New Mars Theme Park to Open in Wyoming

"Honestly, I should have made that left turn at Albuquerque," said Jason Thruster.

Jason had been behind the wheel a little too long and at some point he lost track of where he was.

He reached into the ice chest next to him, pulled out an overly caffeinated energy drink and chugged it.

A moment for the heart-pounding additives to take effect and suddenly he had clarity.

I hit the brakes. My car came to a screeching halt and I was afraid to step outside since there was not enough air to breathe. I THOUGHT I WAS ON MARS.

No, not Mars.

Jason had mistakenly driven into the middle of Wyoming.

Have you seen those photos from those Mars rovers? I could've sworn what I was looking at looked just like them, except for the road up the middle of it all.

That's when Jason got the brilliant idea to open up a new tourist trap—um—stop.

Let's face it, none of us will ever get a chance to visit Mars.

But we can experience it right here on Earth just by visiting parts of Wyoming.

A new Wyoming theme park.

The kids will love it.

And why not? Even the University Of Wyoming has compared Wyoming to Mars.

That first part of this story is not true. Here is the part that is...

Have you ever heard of the Wyoming Study Atlas? Me neither. I stumbled across it while searching for something else. It's used by college professors to put lesson plans together.

According to the website:

The Wyoming Student Atlas is available as a soft cover book, as a digital flipbook, and as a series of science or social studies Web-based interactive story maps which can be used in lesson plans either as self-guided or instructor-guided activities.

The part that I stumbled across compares Wyoming and Mars to find the similarities. You can find the actual study guide at this link.

Exploring Mars and Wyoming lesson:

• Compare Mars versus Earth craters
• Guess which photos are from Mars and which are from places on Earth that are good testing places for Mars.
• Identify features in your town from satellite photos
• What natural features or resources do people use for their livelihood?
• Identify some important locations in Wyoming from satellite photos
• What natural resources are important in Wyoming, and which ones would also be important to Mars?

It is true that there are places on Mars that look just like Wyoming. Or did I mean that the other way around?

So, yeah, people who come to Wyoming often feel as if they have landed on another world. I get that.

If you think about it, colonizing Mars has proved just as difficult as colonizing Wyoming. We have been at this for a long time and we just can't get many people to move here.

When humans do finally colonize Mars it will be much the same as Wyoming: wind storms, cold nights, nothing grows in the soil, and not much water.

Have you ever stopped to think that both Mars and Wyoming both have a "supervolcano?"  Wyoming has Yellowstone and Mars has Olympus Mons, which is the biggest volcano in the solar system. WEIRD. RIGHT?

The lesson plan/study concludes by asking students to "think, pair, and share" with their partner to come up with ideas for people who might travel to Mars one day.

Possible answers: Tourism might be a big money maker on Mars, some people will be willing to pay a lot of money to say they visited another planet. Coal mining and natural gas drilling will not important on Mars because these are fossil fuels and so far we haven’t discovered fossils on Mars. Other mining (for uranium maybe) might be of use (uranium), and like Wyoming (dry and cold), Mars probably won't be greatly populated.