It is stunning that anyone still thinks Elon Musk is a smart guy. Shannon Stirone tears into one of his recent performances, in which he read from Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot and took exactly the wrong message away from it.

Musk reads from Sagan’s book: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.”

But there Musk cuts himself off and begins to laugh. He says with incredulity, “This is not true. This is false––Mars.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. Mars? Mars is a hellhole. The central thing about Mars is that it is not Earth, not even close. In fact, the only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many).

Read: Can we still go to Mars?

Mars has a very thin atmosphere; it has no magnetic field to help protect its surface from radiation from the sun or galactic cosmic rays; it has no breathable air and the average surface temperature is a deadly 80 degrees below zero. Musk thinks that Mars is like Earth? For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground, and what is not enticing about living in a tunnel lined with SAD lamps and trying to grow lettuce with UV lights? So long deep breaths outside and walks without the security of a bulky spacesuit, knowing that if you’re out on an extravehicular activity and something happens, you’ve got an excruciatingly painful 60-second death waiting for you. Granted, walking around on Mars would be a life-changing, amazing, profound experience. But visiting as a proof of technology or to expand the frontier of human possibility is very different from living there. It is not in the realm of hospitable to humans. Mars will kill you.

If anything, you’d think that the recent and ongoing confinement due to the pandemic would hammer that lesson home: most people don’t want to live in a tin can, where the outside is deadly and nasty and unpleasant. We’re just dealing with a mundane virus, not a hostile atmosphere, and people are freaking out over wearing a mask and not going to a restaurant now and then. Imagine…you have to wear an airtight suit and bring a tank of your atmosphere if you go out, and you have to recycle your poop in order to grow lettuce. This is what Musk thinks is a desirable future for other people, but not him, oh no. You’d have to be crazy to colonize Mars yourself.

This is an accurate summing up.

The influence Musk is having on a generation of people could not be more different. Musk has used the medium of dreaming and exploration to wrap up a package of entitlement, greed, and ego. He has no longing for scientific discovery, no desire to understand what makes Earth so different from Mars, how we all fit together and relate. Musk is no explorer; he is a flag planter. He seems to have missed one of the other lines from Pale Blue Dot: “There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

Somebody panicked when they found a few spiders. They closed the library!

The University of Michigan’s Shapiro Undergraduate Library was temporarily closed after venomous spiders were found in the building.

Three Mediterranean recluse spiders were found in the library’s basement storage areas in late January, university spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen said. The spiders were not in any public spaces, Broekhuizen said, and the library was closed on Sunday, Feb. 21, and Monday, Feb. 22.

That’s silly. Venomous spiders are everywhere, but they have no interest in human prey, and are generally shy and unaggressive. Relax. Call your local entomologist/arachnologist and they can scoop ’em up and relocate them or, in the worst case, euthanize them.

The university got better, though.

Broekhuizen said a misunderstanding led the library to close for two days, and based on what the university knows now, it was a mistake to close the building.

Let’s get my usual negativity out of the way: I don’t think humans will ever be capable of sustained living in space. We’re too fragile and to highly adapted to those little things, like, oh, gravity and air pressure and specific proportions of oxygen and CO₂. Short term, maybe, but I see the toll it takes on astronauts living in orbit for a few months, and I have to wonder why we’re even trying to build space stations. Elon Musk is never going to colonize Mars, he’s just recruiting victims for the most expensive death trap ever.

Here’s what I do like, though: robots. More robots! Robots can be designed to function in all those environments that we’d be nuts to try and live in. NASA has been fantastic at building robots, and space robots really ought to be what NASA does.

So hooray for Perseverance!

I also appreciate that they’re using this robot to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars.

Scientists believe that, around 3.5 billion years ago the Jezero crater – where Perseverance was sent – was home to a river that flowed into a lake and deposited sediment in a fan-shaped delta. They hoped it could harbour fossilised microorganisms the rover could find evidence of.

However, before the landing, there were some nerves about Jezero crater as a destination. Mr Chen said: “It’s full of the stuff that scientists want to see but stuff that I don’t want to land on.”

I’m a little disappointed that, near as I can tell, they’re relying on visual analysis with a suite of fancy cameras — you’re not going to find out much about bacteria with that. They’re caching the samples and are going to have another lander fetch and return with them? I want to see that.

Of course, if they find the Martian version of a trilobite, I guess high-quality images will be enough (they won’t, but it would be cool.)

The Great Backyard Bird Count has begun today, and continues through the 15th. My wife has been staring out the window all day, scribbling notes on paper, and I might have wondered what weirdness she’s up to, except that she just told me I should tell everyone in the world to join her. Not in our backyard, that would get crowded, but in your own backyard. I’m exempt, because she knows I only count spiders. And dinosaurs.