[nightdriver]

''No hedging needed. There was liquid water on Mars. Case closed,'' Kargel wrote in an e-mail message.

Right!!

With AVERAGE temperatures of -63 degrees, lots of water can exist in the liquid state!

All we gotta do is rewrite the laws of physics concerning water.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Somewhat OT, but with all the attention focused on colonizing Mars, I think we're forgetting another attractive candidate-Venus. It's closer, and it already has a thick atmosphere that would seem to make it easier to terraform, relatively speaking.

[Strategerist]

All we gotta do is rewrite the laws of physics concerning water.

Or maybe just realize the temperature on Mars used to be a lot higher than -63 degrees.

[Rebel_Ace]

"...''No hedging needed. There was liquid water on Mars. Case closed,'' Kargel wrote in an e-mail message.

Right!!
With AVERAGE temperatures of -63 degrees, lots of water can exist in the liquid state!
All we gotta do is rewrite the laws of physics concerning water."

Not exactly. The evidence strongly suggests that the Martian atmosphere was a great deal more dense in the past, and that over millions of years, the atmosphere leeched away, due to losses from the much lower Martian gravity. This means that in the past, with a thicker blanket of air, temperatures and pressures were higher, permitting liquid water to exist on the surface.

You can't just look at EXISTING conditions and assume that they are the same thoughout the geological history of a planet. Just look at Antartica. You can find fossils of temperate region plants and animals there. That's because, many millions of years ago, that continent was not located at the South Pole. Just because Antartica is cold and frozen TODAY does not mean that it was cold and frozen 150 million years ago.

[brazzaville]

Good evening.

"All we gotta do is rewrite the laws of physics concerning water."

Or warm the place up.

Michael Frazier