Titan. Yup. It rains liquid hydrocarbons like Methane and I believe Ethane. The rain falls at about 1/3 of the speed as rain falls on Earth because of Titan's atmosphere... There are also lakes on Titan - one even as big as Lake Michigan of Liquid Methane. If a moon orbiting a Gas Giant like Saturn can have an atmosphere, then could a Pandora really exist? Fuck yeah, it can: We all know our Sun is a regular star, and there are trillions beyond trillions out there. We found the first "Exoplanet" (planets that are not in our solar system, but orbit other stars) about 20 years ago. Since then we have found over 400 - and we're finding them quicker and quicker - exponentially. All but 2 of those Exoplanets that have been found are all Gas Giants and Super Gas Giants (even bigger than Jupiter), and even "Hot Jupiters". Hot Jupiters are so close to their stars that their surface temperatures are about 2 or even 3 thousands degrees Fahrenheit! They say that it rains molten rock literally like it rains water here. The other 2 are called Super Earths. One is even in "The Habitable Zone" (Gliese 581c or d). It may be a waterworld - a planet that is only water. We haven't found any "Exomoons" yet, but we will shorty. Check out "Kepler" - the telescope they just shot up into space last year to find planets - maybe even directly image them. Another one worth mentioning is Europa - one of Jupiter's moons. They say it's covered with ice and there is an ocean made of liquid h20 underneath that ice (under about 5 miles of ice). They are also saying that there could be life (weird sea-creatures) in that ocean... Last picture is Europa. Look at the lines criss-crossing the moon. I don't see many craters - if any. That's nuts! So yeah, cool shit. The universe is fucking awesome! And as far as the planets, I've always wished I could like smoke a blunt on another planet. That would be the shit! Who else here digs Mars and the other planets?
Is always interesting to me that the only reason we haven't found a Earth 2.0 is more because we don't have the instruments that are sensitive enough to detect planets of that size yet. It's why they found either the gas giants or smaller planets really close to their sun, the technique they used these were the easiest to see. Of course in the past few years and in the next few there will be a lot more up in space that can have the sensitivities that we would need to detect the things we are looking for (Earth sized planets, gravity waves, the cosmic background radiation in finer detail etc.) Europa is very cool to me, those lines are supposedly from the "sea ice" moving around because of the gravitation from the planet. Which is suppose to keep the core of the moon active enough that it might have life underneath all that water. I love to light up a blunt and watch the different parts of the Cosmo's with Carl Sagan. About as close as I can come to actually being there and burning one But yea, I can defiantly dig it.