Something similar to this has already been done in the UK. The company behind big brother made Space Cadets.
I never saw it but it looked pretty lame. Actually training them (not anybody, real potential astronauts) and sending the winner into space would be far more interesting.
No, because we do not evolve anymore since the advent of agriculture (or so).
This belief that humans are no longer evolving is wrong. The advent of agriculture, the improvements in medicine and so on may now mean that certain features that used to be favoured are no longer so beneficial, e.g. the ability to run fast, but this does not mean that we are no longer evolving. Agriculture wasn't the end of the road for human evolution, if anything was it was (good) medicine, the ability to cure potentially fatal diseases and allow people to reproduce who would otherwise not be able to. Despite this there are still features that make some people more likely than others to survive and reproduce, therefore passing on their genes to future generations; medicine hasn't turned all humans into perfect identical clones. We still have features that distinguish us from each others, some of which will be passed on, we are still evolving. The future however could make things considerably worse (designer babies etc).
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I never saw it but it looked pretty lame. Actually training them (not anybody, real potential astronauts) and sending the winner into space would be far more interesting.
This belief that humans are no longer evolving is wrong. The advent of agriculture, the improvements in medicine and so on may now mean that certain features that used to be favoured are no longer so beneficial, e.g. the ability to run fast, but this does not mean that we are no longer evolving. Agriculture wasn't the end of the road for human evolution, if anything was it was (good) medicine, the ability to cure potentially fatal diseases and allow people to reproduce who would otherwise not be able to. Despite this there are still features that make some people more likely than others to survive and reproduce, therefore passing on their genes to future generations; medicine hasn't turned all humans into perfect identical clones. We still have features that distinguish us from each others, some of which will be passed on, we are still evolving. The future however could make things considerably worse (designer babies etc).