Most of my life I’ve taken the hostility of outer space for granted. Textbooks and teachers taught me about an acidic atmosphere on Venus, bone-crushing gravity on Jupiter, frigid darkness on Pluto, and the arid, dead stone of the Martian wastes. I remember standing in the Smithsonian as a child staring at the lifeless landscapes photographed by the Viking missions, red rocky deserts stretching on to the edge of forever. That image cemented an idea which I accepted for a long time to be a matter of fact, that Mars was an inhospitable, empty rock spinning through space. But today I woke up into a universe where water, the most elemental of life-sustaining substances, flows across the surface of Mars.
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