One-Way Ticket: Mars One Project Applicants Top 100,000

Bas Lansdorp's projected trip to Mars has a well-known catch: the ticket to space is free (rather than the millions of dollars for the more conventional kind of space travel available to civilians), but it's one-way only. That's a downside for any potential astronauts who'd like to do things like visit the beach or ever see their Earthside family again in person. Still, the Mars One project announced this week that more than 100,000 volunteers have announced their willingness to forsake this planet in favor of the next. The application process is ongoing; have you signed up?

Comments

what happens if the chick get pregnant?

[alen]

will they sterilize the women first or will they risk children being born on Mars?

Re:what happens if the chick get pregnant?

[sentientbeing]

Mars aint the kind of place to raise a kid

Re:what happens if the chick get pregnant?

[__aaltlg1547]

The OP is probably referring to the fact that conception and gestation are likely impossible on Mars due to it's low gravity.

That's not a fact. That's unfounded speculation.

1. The child will be unable to travel to Earth, because the higher gravity of earth will kill him or her.

More speculation. There's no data on which to base that conclusion. No person have ever been in gravity between 0 m/s2 and 9.8 m/s2 for more than a few days.

2. If the child is part of this group then it will die of starvation or whatever, just as they will, except of course, they chose to die, and the child didn't. It's an ethical minefield.

That's pretty likely.

Mars will be in a very disadvantageous position WRT to Earth. They will lack power, industrial skills, economies of scale freedom of movement, everything that goes to making a society prosperous. Mars has nothing the Earth dwellers want or need, and craves the things the Earth can provide. ... Mars lacks the water and sunlight to be competitive or even self sufficient agriculturally, it lacks the power, and likely, the metals needed for industrialisation, it cannot support a population large enough for a diversified economy. Mars will be a ghetto. Unemployment and crime will be rampant.

That also seems likely.

As a bonus

[countach]

All 100,000 get honorary darwin awards.

Re:As a bonus

[oodaloop]

And the remaining 7 billion people left on this dying planet get them as well.

Re:As a bonus

[JoshuaZ]

And it wouldn't surprise me if someone said something similar about the humans who first moved out of Africa. And it applies as well to those who went on voyages of exploration, or those scientists who selflessly used their own bodies for medical tests (a category often underappreciated and discussed Lawrence Altman's excellent book "Who Goes First"). We progress by taking risks and we should be grateful for those willing to do so.

Re:As a bonus

[Vanderhoth]

It's funny how we claim in western culture that we should be free to do as we please as long as it's not hurting anyone else, but there are so many that feel the need to jump in and stop others from go on what could be the greatest adventure any of us could ever go on, possibility for the betterment and all mankind, but everyone and their dog feel it's absolutely necessary to try and stop them.

I find it very disheartening

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How to build a better world

[gmuslera]

Reject all those applications and send to Mars the 100.000 that are in the top 0.1%. Uh, and later send a second batch with lawyers.

Mars One torn to shreds by their own AMA

[Quiet Sound]

These people know nothing about space travel and are completely incapable of answering technical questions about the project. They aren't legitimate.

I'm sure she'll be fine.

[Andunelen]

No, but I signed my mother-in-law up.

Re:DOA

[drinkypoo]

One solar flare pointed in the wrong direction and they will fry before they get there. Without science fiction, there is no practical shielding tech that offers a solution (a room with 6 inch think lead walls is heavier than you think).

sigh, and also sigh. It's called water. You need it anyway. It's good for everything.

Are they going to land on the surface? I doubt it. The atmosphere makes it very hard to land anything larger than the rover without making a new crater. If you landed, you would have supplies for a few hours before death. You can't do it with parachutes. You need a big rocket to slow you done

You missed some punctuation there: "You need a big rocket to slow you. Done."

It goes on and on. Mars is distraction. Money and energy should be spent on more practical projects.

Yes. Like asteroid mining. Which would give us the mass in orbit necessary to build meaningful interplanetary missions.

We'll all be dead from a antibiotic resistant super-bug before we have any hope of putting someone on Mars.

Unfortunately, aerospace engineers aren't very useful in solving that problem. Probably we should still let them work on getting us off this mudball before the impactor arrives.

Re: So, wait...

[drinkypoo]

The religious idiots had an advantage : they could slaughter the inhabitants and just seize already cultivated land and resources and eat all the animals they could find. Settling 'Murica was probably the easiest in the history of mankind.

The advantage they actually had was that the native Americans had already been decimated (in the modern sense; actually, they were reduced to the tenth man, not by him) by contact with the diseases of the Spanish.

Not that bad

[SuperKendall]

They will need radiation shielding on Mars too.

In a talk on current measurements for radiation levels on Mars I attended, the scientists responsible for the radiation measurement instrumentation said the rough dose you would get per year is around 100 x-rays worth. That's quite a lot, but not going to kill you anytime soon.

That was with little solar activity, but you could provide a shielded area to retreat to if something happened to hit while the sun was up.

Re:DOA

[DamonHD]

The "we must not do anything speculative until all more mundane problems are totally solved" view is broken on many fronts, not least of which is ignoring the potential parallelism in progressing our culture and expertise, and the actual practical intractability of many of the "simple" problems especially if they are even defined in relative terms.

Life is neither binary nor single-threaded.

Rgds

Damon

Stop giving this scam free press!

[notanalien_justgreen]

I really wish people would stop posting MarsOne propaganda. It's a scam, pure and simple. It's been pointed out time and time again that their team is primarily artists and PR people. Just look here for yourself:

http://www.mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/team

Of the 7 people listed there's: an artist, an editor, a communication specialist, a communications director, and an MD. There's only 2 people who could conceivably have any expertise on getting to Mars.

They did an interview (AMA) on reddit and were torn apart:

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ufb42/ama_i_am_founder_of_mars_one_sending_four_people/

STOP FEEDING THESE PEOPLE FREE PRESS!