Seriously? Remember, we all started as microbes.

Finding any life outside our planet would be a huge discovery; even if it's billions of years away from growing legs, we could learn so much about life in its early stages, which could answer some big questions about our own evolution.

Most importantly, if life was found on Mars and it was convincingly shown to have had a separate origin to life on Earth (i.e. no panspermia) then this would severely impact upon our understanding of how common life in the universe is.

When we've only got one example and it's us, our estimate of the probability of life evolving on a given planet (given suitable conditions) could literally be anything from 100% to any arbitrarily low number you might like to think of.

If we check two life-plausible planets and find separate life on both, the probability is suddenly way biased towards the high end of the scale. (A statistician can figure that one out for me.)

True, but I'd rather send a fleet of robots over there and bottle 1000 different soil samples for later study, and then get on with terraforming the place, perhaps by crashing a comet into it. 'But what if we contaminate this otherwise pristine natural environment' seems to get trotted out in every discussion of Martian exploration and is (IMHO) slowing us down.

The International Space Station is the most expensive object humanity has ever built. You think that the reason we are slow at terraforming Mars is because we're debating about life there?! No. The reason we're slow is because it would take millennia and incomprehensible amounts of money.

I say we land there with humans, spend a few decades checking the place out, then begin with the terraforming.

You misunderstand me. The non-contamination argument is offered reflexively to any proposal for work on Mars - from sending more landers to manned exploration. It's an obstruction to funding and research, rather than to terraforming directly - just as news like this is an encouragement.

I do not think terraforming need be terribly expensive, incidentally. We already map a great number of asteroids and comets out of awareness that if a sufficiently large one were to hit the Earth its impact would be devastating. Our best understanding at present of how to deal with the possibility of such an impact is to give the item a slight nudge that will alter its trajectory during a non-terminal interaction with Earth's gravitational field. We have already matched speeds with and made very close observations of asteroids, and our observational abilities are constantly improving. So to begin the work of terraforming Mars, I would begin looking for asteroids with large quantities of ice (or ammonia or other appropriate compounds) that are likely to intersect closely with Mars' orbit, and give them an encouraging nudge.

It annoys me that since the two rovers we've sent so far have worked so well, our response is to spend years developing a New and Better Rover at great expense, rather than launching launching a large number of rovers that use the existing design which is already known to work, and which can be done without any additional research whatsoever.

I was under the impression that Mars once had an atmosphere, but its lack of a strong magnetic field means that the solar winds sweep that all away. If true, that means that terraforming would have to involve 'jump-starting' Mars' magnetic field, which would probably involve a great deal more difficulty.

Wait that tin can floating around above us is the most expensive thing we've built? Wow, that's sort of kills all the dreams of things like building an enterprise size ship in space for a long while.

I guess it's a function of cheap transport to LEO. If we get that, other things will follow. Go Space X!

Perhaps World of Warcraft is appropriate for your level of interests.

I remember brining up a theory on reddit about how rice agriculture had a profound influence on Japanese culture, and this idiot chimes in with "Japanese like to cooperate because they had AGRICULTURE?" Basically, his entire concept of agriculture was a point in a tech tree in a strategy game. (Hence no differentiation between agriculture in the wheat fields of Western Europe vs. rice paddies in Japan.)

In some ways, modern life does leave us out of touch with the complexities of the world and nature.

How would Japan be different if they had developed wheat agriculture instead?

From vague memory of an article read years ago:

Rice was a lot more labor intensive in that it required more time in the field per food-for-one-person than wheat. It also doesn't store as well nor have bumper crops. So, if you have a bad year, it's hard to have a buffer with which to get by. As a result, the vast majority of the population had to get over themselves, cooperate and comply with spending most of their lives taking care of the rice or else people would starve. Troublemakers who did not cooperate were putting everyone else in clear, near-term risk and were dealt with harshly.

Malcolm Gladwell thinks that they wouldn't study as hard in school because wheat grows itself.