A Re-e-eally Long Pipeline

Good news for the careful folks who carry a bottle of water around all the time, even at the office just feet from real faucets. No need to worry about sudden droughts anymore; they’ve found more ice on Mars.

Even from this distance, people have long known that ice dominates Mars’ north pole, whereas dry ice was thought to dominate the red planet’s south pole. Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, which is not so good for drinking. Now, thanks to new satellite imaging, Science magazine reports that there’s also regular ice down south, too. What a relief!

Water is essential to human life as Californians know it. Without water there would be nothing to wash cars with every week, dirty or not. Water is essential for boating, water skiing, watching sunsets and filling fountains left off to conserve power.

Water has also proved important for unnecessarily long showers, for making cups of tea with British names and for flushing waste into the ocean.

Without a lot of water, at least on paper, California housing developers can’t build overpriced houses without basements to sell to people who’ll run their lawn sprinklers even during rainstorms.

Governments obviously enjoy using water too; during recent rains, freeway sprinklers blasted thousands of gallons onto already soaked trees and plants, just to be sure.

As a result, officials have long known the importance of, shall we say, importing water from elsewhere. But water isn’t just for filling up long cement ditches from once-green valleys far away. Water can be sold for high prices in little plastic bottles with nickel deposits and carried around for stylish sipping anywhere.

Thus, finding more ice on Mars can seem a so-what development in, say, Chicago, which has its own lake to drink from and pollute. But Mars ice should be very big news in Southern California, which knows water well but little of ice.

Mars ice is very frozen water; temperatures hover at minus 200 degrees. Without Mars ice, spaceships would have to carry many little plastic water bottles. If water is available there, that could save a lot of weight -- and bottle deposits. Then, if no one is watching, maybe Southern California can figure some way to get Mars ice down here for thawing so, for instance, the Los Angeles River can have water other than treated sewage again.

See, this is why seemingly distant science news can be so important locally.