Chance to contemplate Mars

Philadelphia Inquirer: In the next couple of weeks, do a simple, invigorating thing for yourself and your species.
Go outside at night and look up and see Mars. Really see it. There will never be a better time.
Mars is now closer to Earth than it has been in 60,000 years. Recorded history is only 6,000 years old. So in a way, what is happening right now is something that has never happened in human memory.
You can really see Mars right now. It looks great: beacon-bright, basketball-red. OnWednesday, it (became) "full Mars," the rosy, round face of the planet nice and close. The naked eye (if it's a sharp naked eye) can already discern the larger polar ice cap, as well as other surface features.
Get a good pair of binoculars, and you can see even more. Go to a local planetarium, and you can get a real eyeful. The very closest moment (occurred) at 5:51 a.m. Wednesday. But really, the Mars effect will be on for a while.
Viewing celestial objects is a great thing to do. It reminds us of our place in the universe and that of neighbor worlds. But Mars is special.
We've been watching Mars for a long time now. We used to imagine there were canals there. And even when we learned that, no, those weren't canals, we still kept watching.
Why? Because in all the solar system, Mars is most like us. Venus is a hellish furnace swathed in greenhouse gases. She's a beauty, but she's not like us.
Rocky covering
Mars is almost the same size as Earth, and is built, like Earth, of an iron core with a rocky covering.
We can watch climate change as the south polar ice cap changes and melts. We can watch buttes and mesas grow and shrink, dust storms cover the entire planet (yes: there's martian weather), patterns of erosion come and go. And there are dumbfoundingly great canyons and arroyos and sluice beds. Something liquid used to course over the martian surface. But it doesn't any more.
Mars offers a chilling comparison. Are we what Mars once was? Is Mars what we will become?
Some believe that its atmosphere, now thin and inhospitable compared to ours (Mars' atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, great if you're a plant, bad if you need oxygen), was once fuller. So how did it escape? And where is the water?
Some scientists believe there are large amounts of groundwater on Mars, perhaps just below the surface. And where there is liquid water, there may be life, microscopic life to be sure, but life.