# Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after Mars, the Roman god of war. It is also referred to as the "Red Planet" because of its reddish appearance as seen from Earth.

## Quotes

* Mars aeternum.
** Admiral Salen Kotch, Call of Duty:Infinite Warfare (2016)
* Mars is there, waiting to be reached.
** Buzz Aldrin, "Buzz Aldrin: Down to Earth", Psychology Today (May/June 2001).
* Fly me to the moon And let me play among the stars Let me know what Spring is like On Jupiter and Mars In other words, hold my hand In other words, darling kiss me.
** Kaye Ballard, Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words) (1954). Note: These lyrics were popularized by Frank Sinatra in the 1960s.
* When President Bush called in 1989 for a manned mission to Mars on the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo landing, he got the estimated bill from NASA: 450 billion dollars. The sticker shock killed Bush’s initiatives in Congress. The price was high because everyone in NASA and their parasite companies tacked every conceivable extra onto the mission.
** Gregory Benford, Going to Mars in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1997, p. 112
* [Y]ou drive all night and then you see a light And it comes right down and it lands on the ground And out comes the man from Mars And you try to run but he's got a gun And he shoots you dead and he eats your head And then you're in the man from Mars You go out at night eating cars...
** Blondie, Rapture (1981).
* [In 2057] we should be celebrating 20 years of man on Mars.
** NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin, (September 28, 2007), discussing NASA's aim to put a man on Mars by 2037.
* Know you why the robin's breast Gleameth of a dusky red Like the lustre mid the stars Of the potent planet Mars?
** Paul Hamilton Hayne, "Why the Robin's Breast Is Red" in Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne (1882), p. 370.
* Mars is too cold, Venus is too hot, Earth is just right.
** Andrew Ingersoll, Bypassing the habitable zone
* I want to fly away. (Yeah Yeah Yeah) Let's go to see the stars the Milky Way, and even Mars where it could be just ours.
** Lenny Kravitz, Fly Away.
* Mars is way more hostile than you can imagine. It’s colder than Antarctica, has less air than the top of Mount Everest, is drier than the Mojave, and is harder to get to than the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
** Geoffrey A. Landis, A Hotel in Antarctica in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 255
* The Mars we had found was just a big moon with a thin atmosphere and no life. There were no martians, no canals, no water, no plants, no surface characteristics that even faintly resembled Earth's.
** Bruce Murray, contemplating the findings of Mariner 4 in Journey into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration (1989).
* Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
** Vice President Dan Quayle, Hawaii, 8/11/89 (interview broadcast on CNN, referenced in 9/1/89 Washington Post article: "A Quayle Vision of Mars").
* I don't know why you're on Mars. Maybe you're there because we recognize we have to carefully move small asteroids around to avert the possibility of one impacting the Earth with catastrophic consequences, and while we're up in near-Earth space, it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to Mars. Or maybe we're on Mars because we recognize that if there are human communities on many different worlds, the chances of us being rendered extinct by some catastrophe on one world is much less. Or maybe we're on Mars because of the magnificent science that can be done there, that the gates of the wonder world are opening in our time. Or maybe we're on Mars because we have to be, because there's a deep nomadic impulse built into us by the evolutionary process. We come, after all, from hunter-gatherers, and for 99.9% of our tenure on Earth we've been wanderers. And, the next place to wander to is Mars. But whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you.
** Carl Sagan, reported in Brian Muirhead, Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Going to Mars: The Stories Of The People Behind NASA's Mars Missions Past, Present, and Future (2004), p. 152.
* I’m surprised to see people get so wildly excited about a possible bacterium on Mars when our own planet is crawling with undiscovered species.
** George Schaller, cited in Awake! magazine, 1998, 22/3.
* Thou art the Mars of malcontents.
** William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act i, scene 3.
* "And in that hope, dear soul, let trouble have rest, Knowing I tarry for thee," and pointed to Mars, As he glow’d like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast.
** Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Maud: A Monodrama", V, 11.
* She saw the snowy poles of moonless Mars
** Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Palace of Art"
** After the discovery of two moons, he altered it to "and moons of Mars".
* Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.
** Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds (broadcast October 30, 1938).

## See also

* Extraterrestrial life
* NASA
* Planet
* Space