There’s been some groping for superlatives in the Mac community of late.

Seasoned Apple evangelist Bob LeVitus reviews Apple’s new iLife app GarageBand and calls it “one of the best computing experiences I’ve had in the 17+ years I’ve been having computing experiences on my Mac.”

Inside Mac Games unashamedly lauds Bungie’s Halo as “the most advanced, the best produced, the most amazing first-person shooter to have ever graced my Mac’s screen.I would agree, though my tricked-out PowerBook is proving barely able to keep up at minimal settings.”

Meanwhile, Apple’s free beta of Xgrid, reviewed here, now allows any network of Macs to work together as a grid supercomputer to solve complex problems such as number factoring or gene sequencing. Installation is simple, and it comes with a few sample applications, such as a beautiful Mandelbrot set renderer.

Even if you have only one Mac in the house, this is worth giving a run, because it hints at how very differently we will perceive computers in the future. I would not be surprised, for example, if eventually you will be able to buy Gigahertz-hours from Apple server farms when it’s time to render your latest creation using the next iApp, iAnimate“Pixar for the rest of us.” Warning: Although I am speculating, Apple has a knack for never leaving my creative urges unsated for long: Would I love to make my own short film populated with predefined characters from Finding Nemo? Oh yes, and so would everyone with my mental age and below. Soon, 8-year olds will be demanding Terahertz-hours for Christmas.. Or perhaps future Final Cut Pros will let you speed up your rendering when a deadline looms, using the Macs of the advertising department, who have already left for the day. “Grid supercomputing for the rest of us” is perhaps too obvious a slogan, but that won’t stop Steve Jobs from using it when this goes mainstream.

But I reserve my own superlatives for Maestro, software that will forever change how we approach space exploration. You will have heard of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission; Maestro is the software that allows scientists to interact with either of the two rovers, Spirit (already in operation on the Martian surface) and Opportunity (almost there). It takes a rover’s raw data and displays it in a variety of ways, the most impressive of which is an accurate three-dimensional world of its surroundings rendered from stereoscopic cameras at human height. Scientists can then “walk” through this virtual world to decide what the rover should explore next, and then build a task list of simple commands that are sent back to the rover, which executes these autonomously (there is a 10 minute delay at present, because lightspeed is not infinite).

All this amounts to a revolution in remote imaging, command and control. But that’s just the beginning. The software is a free download for the general public, and so is the data the rovers beam back to EarthYes, it works especially well on OS X 10.3. Here is Apple touting it.. Anyone with a late-model computer and broadband now has pretty much the same tools at their disposition as the scientists running the mission. We too can now walk around Spirit’s surroundings, notice items of interest, name them, measure distances between them, then tell the rover to take a closer look. The one piece missing is the actual ability to beam intructions back to the roverThat would be the ultimate hack, though: Taking control of the rover and defacing Martian soil with tyre tracks in the shape of your tagline. M3M3#1!. But that’s a privilege NASA paid $850 million for.

You really need to try this. It’s not optional. If schoolkids in middle-income countries can master this, you better as well or else watch your job leave for Mexico even sooner than you thought. Yes, there is a 80-page manual, but the casual user needn’t read it at all. The application, and each subsequent data module, comes with its own built-in automated tour conductor. Your involvement can be as little as clicking “Next” whenever the fancy hits you and you will get 80% of the wow-factor.

In all likelihood, curiosity will eventually get the better of you and you will want to venture out for a spin on Mars, as I did. I went and found myself two interesting rocks and named them Blog@StefanGeens.com and MemeFirst, respectively:

When they are named, Maestro gives them coordinates, so it now knows where they are in relation to the rover, and to each other. I then built a task list, instructing Spirit to first drive up to MemeFirst, inspect it, and then to drive up to my blog. Once there, I took this snapshot:

And this just with the first data set. Data will be rolling in for at least 3 more months, as Spirit wends its way to a nearby crater and then to the top of some hills. And Opportunity hasn’t even started yet.

The high level of user experience that Maestro provides should influence the debate over whether we should send men to Mars. We get 2 such rovers for $850 million. We’d be able to seed mars with over 600 rovers now for the price of a few fragile men on Mars 20 years from now. Or a smaller number of far larger, speedier and more robust rovers — mobile labs atop vehicles resembling remote-controlled moon buggies, perhaps. Or teams of such vehicles triangulating a region in tandem.

I have always been for manned planetary exploration. It is our destiny, and I wish we could do it again in my lifetime. With our present technology, however, it may just cost far too much for the scientific knowledge we’d gain in return. Ironically, robotics was not far enough advanced when men were put on the moon in 1969. Men were needed to do the kind of science they did then. Today, you cannot make that argument — humans are far too valuable and fragile, and are being replaced on Earthly battlefields with remote systems for precisely this reason. In other words, do spend the money on Mars, but leave that planet to the robots for now. Humans will get there in due time.