Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for August 05, 2012

There goes the neighborhood.

What’s happened to the Sunday strip? It’s shrunk, and the blowup is no longer full-res. Previous Sunday strips have gotten degraded, too.

Hey Rover, get off my lawn.

“Your not getting your Rover back until I talk to your dad..and that Frisbee? My doberman ate it!. Stay off my lawn! You’re only supposed to look at it!”

“We have to get Curiosity out of the space pound.”

“What, did it chase a cat?”

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

If this is what a rover named “Curiousity” does, imagine the havoc that would be caused by a rover named “Nosiness.”

Graphite is a carbon molecule, but it’s not organic. To be organic, the carbon needs to have, at a minimum, hydrogen and oxygen.

I hope they sanitized that thing before introducing it into the Martian atmosphere – otherwise they certainly might find evidence of life – OURS.

And Isn’t ”repetitively redundant" also repetitively redundant ?

AAAAGH! MY SPLEEN!

Pretty bold to assume it landed successfully since it’s supposed to happen tonight. Have you seen what a Rube-Goldberg landing method they’re using?!

Downgraded indeed. This is one of the best strips and it now has a lower quality than it did before due to size reduction.

Let’s say that we actually find some microbes and prove emphatically that life exists elsewhere. It’ll be front page news, we’ll all say “hey, whattaya know!,” and some textbooks will be rewritten. And… what do we DO with this information? While I appreciate the spirit of wanting to fill in the voids in our understanding, I’d rather spend those countless billions on, say, developing rovers that can automatically repair city water and sewer pipes from inside them. It’s estimated that a lot of cities lose a quarter or more of their treated water to water leaks, and major breaks can disrupt thousands of lives (and even put some lives at risk). If we can build a rover that can be transported to Mars, survive the landing, and conduct a myriad of scientific experiments in a hostile environment, surely we are capable of building rovers that can at least assess the state of water and sewer pipes and allow us to repair the most damaged ones before they break (if not actually perform the repair itself).

Or, howabout we keep spending the minuscule proportion of GDP on NASA as before and cut out 0.00001% of the endless trillions wasted on the war machines to go towards sewer repairs?

Did they get a permit to dig? Did they call the utility company first?