I'm curious, what would you say is the value proposition of astronomy?

Astronomy and space science answers the ultimate with the capital you questions.

Where did we come from?

But then you can extrapolate outwards

and really get a sense of our place in this vast universe. Hi, I'm Cody Gough from Curiosity.com. Today we're going to learn why astronomy matters.

Every week we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.

This is the Curiosity Podcast. you might have heard

have heard astronomer Michelle Nichols on a special episode of her

podcast when she helped us understand why the Solar Eclipse on August 21st, 2017 was such a big deal.

But what you didn't hear was the rest of our conversation, where we talked about so much more.

Today we get into the core values of astronomy and the international space community.

To set up our conversation, here's a quick refresher on what scientists are doing on Mars.

Mars has been really popular because of NASA quote-unquote following the water.

We've seen evidence that a liquid water ocean and lakes and rivers and such used to exist on Mars in the distant past.

The next question is, did life ever exist on Mars?

Now enjoy the rest of our conversation on Mars and more.

Do you think the quote-unquote race to Mars is more

motivated by looking at the history or looking at colonizing it? Are we looking

forward or backwards? It depends on who you ask.

The scientists would say, do as much as you can, learn as much as you can. But just like we've gone

to the moon, our logical next step is Mars,

but it's gonna take a lot of effort

...