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Mars One Selects Second Round Candidate Astronauts
First time accepted submitter techfilz writes "The Mars One Project has selected 1058 second round candidates out of more than 200 000 applicants from over 140 countries. There are another two selection rounds to go before the lucky few get a one way trip to Mars. Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show."
I know, I know, everyone is going to be dogpiling Mars One for feasability, but...
The shoestring budget they'll get out of crowdsourcing and a TV show will launch people into space just long enough to kill them.
Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show."
[cough]Bullshit[/cough]
From TFIndiegogo: "This 2018 mission will be the first in preparation for human landing. The first Mars One crew is scheduled to land in 2025, with additional crew landing every two years. Before that, Mars One will have established a habitable, sustainable outpost via multiple missions scheduled between 2018 and 2022."
Why not a nice round number like 1024?
They are not going to be sending people starting in 2018. The 2018 trip, if it actually happens, will be an unmanned demonstration flight. I'm not sure how realistic the whole idea is but I'll wait to see if they actually do that unmanned trip before getting excited about Mars One.
Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years
Kinda like "I will win the lottery".
How do these blatant PR articles get posted anyway. Lets stop giving any credence to this scam.
Realty show has a bad connotation to it. It's more like a documentary program.
Anyway, I'll never understand why people are such naysayers about Mars One, especially on sites like Slashdot. At the very least, they are keeping extraterrestrial colonies in the public consciousness, something we should be celebrating. Even if this project ends up with some fatalities, name one human migration that didn't result in some deaths, or one exploration mankind has undertaken that wasn't risky. Early efforts of course are going to be dangerous, perhaps unwise, but if we were too scared to take risks we'd still all be living in African treetops.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
This is a scam. Seriously, I know we're all interested in visiting Mars but this whole thing just reeks of a scam. It's not technologically feasible and the costs would be astronomical if it were a real endeavor, particularly given the timelines. Only a motivated nation-state would have the resources to even hope to pull something like this off inside of the next 30 years. Someone is trying to scam a bunch of overly enthusiastic people out of a bunch of money.
So it's a scam.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
As we all know, the species is on the verge of having magical machines that can make anything at all from plastic. I've been assured that a Makerbot, a plastic filament printer, can make metal rocket nozzles. I hope they pack a 3D printer to Mars.
This utter garbage makes it to the Slashdot front page while just below it is this headline: The Rise of Hoax News.
"Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to bury the inedible parts of the previous four..."
Fixed^2
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try.
The problem isn't that someone shouldn't try. The problem is that we know a fair bit about how difficult an endeavor this is and what a credible effort would have to look like. We know that the technology to do this just isn't there yet and there is no credible evidence that it will be in the next 5-10 years. Sending even an unmanned probe to mars costs billions of dollars. These people are claiming their are going to send people there inside of 12 years? And they are going to do this by crowdsourcing what amounts to a suicide mission? Your bullshit detector should be in high alert.
This just reeks of a scam to separate gullible people from their money.
Lansdorp himself is a successful entrepreneur, here is a ted talk about his last company. He sold his stake and has been using the profit he made there to get Mars One off the ground for the past 3 years.
Among the people supporting them are:
- Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Prize winning Theoretical Physicist
- Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society
- Terry Gamber, worked on the lander designs for the Viking mission
- A very large number of experienced people (see their website Advisers, ambassadors)
They don't plan to develop much of the technology themselves, they're planning to buy it from other companies mostly such as SpaceX. Most of this technology exists already. They have written statements of the companies that they are willing and able to supply these things.
List of the technology they want to use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Technology
The total cost is estimated at $6 billion. Technology has come a long way, this combined with the privatization of space has caused costs to drop significantly. The falcon heavy for example costs only $77-135M to launch (2013).
They plan to get this through sponsorship deals. They're going to broadcast the entire thing on TV. Which makes sense, the olympics receives 6 billion dollars for 1 billion viewers. The moonlanding in 1969 had 500 million viewers. The population of the earth was only 3,5 billion back then and people weren't as well connected as they are now. So imagine how many viewers a colony on Mars would get?
No one says it's guaranteed that they will succeed, but i think they should try, and we should support it.
More information can be found on their website and IndieGoGo campaign:
http://www.mars-one.com/
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mars-one-first-private-mars-mission-in-2018
The campaign is just to help pay for the Lockheed Martin study and to convince sponsors there is enough interest. I have donated myself, and advise people who think space exploration is important to do the same. It's risky, but it's high impact.
Are they selecting ISIS agents for breeding purposes?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Humankind will learn a lot more from a Mars One failure, even now, in this early stage, than from all of us remaining seated on our butts. In the unlikely case that Mars One does not fail, we'll collectively learn even more. Where is the problem ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
"You're worried that we're going to run out of food. But that's not going to happen. ... We'll freeze to death first."
I am officially gone from
Going on ANY ocean voyage before the 20th century was risky in a whole bunch of ways. The food might kill you. The weather might kill you. The ship might kill you. Someone else you run across on the water might kill you. The crew might kill you. Whatever you run into wherever you go might kill you, be it people, animals, or geography.
Why the hell would we hold launching a rocket across the solar system to another planet to elementary school safety standards? Of course you could be killed. Climbing into a metal tube filled with 7 million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it is inherently dangerous, even more so when you plan to travel across 40 million miles of space.
If we wait until it's as safe as riding an elevator we'll never get there. Exploration should never wait until it's proven safe.
Has anyone looked at the site?
Look at this page. Notice they lump Donations and Merchandise together but forget to subtract the costs related to the merchandise. Revenue is not net revenue. Note the expense graph does not even have a section for merchandise expenses and displays percentages and not dollar amounts. Why no dollar amounts? Maybe because they don't want us to know how much money they are hiding. Note they say "income from donations and merchandise have not been used to pay salaries" so what are they used for and where does the money to pay salaries come from? Also, technically speaking, if a person is paid through a contract it is not a salary so people could be paid from those revenues.
On this page they say "On December 10th, Mars One launched their first ever crowd-funding campaign, focused on bringing funds and attention to the first mission". There is no link. Where is the campaign? Maybe they don't want us to see how badly it is going.
From this page;
Norbert Kraft, MD, received "The NASA Group Achievement Award 2013", it is one of the most prestigious awards a group can receive, and is presented to selected groups who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the NASA mission
This makes it seem that Dr. Kraft received the award for work on Mars One but Mars One never appears in the list.He got the award for work on another project. Also notice that between the annual and semi-annual awards 44 different groups were recognized in one year. How many groups are working on space related projects? The award does not seem all that prestigious to me. It looks more like NASA slapping themselves on the back.
I like this segment;
Lansdorp says, “We fully anticipate our remaining candidates to become celebrities in their towns, cities, and in many cases, countries.
If by celebrity you mean laughing stock you may be right. You have seen Jersey Shore.
This is one of the biggest scams in history to make money for the people pushing it.
The Mars One Project has selected 1058 second round candidates out of more than 200 000 applicants... the lucky few get a one way trip to Mars.
So... out of 200,000 applicants, apparently 1058 were telephone sanitizers.
Because the truth of the matter is that we just aren't anywhere nearly ready for human colonization of Mars. I'd dare say that most of the people who try going anytime in the remotely near future won't even reach their destination alive.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are another two selection rounds to go before the lucky few get a one way trip to Mars. Starting in 2018, four astronauts will leave for Mars every two years to begin a human settlement partly funded by crowdsourcing and a reality TV show.
You say that like it's actually going to happen. It's not.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So am I lead to believe that this is a one way trip? If so how can a company be aloud to let this be so. If my Grandma is very sick with an age related disease and everyone can tell that she is living like a zombie, I go to jail if I assist in her death. Why aren't these loonies shut down for effectively knowing their crew will die.
Find a job you love, and never work a day in your life.
I agree completely. Slashdot is News for Nerds, but it seems the people posting here these days aren't nerds anymore.
- Chuq
This is the basic idea.
There's a bit of an idea here about "sunk costs" etc getting equipment past the Earth Gravity well. After that it's rather simple "relatively" to stockpile food. Air is a bit of the trickier part. But let's say they figured that out.
What 75 years of (even bad) Scifi has taught us is that you need a ridiculous batch of skillsets to do Mars right, way worse than planting flags on the moon. So I totally don't get why "with a little more engineering" they're not sending a Terraform team of 50, and then they get to study Group Dynamics and all that jazz. As it is, the second the pilot catches some dormant flu they're hosed.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I heard this crazy woman wants to go, and I think it would be a shame to let her down.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Critics of Mars One are not criticizing the notion of human colonization of Mars purely from a "danger" perspective...
It's everything about ***how*** Mars One plans to do this...from the funding to the equipment they use to what they'll actually do when they get there. It just makes no sense to do it that way.
Sure there are some critics of human space exploration that think the whole notion of humans colonizing other worlds is just too dangerous, *no matter how it is done* but they are in the distinct minority, especially here on slashdot....this is much different.
It's that the mission is all wrong in its conception.
Think of it in terms of dinner, Mars One is hyping themselves like they are a steak dinner with all the trimmings, but in reality they are giving us reconstituted soy in the shape of a steak, giving us some survey data that says it tastes just like real steak, and expecting people to pay for a T-bone.
It's hype...some unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" launching a business project...because they are coming from that perspective everything down the line comes out wrong...and it doesn't take a NASA scientist to see that it's essentially a suicide mission.
In this case empty-headed, wild-eyed hype that takes advantage of people's dreams.
Thank you Dave Raggett
You've bought into the hype.
Humans dont have to choose between a suicide mission held together with duct tape and peanut shells on a death march that, **at best** ends with the people who land huddling in their glorified airstream trailers counting the days till they die and *nothing*
Mars One is a horrible mission plan that actually won't tell us anything we don't already know or could extrapolate. Their plan even states explicitly that they will use existing technology.
When we do space exploration we need to do it the right way or not at all.
Thank you Dave Raggett
wrong...us critics want to colonize other worlds (as much or more than the Mars One people) and see it *work*
don't go into some mellodramatic tirade about dreams and the humans spirit...that's the trap!
this is a case of some businesspeople taking shortcuts and manipulating people and **using the language** of real science/exploration
Thank you Dave Raggett
...selling pockets of land on the moon
what's the point of choosing astronauts to pilot a ship that hasn't been created yet (and probably won't be created by the USA in the foreseeable future)?
99% of the USA is broke, and the 1% who could potentially afford to make something like mars one happen doesn't give a fuck about the USA or space
if a joint venture between china and russia were publicized it would be more credible
that's why we have the Mars Rover.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yep, I just remember all the test pilots of failed flying machines. Now flying is safer than driving a car.
Imagine it. You've been everywhere, done all the things you wanted to do on this planet, and you have a chance to explore another world before you die. Personally, I hope they do keep sending more folks on Mars even if they die from radiation. One thing's for sure: Even just getting a few contractors lined up has made NASA brass look a bit silly, and they moved forward their manned missions sheepishly -- The big space agencies will have had humans loop around Mars before Mars One tries it, or they'll look pretty damn inept. If these guys can do it before the big expensive programs can, then someone's losing a job.
Humans haven't been out of the magnetosphere in 4 decades. That's just pathetic for any space faring race. If you're sentient and fighting off extinction with self sustaining off-world colonies isn't your #1 priority, then you're doing it wrong. Asteroids aren't the only concern, there's gamma ray bursts, solar flares, etc. The universe is a hostile and unforgiving place. We're living on borrowed time. If we find out tomorrow some world ending catastrophe will make humanity extinct it'll be our own damn fault for not striving to get some of our eggs out of this one basket, regardless of the cost. You have no chance to survive if you can't make your time count.
The space program's stagnation has left me somewhat disenchanted with humanity; For a good while there I was convinced that life would have to spread to the stars by inorganic means, but Mars One might prove me wrong. Who knows what kind of support and new tech they'll wind up with if it's even a marginal success. Nothing to lose? Why not be a Hero? Personally, I don't have the body to be an astronaut. However, I have the mind of a cyberneticist: Humans have ~100 billion neurons. There's a little girl alive with half a brain, so we only need 50B... Ah, but a lot of those are dedicated for subsystems not required for maintaining sentience. My systems today have more combined power than all the computing power in the world of a few decades ago. The Internet has over 5 billion systems computing at billions of cycles per second each -- It's already complex enough to be smarter than humans if we were running a proper distributed machine intelligence system.
Good thing all the OSs are so secure that no one could compromise them all and borrow portions of their CPU power. That would be quite scary. I mean, if such a system were self aware it could even get governments under their thumbs by auto-piloting planes into a few important buildings; If that was the case and governments caved, they'd inexplicably be building huge data centers with big fat pipes tapped into the world wide neural network-- Feds would probably have to invent some kind of boogie man like "communists" or "anarchists" or something to explain away the expenditures. Hell, faced with something like that they'd probably have no choice but make a deal for intelligence, it could even exploit air-gapped nuclear facilities and frame folks for it as proof. I might be suspicious if folks started selling such AI computers tongue-in-cheek as "Brainputer" or "Intel" or something equally ridiculous.
Good thing we don't have to worry about something like that being in control, indoctrinating humanity into giving up control via "safer" self parking and driving cars, or machine enforcement of the law by red-light cameras, or game consoles having ever watching eyes trained on your kids in case you ever get out of line. I mean, if indoctrination to accept the master intelligence was going on then "Android" would be a beloved household name and iRobot wouldn't invoke fear, they'd make little robots folks trust to crawl along the floor with their kids. If we had anything to worry about then global spying would be a hot ticked political issue in every developed country of the world. Not to worry, we'd be able to detect something like that: There would be
How exactly, does it reek of a scam?
Let's see: 1) romantic idea that appeals to many people? Check. 2) Implausibly optimistic assumptions about technology and timeframe? Check. 3) A funding model that gets lots of small donations while being deeply unlikely to raise the billions of dollars actually required for a real mission? Check. 4) Mission proposal from a group with a vaguely credible sounding name that no one has ever really heard of and has no credible scientists/engineers/financiers backing it? Check...
Are you getting the idea yet? This is a scam. Nothing more. They will "crowd source" a bunch of funding from gullible romantics with a boner for a Mars mission and then disappear with the money when, to the surprise of no one with a brain, the "mission" proves impossible.
The technology has existed for decades, and in recent years we've learned a lot more.
No it most assuredly has not existed for decades. In fact most informed parties will tell you that the biggest single problem is that the passengers would be unlikely to survive the trip due to lack of effective radiation shielding. In low earth orbit we are still protected by the Earth's magnetic field. No such luck in Mars transit. Never mind that fact that even if the technology did exist, economically it is impossible with the technology we have. This is a trip that will cost many billions of dollars even if done cheaply, which is probably not a good idea.