‘Okay, we’ve planted the flag here. Now, we have to sit around for a year. Let’s get out the chessboard. Then we can play some cards maybe. Later, we
can open up our ant farm.’

Geophysics professor Norman Sleep, in the San Francisco Chronicle, describing an imaginary conversation between astronauts after landing on Mars, where he says they would have little to do except ‘keep out of the way’ of robots collecting scientific data.