TELEVISION celebrity Sir Patrick Moore touched down in York last night on a mission to turn us all into Martians.

Now in his 80th year, Sir Patrick enthralled his audience with his proposition that humans would be colonising the planet Mars in less time than it took the industrial revolution to get up a head of steam.

With only one prop (a balloon to humorously illustrate how rockets work) this truly original and unique man talked without notes in the most lucid and engaging manner.

Sir Patrick put forward the interesting hypothesis that Mars may well be locked in its own ice age.

Terraforming was one solution he explored, but the suggestion there might be life forms on the red planet solicited the booming catch phrase, "I'm not so sure!"

If there is life on Mars he concluded, it will be single cell life forms frozen beneath the surface.

Where the lecture became really interesting was when Sir Patrick expounded the theory that if homo sapiens succeeded in colonising Mars they would then develop into a separate species, unable to travel to Earth because of gravitational and environmental differences.

So why bother?

The solution for the human race to survive the inevitable consequences of our sun eventually expiring would be to travel beyond our solar system.

While "something exotic" would be required to achieve this, Sir Patrick revealed he did have a plan to send all the politicians of the world on a feasibility study.

More chance of little green men then than a government grant for that idea!

Updated: 10:54 Tuesday, November 25, 2003