Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen

Chapter Fifteen: The 15 chapter talks about Mars in specific. It is the planet with the closest climate to Earth and one of the only celestial bodies we have successfully visited. There have been two real, successful missions to this planet and they were mad by Mariner 9 in the year 1971 and by Viking 1 and 2 in the year 1976. They discovered some major geological features of Mars such as a mountain three times the height of Everest and a rift valley that in comparison to Earth, would span the length of New York to San Francisco. The water that once hosted the original life on Earth could have existed on Mars and, just maybe, there could have been a brief period of life. Meteorites are good history tellers to us. They have been found in Antarctica, preserved by the ice and snow. Some of these have been analyzed and found to be from Mars. In these fragments, there is evidence to show that they had been in water at one time. If water had existed on Mars, then it is very plausible to question if life had once existed there. Long ago, Earth and Mars were both planets with water, so could Mars be hiding miniscule life deep within it?
Chapter 16: This chapter poses a great question: Should we spend the money to make a human trip to Mars? The problem Sagan proposes is this: for the expense of a trip such as that, we could save so many starving and impoverished peoples' lives. Is it right that we stay within Earth, or is it right that we expand into space? Our history could have taken so many different paths. if we had stuck with and expanded the manned space program, could we have already been living on distant bodies such as asteroids, the Moon, or even Mars? President George Bush wanted to initiate this, so on July 20, 1989 he announced the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). This program set up a series of space triumphs until 2019, which would be the crowning achievement of sending humans to Mars. Many problems arose however, such as the timeframe being longer then Bush's presidency, leaving the program to his successors. Another major problem was the cost of the trip. Many different prices were estimated, but a clear plan wasn't conceived.