Is there life on Mars?

Its finally been announced today, on the 1/04/08, a date that will live on in the history of our species.

After years of planning, Virgin and Google will spearhead the exploration and colonisation of Mars. From Sir Richard Branson, writing on the Google Blog:

In the years to come, we'll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers -- myself among them. If you think you might want join us (or invest in or otherwise assist this vast venture), I hope you'll read more here about how Virgle will work, what our brave Pioneers can expect and what the future holds for what just might be the most ambitious adventure in mankind's long and storied history.

See you on the north side of Kasei Valles!

What has not yet been noted, and we are delighted to announce today, is that Broadsight will be providing the provisioning services, the Virgle Requirements Manglement System (VRM) for a part of the early startup infrastructure on the Kisei Miyass landing phase platform.

It is architected as a pull based system, for the first leg of the project.

This system will be part of a pan European project, with the overall workflow and management systems being provided by Germany, Food provisioning systems from France, policy monitoring systems from the UK and - well, for non-Virginal needs, the 4-play "special services" being provide by Italy.

As you can imagine, getting this complex system operating is fairly important - imagine for example if we got it wrong and the Food was done from the UK, Workflow by Italy, policy monitoring by France and 4-play needs by Germany?

That would be hell off-earth!

(Thanks to TechCrunch for Link)

PS Imagine if it were true, it might look like this....