Opinion Editorial October, 2025: Dodos on Mars
"Alien Poop on Mars?" sounds like a headline generated by either AI or a clickbait-obsessed wannabe influencer. Yet it was the title of a YouTube video posted last month by the respected and established space news organization NASASpaceflight.
For centuries we speculated whether there is life on Mars. Even though there isn't, the possibility remains that there once was. And if there ever was, it would have resulted in byproducts just like it does on Earth.
Last month, NASA announced that its Perseverance rover may have found those byproducts — or more technically, biosignatures.
Staying with space news, in a bizarre online romance scam last month, someone convinced an 80-year-old Japanese woman that he was in space, under attack and running out of oxygen. She was duped into sending money to him.
Perhaps the strangest news story from last month happened in the small town of Happy Valley, Oregon in the USA. There, a man was discovered to have been squatting in the space under someone's home. He had even moved a bed and a TV into the space.
Such stories are only likely to get even stranger in the near future. NASA also announced last month that its Artemis II mission will be brought forward to no earlier than 6 February next year. That mission will return humans to lunar orbit for the first time since 1972.
This announcement gives the wannabe influencers and conspiracy theorists only four months to create their "evidence" showing the whole mission was faked. Now that AI slop is so easy to create, they may succeed.
Artemis II will be a huge milestone toward the eventual objective of a permanent lunar base and eventually a Martian one. The long-term viability of the latter could rest on our ability to terraform Mars. If we can then it may one day look a bit like this month's photo taken in western Mongolia.
That in turn leads to the possibility that we could one day have to deal with the issue of ancestral land rights on Mars. That this is not pure science fiction is suggested by yet another strange news story from last month.
Back to the topic of squatting, three immigrants were evicted from land near the small town of Jedburgh, Scotland. They were accused of squatting there, but they claim African ancestral land ownership calling it the stolen Kingdom of Kubala. Their new camp is still there (a few meters from their previous one). Like the indigenous Kazakh camps in the area in this month's photo, it will be no match for a local winter. A second eviction order is currently being prepared. Interestingly, Prime Minister Starmer has not called the evictions immoral.
How does any of this relate to dodos? They have been extinct for hundreds of years. Yet last month, a "de-extinction" company in Texas announced a major milestone in bringing dodos back. They claim we could see them again in less than ten years.
Fact really can be stranger than fiction. In case there weren't enough examples last month, here's one to kick off this month. Despite the latest announcement two days ago, we could see dodos on Mars before we see peace in the Middle East.
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