Worms can live and reproduce in Mars soil

[toast]

7 hours ago, mackbolin said:

great....we spend millions of $$$$$$$$$$ to see if worms can screw on mars...yay.

Great, another one who didnt read the article/understood the project but feel forced to comment...yay.

[tmcom]

10 hours ago, ShadowSot said:

Hardly millions, maybe a thousand if they really pushed the envelope.

Its important for any future colonizing attempts. Worms are part of soil renewal for farming. 

Mars Curiosity costed a billion to get there, and then it mapped out a path from its origin to another place, avoiding anything dangerous, etc inbetween.

[ShadowSot]

On 12/5/2017 at 8:11 AM, tmcom said:

Mars Curiosity costed a billion to get there, and then it mapped out a path from its origin to another place, avoiding anything dangerous, etc inbetween.

It's done a lot more than just that, looking at its soil sampling data for example. 

 And I was replying to a post about this worm study. 

 And with a lot of the technology developed for this project that goes to the private sector it'll give returns on those investment, which is why NASA is one of the few government programs that turn a profit and increase cash flow. Those billion so odd dollars didn't em get sent to Mars, it was spent hiring and paying people to do a job. Those people being generally the sort who spend the money in their local towns or cities. 

 You get the cash flow there, and the innovation and future technologies that enter the public sphere for development. 

 And frankly on the scale of government spending a billion dollars isn't that much. Especially not went spent over many periods, the mission was a multi year project ending in the bill, not a single lump sum. It was spread over eight years of development. In that time period more money was spent on Halloween candy. 

[GlitterRose]

they've now produced their first offspring.

And they look like this...