The Extremophile's Lair

And then at odd moments she would see in her mind's eye the black dunes, the white ice, the silhouetted figures against a sunset sky.  She would shiver and come to with a sigh.  Ann had already arranged another trip and was gone, this time south to the northernmost arms of great Valles Marineris, to see more unimaginable marvels...
Maya complained about how much Ann was away.  "It's clear that she and Simon have started something and are just out there having a honeymoon while we slave away in here."  That was Maya's way of looking at things, that would be what it would take to make Maya as happy as Ann sounded in her calls.  But Ann was in the canyons - and that was all that was needed to make her sound that way...

This is one quote I really like from Red Mars - I might add more to this same post as I write them up, or give them their own post, whichever is less confusing.

Red Mars is a novel about the first 100 colonists on Mars and how they interact with it and how Mars changes them.  And how they get along with eachother.  And then there's environmentalism, and politics, and a mystery...  It's a very "big" book for the number of pages it has. :)

I really love and respect Ann Clayborne and her love for Mars.

Charles Darwin's birthday was yesterday.

The man credited with the first widely-read explanation of evolution.

I'll let him speak in his own words:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
(bolding is mine)

That's what it feels like. In the middle of the scene.  Like life springing  from death.
I'd rather rejoice that life creates new forms and gains energy from death.

Also:
from TrinityVA:
trinityva.livejournal.com/975996.html