What was it the old salts use to say about who and what conquered the seven seas? Iron men and wooden ships, not wooden men and iron ships. - Robert Zubrin

Perhaps the question was premature in Turner's time, but not now. Currently we see around us an ever more apparent loss of vigor of our society: increasing fixity of the power structure and bureaucratization of all levels of life; impotence of political institutions to carry off great projects; the proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private, and commercial life; the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of popular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline; the deceleration of the rate of technological innovation. . . . Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall. Without

...[C]ontrary to your Earth experience and its derived cynicism, on Mars, such things are possible. Yes, fully possible, even for you, a person who obviously was a complete social failure on Earth — otherwise you wouldn't be here.

The evidence from our orbital images shows that there was liquid water on the surface of Mars for about a billion years of the planet's early history, a span roughly ten times as long as it took for life to appear in the Earth's fossil record after there was liquid water here.