Gun Nation

Guns On Mars!

November 21, 2011

Gun control advocates may be very very angry, but the militarization of Mars has begun. Only not really. The latest Mars rover, Curiosity, comes—I mean goes in peace. Make that piece. As in pieces of rock. ocregister.com reports that Curiosity sallies forth with a laser gun to help determine if there was (rather than is) life on Mars. “The rock laser, called the ChemCam, will shoot into interesting rocks and actually burn them,” according to John Grotzinger, chief scientist for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “The burning creates a ‘plasma.’ By analyzing the light from the plasma, the rover can determine what the rock is made of.” And if the rover has next gen AI software, it probably knows that ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which humans should not put. And here’s hoping the Twitter bird asphyxiates in short order. Just sayin’ . . .

9 COMMENTS

Joe nobody November 21, 2011 At 10:39

Militirization? Its funny, im reading the martian chronicles for a school project where there actually are guns on mars.
JRP November 21, 2011 At 11:09

I’ve always wondered where gun rights would end up in the future. Whenever there is a colony on Mars do you think they will allow the colonists to have guns? For that matter, why is it in most every Sci-Fi series that merchant/trader ships are unarmed? Civilian ships are looking to arm themselves today, I bet in a couple hundred years time that almost every space ship will have some sort of armament.
Sean November 21, 2011 At 11:17

From the perspective of tiny martians, the rover is the equivalent of the machines in War of the Worlds.
Joe nobody November 21, 2011 At 11:32

I wonder what ballistics will be like on mars. There is more gravity so we will probably switch to lighter faster loads.
- JRP November 21, 2011 At 11:52
  
  Mars has a little over a third of the surface gravity than Earth and the atmosphere is far less dense. Therefore firearms will have much greater range on Mars than on Earth.
  - Joe nobody November 21, 2011 At 13:57
    
    Really? Thanks for clearing that up.
Arthur Steadman November 21, 2011 At 11:56

I bet that picture is Photo-shopped.
BLAMMO November 21, 2011 At 12:48

… ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which humans should not put.

Where did you hear that from?
irock350 November 21, 2011 At 17:47

Ending sentences with prepositions is acceptable in English and is completely doable unlike Spanish where it is impossible to end a sentence with a preposition. It is not an impossibility nor does the sentence break down and become incoherent, it is only unfashionable because the Grammarians who wrote the grammar books did not have a firm grasp on the language they sought to change. If you look at the sentence in question it’s meaning is clear and readable. However, if you removed “of” from the end of the sentence the sentence is no longer coherent.