ICE MAN! COMETH!
Off again - on again!
As long as I can remember we have been talking, planning and dreaming about going to the planet Mars.
One of the big factors holding us back was said to have been the apparent lack of water. If water were present, the red planet had enticing potential as a sort of second Earth. Now, as the year 2003 is racheting along, the mystery has been more or less "solved."
The water is there but it now known to be found only in the form of ice and largely underground. So, there is work still to be done before any expeditions can be shipped out with setlement can ship out for Mars with settlement ideas in mind.
There was a time, some years ago, when our community depended to the specilal abiltiies of a man, a specialist, who loomed large in our lives - the ice man. In those days before refrigeration systems we depended on that man to keep us supplied with large chunks of cyrstal-clear frozen water. The iceman had his sole product available in various sizes ranging from ten or fifteen pounds up to one-hunded pound block. We used smaller churcks every other day, but he had some customer with larger ice-boxes and he lugged in hundred pound chucks at those places. It took some doing, too. He used large, black-iron callipers called ice tongs and usually he put a leather sheet across his shoulder before he hoisted the ice to that perch for transport into the house.The ice was placed in a insulated section of the cabinet known as our "Ice Box:. There was a pencil-sized hole in the bpttom of the the box which allowed the water from the melting ice to flow through a tube to a pan undeneath the icebox. That pan, by the way, had to be emptied at regular intervals, too.
The iceman was an important person in that era. We depended on him to keep our food supplies safe.
Specialists in ice managemnt are again in demand.
The latest spectrascope studies indicate that the ice on Mars will need to be "worked" or processed. It is frozen in layers with sediment. Water is evident as far as 60 degrees latitude. As anticipated, it is most prevalent at the planet's poles. The South Pole of Mars, like our own, appears to be a tremendous continent covered with ice. Our present equipment does not allow us to "see" beneath more than a yard or so beneath the surface, so it is not know how deep such layers might be.
It is up to the ingeniuity and skill of a new generation of ice men and women to determine what all of this can mean to humans here on Earth. Systems need to be developed which will bore into the icy crust of Mars, melt the treaures hidden there and distribute them in some manner yet to be devised to change a dead planet into a living one.
The novelty of the venture makes it a compelling one. We're well started on the journey and, no doubt , we will make mistakes and misjudgments along the way. We used to laugh at the ice man of yesteryear and say that his horse knew their daily work route better than he did including which houses needed ice and how much. They were said to be able to read the printed cards cards we used to display in windows showing what size block of oce we needed.
The new challenge is evident. Get your tongs tuned, Ice-men and Ice-women, and let's work toward making this dream a worthy reality.
A.L.M. January 14, 2003 [c580wds]
