The electronic crystal ball has shown me the future. I see two words: "quantity" and "taking". The inner voice points me to the cosmos. I see a red dot. It grows larger. It is Mars. I see two robots rolling across the Martian landscape. They are madly photographing every rock they come across from 20 different angles and sending the images back to earth. The future becomes clear.

Congress, in an effort to streamline the national budget, will require the defunding of whichever rover gives us fewer photographs during the month of April. The money saved will be diverted to a pay raise for the members of congress. As a result of the policy, quality will take a back seat to quantity, and the rovers will be sent on a mad photographing spree. Their cameras will be set to minimum resolution to reduce the size of each photograph file. In the end, we will have millions of worthless photographs from each rover. The camera on the winning rover will fail during the first week of May.

Can this fate be avoided? Yes. Tell all your friends to contact your representatives in Washington to voice their opposition to the Mars Rover Competition for Congress Act. If enough of us voice our outrage, our representatives will be cowed into funding their pay raise by reducing the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development instead, and the rovers will provide us a multitude of attractive, high-resolution photographs of Martian rocks over their useful lives.