I’m fascinated by the high-resolution color photos from Mars. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has stared at the newly-revealed Martian landscape and imagined himself standing there, walking there, feeling the Martian dust crunch underneath his shoes, making footprints in the Martian soil. What if human beings walk on Mars someday? Will it happen in our lifetimes? What will it be like?

Walking home tonight, I looked up and saw a full moon in the sky. The frigid night air made it beautifully clear and bright. When my peers and I were born, the 1969 moon landing had already happened. That achievement has been a fact our entire lives. But what must it have felt like when it first happened? What did people feel when they watched Neil Armstrong live on television on that summer Sunday night? How can someone look at this front page today and not be taken aback?

“Men Walk on Moon.”

Men. Human beings.

Walk. Human action.

On Moon. On the frickin’ moon.

Human beings have walked on the moon. This mysterious shining object in the sky, an inspiration to ancient Chinese poets, a beacon and god to our childlike proto-human ancestors — human beings have made marks on it with their boots.

A few months ago, Mars came the closest to Earth it had ever come since people started calling it Mars. We’ve landed human-made machines on its surface, and now we’ve got the best photos of it we’ve ever seen. Someday, some lucky person will take the first tentative human steps onto the planet. A descendant of primordial cellular soup will walk on another world.

And if that never happens, there’s still the two Voyager spacecraft, which have left the solar system behind, carrying their collections of photographs and their recordings of music, sound, and the human voice.

Whatever happens to us here at home — whatever major scrape our species ultimately gets itself into — the two Voyagers will always be out there, keeping our collective human memory alive.