On July 31, 2014, NASA announced the payload for the 2020 Mars Rover and inflamed physics enthusiasts from around the net.

Among the Internet crowd, user jani69 on Scientific American was not impressed, exploding out in cries of “WHAAAUUU [sic]… Is it how they put it in the comic books? Should we be impressed? Is it not ironic we are dying [of] CO₂ on earth [and] NASA wants to use it on Mars to make O₂?”

Flushed out with SuperCam Calibration targets, SHERLOC sensors, and additional arrays of electronics, the Mars Oxygen IRUS Experiment (MOXIE) is prepared to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.

Astronaut and NASA administrator John Grunsfeld claims that the announcement of the 2020 MOXIE was “a really exciting day for us” in a recent BBC interview.

There are not many places for human travel after the Moon, adds Professor Tom Pike of Imperial College, London, asserting that “Mars is it.”

Based on the Curiosity Rover, which made contact in 2012 with the historically largest selection of scientific instruments to be ferried to the Mars surface, the 2020 Rover will assess the habitability of Mars as well as analyze environmental resources.

“That’s the one that most likely has the chance for us to get enough energy from the sun,” inserts Bob Jones physics teacher and cosmologist Jeremy Raper. “If we could provide some extra goods, we could actually live there.”

Invoking much more than passive study, however, MOXIE is determined to utilize “in-situ resource utilization,” a process of sucking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after discarding debris and modifying it into oxygen as described by ExtremeTech.

Sparking the most controversy among the science community and Bob Jones alike, the concern for humans to be “changing a new environment into something totally different and…destroying something that can never be replaced” is at the forefront of Bob Jones counselor Johnny Fowler’s mind.

In risking the annihilation of the theoretical Mars populace via the depletion of their carbon dioxide, are scientists no longer hoping to find life on Mars?

Bob Jones junior Michael Burleson maintains a staunch disagreement and asserts that “if anything, [the terraforming of Mars] only proves the chances of there being other planets with life.”

Countering Burleson’s argument, Raper sides with the idea that such extraterrestrial intelligence exists and justifies, “Since we’re actually going to attempt this, I think we’re assuming there is no life there whatsoever and we plan on going there someday.”

The grand uncertainty remains: have we lost all hope in extraterrestrial intelligence whatsoever?

“I think just locally,” muses Raper. “I think in the grand universe, we’re still looking. But close by, eh.”