Without water, the indispensable-to-life chemical, no living organisms would have developed on Planet Earth. We are here because there is water. NASA has sent its Mars Rover to that planet to attempt to discover whether organic life ever existed there, and the search for water on Mars is ongoing. There is water in its frozen form, and indicates of dry riverbeds, that water once flowed freely on Mars. Why not, then life of some kind?

This view shows the patch of veined, flat-lying rock selected as the first drilling site for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

 Signs of water, sulfur and chlorine along with carbon-rich chemical compounds have been extracted from the dirt analyzed in Curiosity's on-board laboratory, Space reports .However, the substances may not to have their origins in the Martian surface, but might be part of Curiosity's contamination along its way. Scientists have not reached a conclusion on this yet.

 Just curious. We are always curious, wanting to know more and more again about nature, science, the world directly around us and we probe as much and as distant as we can into the far reaches of the Universe to inform ourselves of how we were created and what created creation.  The force of nature is also the background of the force of our natural curiosity.

We live with water, it surrounds us; from distant space we can see the vast oceans of our world. We explore, as much as is now feasible - and much now is - the deep craters of the Earth's crust, under our vast seas, and find there, to our amazement, living organisms, at a depth and pressure and distance from any light source that could never have been imagined with our current knowledge of how and where life exists.

Still, although we are existentially dependent on the presence of water - we are ourselves comprised of mostly liquid - and require it for our daily irrigation, it demands respect because it represents an enormously powerful element. Too much of it and we lose our existence. We breathe oxygen through exposure to the air around us; through evolution we can no longer filter air from water through our lungs, though we first appeared as amoebas in the primal slush of evolution.

Snow falls on Copley Square in Boston

And when water freezes becoming ice and snow, pelting us through climatic extremes, its beneficence is withdrawn and it becomes a threatening element. We will never be adequately prepared to deal with the excesses of nature. Our great cities are challenged to cope with conditions inimical to human life. Our power sources are threatened and ordinary life comes to a standstill, we are briefly frozen in time, waiting for nature's onslaught to subside.

We rarely give thought in our daily lives to places on Earth where overwhelming blizzards and huge, deep snowfalls are commonplace because we don't inhabit those places. In the great mountain ranges of the world, the Himalayas, the Andes, the Great Rockies and elsewhere those who live in the footsteps of these stony towers of ice and snow have become accustomed to coping as best they can. 

And we, with our penchant for altering our environment to suit our lifestyles and technologies, our futures and its aspirations through scientific advancement benefiting our vision of ourselves as masters of all we survey, are reminded, from time to time, that Nature herself allows us this conceit, to shield ourselves from the reality that we are her creatures, wholly dependent for nurturance and survival on her whims.