Mars One Has 78,000 Applicants 355
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."
Re:Bleaker than you think! (Score:5, Interesting)
Awesome, I've been expecting that sooner or later reality TV would go in the direction of people dying for years now.
I'm sure the dying moments of these people will make for really awesome ratings.
What a dumb fscking idea.
Re:Bleaker than you think! (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that a problem?
What dying moments will be broadcast? Ideally, the travelers would survive long enough to set up a viable sustainable colony, whose expenses could be handled by a large enough trust fund. By the time they die of natural causes, the reality show would be long-since off the air.
In a less ideal situation, the travelers' catastrophic dying moments are broadcast to the world, and the travelers are martyrs in the ongoing process of human exploration. This is a known risk, which all the travelers must accept before volunteering. Why, then, would it be a problem to broadcast the unintentional deaths of these brave folks? The chance of their sudden death is something they accept... why can't we viewers accept it as well?
Re:Money in the bank (Score:2, Interesting)
This actually reeks of fraud to me. One person's vaporware is another person's fraud. This is a tried and true mechanism for committing fraud on a massive scale:
1. Pitch stupid idea to 100k+ people
2. Get each person (or most of the people) to pledge a small amount of money towards the idea
3. The idea never goes anywhere and the idea pitchers cannot be found (with 2+ million in the bank)
This is exactly how {insert favourite TV evangelist} extorted millions from basically poor people, but instead of sending your money to God you're sending money to some idea almost as equally stupid. After looking at their website, there is no financial information disclosure and no appointed auditors. The whole thing smells like a scam. The only difference being that most people don't really complain loudly when they're out a paltry sum of cash.