Come to Australia - we got loads of this stuff out back. You can drive for days through this terrain and see no one.

"Well, I'm not going that way. It's much too rocky. This way is much easier."

Thanks for the link to the 3-part analysis. Just saw it - it's okay, but most of us genre nerds knew it was playing on two levels. Mainstream American critics didn't get it that it was also a pisstake of America Fuck Yeah.
Great movie - probably my favourite PV flick.

Medical health / longevity is a separate issue to the decline in transit times.
Even today, we continue to gain two years of life every decade. That is, if you have a child in a decade, he'll live 2 years longer (statistically) than if you have the child now. That's been the case for several decades and we still don't fully understand why... probably a combination of improving hygiene, nutrition, effective medicine, etc.

Something to ponder next time you're stuck in traffic running your 1890s internal-combustion engine.... 

Actually transport technology progressed steadily for 500 years. From square rigged sails to lateen sails that allow sailing into the wind, improvements in navigation (e.g. longitude) that prevented getting lost or shipwrecked, mapping of currents & winds to optimize travelling times, steam engines from the 1820s which were continually made more efficient, and railways got steadily faster throughout the 19th century, etc.

Chemical rockets are the best part of 100 years old now, and the engineers assure us they've extracted all the efficiency that is possible out of them. There are other propulsion systems once you get into space (e.g. ion) but as yet there's no replacement for rockets to provide the thrust to launch off Earth's gravity well.

In other words, our generation is the first for 500 years where transport technology has stagnated, so that A to B times remain the same from the day we were born to the day we die.

Horse - Steam - Internal Combustion Engine - Jet - Rocket. We've still no clue what the successor is. A space elevator using carbon nanotubes? After >10 years of working on carbon nanotubes, they can't make them longer than an inch or so.

So when seen in this light, MSL is not some radical step on a ladder of progress that'll see us walking on Mars next decade. It's a modest improvement over Viking, after 35 years, which is a greater interval than when we went from WWII plane to walking on the Moon.

I'm just trying to zoom out and place MSL into the big-picture context, which is an antidote to some of the recent hyperbole. I've nothing against MSL. In fact, I'm full of admiration for the engineering marvel that it is. I wish there could be MSL rovers all over the solar system bring us HQ data from worlds we haven't explored yet e.g. Triton, Titan, Europa, Enceladus, Mercury, etc.

It is great. I'm so looking forward to all new HD colour and 3D images.

My point about it being done before was not to take anything away from this engineering accomplishment, merely to point out the slowing rate of progress. Let me put it another way... here are three gaps...

1. Wright Brothers to the Spitfire propeller fighter plane
2. Spitfire to Viking
3. Viking to MSL Curiosity

All three gaps are 35 years each. When stated like this, it's sobering that progress has ground to a halt.
When MER landed in 2004, JPL's program was to launch something (orbiter or lander) to Mars every 2 years (that's how often the optimal launch window occurs). So there was MRO and Phoenix. But then MSL got delayed and there's nothing in the pipeline afterwards, so even that modest goal has been abandoned. Since the GFC, most western governments are broke. The glory days of the 1960s and 70s were when income taxes were well above 60% so the government had money to throw at big projects like Apollo and Voyager and Viking, etc. Is the private sector going to take over? Will China take over? You be the judge.

My conclusion: As much as I'd like see it happen, we're not going to see a man on Mars in our grandchildren's lifetime. We might get a sample return, but we already have Mars rocks on Earth.

I've heard it - it's okay. I laughed a few times. I think Mike is trying to raise funds for his movie, hence these commentary tracks. 2 hours of geek humour.

Viking had specific life-detection experiments on board, while MSL doesn't. MSL has much better spectrometers, etc. And it's mobile, but its only one rover, whereas Viking analyzed two separate sites.

So yes, one can quibble that MSL is better overall, but then again it's 35 years later. You'd expect it to. I guess it's a glass half-full or half-empty interpretation. If you told the Viking team back in the 1970s that the next specific life-detection mission won't be for another 40-50 years, I guess they'd be disappointed with that rate of progress. Neil deGrasse Tyson is constantly whining that all we're doing is more-or-less redoing what we did in the past. We'll see. Let's hope that MSL rocks(!) and finds something earth-shattering, so to speak.

If all we get is yet another headline "NASA discovers evidence for past water on Mars'... you know, that's kinda lame after seeing that headline after the last seven missions.

It's interesting that while the overall direction of prudishness has been improving over the last century, around the 1980s onwards, it split i.e. there was a reversal back into puritanism when it came to nudity, but graphic violence continued to get much more frequent & realistic. But recently, both have declined again in mainstream cinema (most tentpoles are PG-13). I was surprised how sanitized TDKR was.

Before we get too carried away, we did all this (and a lot more) in the 1970s. Viking was TWO craft (similar mass to MSL) that rocketed down to the surface of Mars, both successful, and both lasted a long time. And they were looking for life. 35 years ago.

MSL has the advantage of being mobile, but it's only one and it's more a geologist/chemist than a life-detection mission.

That's to take nothing away from an absolutely awe-inspiring feat of engineering, but in the 1960/70s, there was even more ambition and scale.

Think of how many Curiosity rovers we could have got for the cost of the F-22 Raptor program (a fighter jet that never flew and is now cancelled, at a cost of $67 billion)... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_M … -22_Raptor

well, the two year delay in the MSL program was worth it if it lead to this flawless landing. I had my doubts but JPL pulled it off again. Can't wait for the HD panorama!

America does Mars better than the Europeans and Russians and Japanese, all whose recent missions have failed.

Now that the landing system has been demonstrated to work, send another few MSL v2.0 rovers. for half the cost. Land one in the Valles Marineris. We're not getting any younger here.

MSL has only 1.7% chance of failure...   
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/do … iking.html