Tuesday, Denver, Colorado

Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars has been the most fertile for imaging life elsewhere. Suspecting life on the moon was discounted long ago, but the idea of making contact with "Martians" has held sway. Science fiction writing and video have depicted creatures from the Red Planet that have alternately warmed and frightened us. Well, soon we will know the real story as NASA, those bubble headed geniuses who, despite some tragic setbacks, have mastered modern space travel, have put a machine on the ground in Mars!

The Phoenix Mars Lander settled into the Martian soil after a trip of 422 million miles! Who can even get their brain around that number? Look, maybe you take this for granted, but I am agog at this breathtaking achievement. I wouldn’t know where to begin even figuring out how far away Mars was from my house, let alone calculating the trip with exact precision. And this is just what they did - make a rocket and machine that could travel that stunning distance in space and then execute a soft landing on the surface. Huh!?

And of course to top it off, Phoenix began sending back full colored pictures of the planet after touching down. Who are these people? How did they go from the same math and science curriculum I had in high school and, within a dozen or more years figure out how to go to Mars with a camera and a radio?

The distance between these people and many of the knuckleheads who sat around them in school and even college is an ocean. While we worry about the growing economic gap between the rich and the poor, there is a another gap that is perhaps wider still: the gulf between the brilliant achievers and the boneheads, between the physicists and the pinheads.

It’s head spinning to think about it.

And of course it begs a question. How come we haven’t figured out how to recruit some of these mind boggling minds to the cause of keeping peace and harmony in the world? How about taking a mission into the brains of terrorists, murders and other antisocial thugs to figure out what’s gone haywire? What about an endeavor into the uncharted minds of psychos with power who believe that annihilating others who don’t believe like they do is the right course of action?

Can’t NASA spare a few of their geniuses for these causes?