As you know, the idea of a Mars mission was proposed recently by President George ''W'' Bush. What happened was, one evening he and his staff were sitting around the Oval Office, trying to think of something for the nation to do, and they got to looking out the window at the vastness of the night sky, and the president suddenly said: ``Hey, we should go to . . . to . . . whaddyacallit!''

The president actually was thinking of a Chinese restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue, but before he could clarify this, his staff had worked out this whole big Mars mission. So he figured, what the hey.

Today we are pretty sure that nobody lives on Mars, at least not year-round. We base this on the fact that NASA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars sending unmanned probes up there, and they have sent back thousands of pictures, all of them showing: rocks. Granted, there was one picture where, if you magnified the background, you could just make out a sign that said ''PALM SPRINGS 47 MILES.'' But a NASA spokesperson quickly explained that this was ``an optical illusion, caused by, um, hydrogen.''