Eggplant: If that was true then nothing would grow on the igneous rocks of Hawaii’s Big Island.

Wind. Birds. How did those alpine lakes get stocked with fish before helicopters and fisheries? Sticky fish eggs hitched a ride on bird feet. Mars doesn’t have a basic ecosystem to get a wedge in there and start the whole ball rolling. That takes billions of years of evolution.

cjm: we should make our military a profit center. any client state can be offered full protection from external threats for 2% of their GDP.

I think we actually made something like $14 billion profit from Gulf I. That allowed Wolfowitz to pitch Gulf II to Congress as a self-financing war, paid by Iraqi oil dollars. Now we can’t even get a discount from Iraq for the oil used by our own forces as we spend US taxpayer dollars to turn Iraq into a viable state.