Jonathan Jones has been staring at Mars (through the eyes of Curiosity) and getting a sinking feeling about Earth. I'm guessing he probably didn't write that daft headline. Mars has, still, given him a total perspective vortex moment:

Mars is a beautiful place, as this picture shows, but it is majestically dead. The universe appears to be full of places like that. What no one has so far found much trace of is a place like this: a planet that jumps with life. Earth is a miracle, quite possibly the greatest miracle in the entire cosmos. It is now proven beyond any reasonable doubt that we are playing dangerously with the very fabric of that miracle, endangering the biological balances of our amazing world. Endangering ourselves. In this picture we look on a dead world. Do those silent strata reveal the Martian past, or our future?

Commenters have been picking up on the factual accuracy of that last point, but that isn't what he's saying, I don't think. It's a specific sense of incredulity mixed with, maybe, a suspicion that this must surely all be a VR computer game simulation. There's a lot of it about at the moment as everyone wonders what possible curve the gradient of arctic sea ice extent is going to describe, given where it's pointing right now.

Curiosity's insane landing (still gives me goosebumps, that video) offered a vicarious sense of achievement: we did that! Humans, that is. I am technically of the same species as Jazz musician turned rocket scientist Adam Steltzner. I've been using every new pic sent back as my desktop like I'm about five. It's just mindblowing. This image of an open plain stretching to distant mountains is still my favourite - I can imagine setting off towards them, exactly as Curiosity is planned to.

But give it a hundred years, how will we see Curiosity? She'll still be sat there - likely long dead from wear and tear and the Martian weather despite her nuclear battery. Still, that human-made metal, wire, heatpump, code will be on the Martian surface for thousands of years. If she could look back to Earth in a hundred or two hundred, what would she see?

As Jones says, `Earth is a miracle, quite possibly the greatest miracle in the entire cosmos.' That miracle will still be seething with life; it's weathered plenty of extinction events as it will the latest one. But is there going to be any place for a species capable of putting robots on Mars? Are we capable of the seemingly impossible, stopping ourselves from unravelling the web of our civilisation?

Hmm. I appear to be developing a habit of going off on Jeremiads. I'll attempt to get some actual content into upcoming posts...