This Tourism Ad for Mars Wraps With a Bleak Jolt of Reality
On Feb. 18, NASA's Perseverance Rover landed on Mars… and immediately began tweeting about it, which made us wonder whether robots deserve to inherit the Earth after all. (We're kidding. Obviously a human team is doing the tweets; Perseverance doesn't care. It's busy off-roading, taking cool pics and collecting rocks to send back home. Vacationing, basically.) Perseverance's arrival, after seven months of travel, makes the race to put people on Mars feel more urgent. It's not just a NASA or SpaceX ambition; China and the United Arab Emirates are also eyeing the Red Planet. And nobody seems ...