just less concentrated. Interesting SciAm article

This reminds me a lot of something one of my grad-school professors did: he looked at Lewis & Clark's compass & sextant measurements to re-construct the magnetic field declination in the interior continental US ~200 years ago: http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/13/10/ they were remarkably accurate at dead reckoning direction & distance.

Good point, though I can imagine that your average movie outsells your average video game by a factor of 3-6 (plus video games don't have box office profits).

or from the Big Bang, if we get good at fusion (D-D)...

(albeit in very low numbers) - they arrived with Viking, Pathfinder, MER, Phoenix, etc.

the landers are very clean, but they're not that clean. Of course, whether or not they survived the trip is another question.

The presence of water vapor in an object like HD 189733b is not remarkable: water has been detected in the spectra of brown dwarfs, in the giant planets of our own solar system, and the transiting exoplanet HD209458b.

Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a surprise: at the temperatures and pressures encountered in an exoplanet atmosphere of this type, all carbon should be present as methane (if cool enough) or carbon monoxide. Giant planet atmospheres are generally far too hydrogen-rich for CO2 to form in any appreciable quantity. So its detection requires an extra-ordinary explanation for its origin.

Here is a Nature preprint from the same research group, describing H2O, CH4, and CO detection. I was hoping to find a research article (and not just a news story or press release) describing CO2 detection, but haven't found any yet...

Great post. I know I'm being pedantic, but we are currently in an interglacial period (Holocene) of an ice age (Quaternary; the polar regions still have ice sheets). So a mammoth would probably be fine in northern Canada or parts of Greenland...