I’ve been interested for awhile in the possibility of something living on other planets–whether it’s us living out there, or some other life form living there, or robots are fine too. Just so, you know, it’s not just us living here. (A few favorite books on living elsewhere: The Dazzle of the Day, by Molly Gloss;  The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber; and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, by Ursula LeGuin). So when I came across these photos of the tire tracks from rovers wandering around Mars, I kind of fell in love. It’s pretty easy, for me at least, to humanize the rovers, and get to imagining what they’re thinking, or what if they were us. My first instinct is to view these photos as a portrait in loneliness–something about a being looking back at where they’ve come from, and only seeing their own tracks, is so quiet and a little sad to me–but that also seems predictable. Why can’t they be excited? Or relieved? Or lost?