People drew a very clear lesson from the extraordinary photograph
An extraordinary image beamed back from the planet Mars has left many people sharing the same reaction.
The picture was one of the latest batch sent back by the Perseverance Rover as it makes its lonely way across the surface of the Red Planet.
One thing which sticks out about the picture is the image quality – it is of a similar quality to a picture of a landscape that someone might take on Earth.
To see somewhere so distant in such clarity, a horizon on a different planet, is an extraordinary moment.
But while the technical scope of the achievement is astonishing, many people on social media were drawing a very clear lesson from the photo coming back through the gulf of space.
NASA said the images from Mars were taken on November 30 (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
This was because the crystal clear snap showed just how bleak and barren the surface of Mars is in comparison to the rich and varied things we can see here on Earth.
While some, including Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are looking to space for a future for humanity, many people took one look at the desolate landscape on Mars and took a very different lesson – that the Earth is uniquely rich and in need of protection and care.
Taking to Reddit to share their thoughts, one person said: “Doesn’t look promising. Better take care of this place instead.”
A second commented: “Boring. Lame. The sky isn’t even blue. One star.”
Others shared the same view, with one saying it ‘looks like a great place not to live’, and another that it ‘looks a lot less cool than pictures of Earth’.
Many people thought the planet looked bleak (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Someone else simply wrote: “Looks depressing.”
Taking a more poetic approach, another Redditor compared it to the enormous variety of landscapes that are present on Earth.
“It’s just sand, rocks and the occasional bit of dry ice,” they said. “There’s no streams, no rain, no puddles or anything that we’d recognise as part of a living planet.”
Even NASA seemed to acknowledge the view, writing in its description of Mars on its website: “Mars is no place for the faint-hearted. It’s dry, rocky, and bitter cold.”
Despite being one of out closest neighbors in the Solar System, the images truly show just how rich the Earth is in comparison to the void around it.
It’s not the first time that space travel has caused us to reflect on the fragility of our home.
Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote how the famous picture ‘Pale Blue Dot’, taken by the Voyager probe as it left the Solar System, shows Earth as ‘dust suspended in a sunbeam’.
He penned: “Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
