When @MarsPhoenix tweeted that the "chunks of bright stuff" it was watching had "Sublimated!" and so had to be water ice, I could hear my elder son. He was saying, "Dad, I tried to tell you."

His convictions about extraterrestrial life have been somewhat prescientific, but now George Rankin and I can be of one mind as we await the inevitable news of (probably microbial) life on Mars.

You all know that GR's passion for the extraterrestrial has me buying alien abduction lamps for him and for his brother Jack.

Yes, that is a plaything, and this is real.

Below is an animated ".gif" from NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University showing the sublimation of ice to water vapor in the trench dug on Mars by Phoenix:

I'm not sure my sons know that their Frink and Hinnant great grandfathers and I had long, happy debates over the likelihood and prospective nature of extraterrestrial life. On Mars, where none of the three of us expected to find abandoned cities, and elsewhere.

I told them, too, the way George Rankin told me, and they were exactly as patient with me as I have been with my sons.

Now I yearn to have my sons and their Frink and Hinnant great grandfathers here with me to celebrate as Phoenix spins generations of scientific dreamstuff into the fabric of well-verified realities.

Alien abduction lamp I would like to get George Rankin for Christmas or his birthday.