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Mars One Has 78,000 Applicants
An anonymous reader writes "Mars One reports that 78,000 people have volunteered for a one-way ticket to Mars. A quick calculation shows that this means people lined up coast-to-coast in a line with only 40cm per person! (As Robert Zubrin already predicted). If you want, you can still go and sign up (or sign up your worst enemy). Or you can just look at some videos of the would-be travelers."
I can think of several people that I would like to volunteer for a one-way ticket to Mars. Were these volunteers self-nominated, or did Mars One accept third-party nominations?
If you read the Mars One, you'll see that they're counting on revenue from a reality program to fund the project.
So, the candidates must not only be emotionally stable and qualified, but be photogenic and charming enough to sustain the interest of viewers.
Imagine the horror if, after three years, all of the surviving colonists turn out to be phlegmatic, agreeable, no-drama workaholics and stable family-minded folks.
"These rating are terrible! My God, it's turned into The Waltons in space! Can we ship in some ninjas or a killer robot to liven things up?"
So? In this era of "liking" and "sharing" and "+1ing"... 78k "likes" isn't all that impressive. (And the vast majority probably aren't qualified and won't pass screening in the first place - they're just applying because it's "cool".)
They are Americans.
100cm = 1m
1000m = 1km
That would be 31.2 km.
Of course, as you pointed out, that's a very short distance between coasts, so which two coasts are we talking about here?
Somebody needs a math lesson. 3000 miles * 5280 feet per mile / 78000 = 203 feet. That is a tad more than 40 cm.
40 cm per person? No... 40 m per person? Yes.
78,000 * 0.4 = 31,200m / 31.2km.
Long Island coasts, it seems. I hope they use better math when designing the spacecraft...
If each of these people were 64 meters wide this would work out.
I hope the guy who did that calculation is not computing the path of the spacecraft.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I know there are at least a 100,000 more qualified people that will volunteer and do a better job then I on the mission
Being qualified for this "mission" only entails being expendable on Earth. This mission is most likely going absolutely nowhere, the real unknowns are what the showstopper is going to be. Will it be their tenuous grasp on basic science? Or perhaps the fact that they havn't got the faintest idea about how they're going to get to Mars in the first place? Maybe it'll be something completely different... We just don't know. Exciting times.
... whatever
Mercifully it looks like the math error might be on the part of the poster rather than the article. I did a quick skim of the article and didn't see anywhere were they mentioned anything like how far apart people would be if stretched from coast to coast.
Of course it is always possible that the article was edited by the time I saw it but since the post doesn't appear to be a quote ripped from the site Occam's Razor is that the poster wrote up the post, did the math, and got it wrong.
What the summary fails to mention is that the "application fee" was at minimum $20 USD, and went upwards towards $40 USD depending on the country. Worst case scenario they made about $1.5 million off of applications alone. I would think that volunteering to permanently leave your life behind would be enough collateral without needing to nickel and dime applicants. This reeks of the space-equivalent of vaporware to me.
Just wondering. What percentage of those are Telephone hygienists?
They are Americans.
I know I don't know what I don't know.
(like Bas saying he doesn't want any engineers...WTF??)
They probably don't want anyone smart enough to see through the scam that it boils down to being. Kind of like the cold fusion guys some months back that didn't want an audience for their test run. What happened to those people anyways?
... whatever
Already been done: Space Cadets.
However
A) Their application process would seem to make this more difficult (you want people who aren't really interested in space so they are less informed and easier to fool)
B) They are also talking about a multi-year training program, which would seem cost prohibitive and would also raise the risk of the participants finding out exponentially.
This is nothing but a fake reality show designed to try and fool people into thinking they're going to mars
or, more likely, a fake fake reality show designed to fool viewers into thinking that the contestants thought they were going to Mars.
(Actually, putting even one "fake" before "reality show" is redundant).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's a bigger pity that you don't know what the word "redundant" means.
He is an American.
Bear in mind that this is a Dutch project. A country with coasts roughly 31.2 km apart...
Is 1563649 a prime number?