Wait,I forgot due to its distance from the sun the temperature there is more than 100 degrees below zero most places at night and impossible for life as we know it to survive.
Why are we determined to waste money on such foolishness.I`m sorry but mankind cannot live there.
I'm sorry but that is very short sited on your part.
There are several ways that Mars "theoretically" could be made habitable for human life. I don't have the time to relate all of them, but for starters we can thicken the atmosphere by melting the caps or by using comets and slamming them purposefully into the planet bringing water an CO2 to the atmosphere. We can also bioengineer plants to subsist on the current and later thickened atmosphere to produce oxygen.
With current technology we have the basic know how it is merely a matter of scale and developing the engineering to do it.
Actually, Carl, it's the other way around. Assuming there was life on Mars a billion or so years ago, it was the greenhouse effect (caused by water vapor and CO2) which would have made the temperature moderate enough to support life. As the water vapor left the atmosphere (probably trapped in permafrost beneath the surface, and at the poles), it was less able to trap the heat, the surface got colder, and away went any life that might have arose.
Why are we determined to waste money on such foolishness. I`m sorry but mankind cannot live there.
It's not foolishness at all. Mankind can indeed live on Mars and must if we are going to survive. President Bush has exactly the right idea; not only will the effort to get to Mars (and back to the Moon) spin-off innumerable technologies that will benefit us here on Earth (you like all that technology that uses transistors? Thank Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo), it also is a worthy goal unto itself, opening up an entirely new realm of human endeavor.
Now THAT is a legacy that will span the ages. When Clinton is a single line in some history book from the year 2500, it will be remembered that Bush not only REALLY opened up space development to private enterprise (Congress just passed the bill last week; Bush will certainly sign it), but also set the national goal on the road to the expansion of humanity throughout the stars.
Actually at the equator in summer it gets up to about 70 degrees. Not bad at all, you just need oxygen.
It's just a matter of time. Probably not in our lifetimes but eventually Mars will be terra-formed with an atmoshpere much like Earth's.
It gets so cold there because the atmosphere is so thin. We have just the opposite issue on Venus, which has a massive atmosphere and a resulting hot atmosphere. Venus is the closest planet to earth and almost the exact same size.
If we're talking about past life on a nearby planet, it's more likely that it existed on Venus. Unfortunately, it is so hot there we would never be able to do any research.
Distance from the sun is less a factor in the dramatic temperature shifts on Mars than the absence of a significant atmosphere. With an atmosphere full of greenhouse gases, solar energy would be retained, and Mars would have a much more stable temperature range, possibly quite livable.