New Curiosity Images Bring Home That Mars is a Real Place, We'll Be Seeing Soon With Our Own Eyes

Until now, images from the surface of Mars, while always breathtaking, have never come with the sense of immediacy of actually being there: The shots were either too obviously the result of technical processing - e.g., black-and-white shots, fish-eye effects, various unnatural color filters or contrast manipulations, etc. - or else too much like professional portraiture with everything all nice, neat, and vivid.  But in the past few days it has all come home: The images I present below are so natural, mundane, and contextual that one can't help realizing on a visceral level that they are from a real place, and they look as if a human being were staring at them through a window or an unpolarized faceplate.  I now know at the base of my spine, and not just in my mind, that we are going there.

Stare at the first one for a while: That's not some exhibit in front of a set-piece background, that's a piece of human technology on another planet - exactly as it would look if you were standing next to it fixing it with the tan-gray Martian sky in the background: