One-Way Ticket: Mars One Project Applicants Top 100,000 240
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?
How to build a better world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a bonus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:what happens if the chick get pregnant? (Score:1, Insightful)
1. The child will be unable to travel to Earth, because the higher gravity of earth will kill him or her.
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. If these people are serious about going to Mars, rather than paying $38, they should volunteer to be sterilised if chosen. This way, the severe ethical and medical issues associated with procreation can be avoided. Oh, and instead of $38 each, they should be paying $38000000 dollars apiece. At that kind of money, and with 100 K people pitching in, we are getting closer to a viable enterprise. Of course, for that money, what they will get is to be able to fly their cremated remains to Mars and have them scattered on the surface by an automated probe. Same outcome.
But to address your points specifically:
Virtually no crime, pretty much nonexistent unemployment,
If as settlement is ever established on Mars, in the long term crime is likely to be a huge problem, owing to the desperate circumstances arising from the incredibly bad economic conditions. 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. Earth dwellers can travel to Mars, and then back to Earth, Long term Mars residents cannot travel to Earth. 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.
lots of free space,
Hypothetical residents on Mars will live underground in tunnels - they have to, due to the deadly radiation. They will rarely, if ever, venture to the surface. Space will be at an absolute premium, more like living on a submarine than living on Earth.
no environmental issues,
Well, Mars is dead, so it's true that we are unlikely to cause any environmental damage. Economic activity will be low to non-existent so Mars is unlikely to have many problems with industrial pollutants. However living quarters will be cramped and sanitation poor, plus many of the techniques used to move pollutants out of our nests on the earth (like flushing them into rivers) won't work on Mars - the water recycling strategies used on the ISS and similar will likely fail early in the piece owing to a lack of parts and the impossibility of buying new ones.
no civil unrest or wars anywhere on the horizon.
Mars will resemble the classic breeding ground for civil unrest for the reasons given above. Wars, maybe not, because there will never be enough people there to ever go to War, and the classic geographical style war is impossible anyway.
Re:what happens if the chick get pregnant? (Score:4, Insightful)
The main problem with your analysis is that the kind of people they will (or ought to) send will be very easy-going, non-violent, kind, highly intelligent and well educated.
Quite likely. For a working model we could actually use the early internet. Back before the arpanet became the internet there were fewer users and most were highly educated researchers. Forward to the present and we know what we have now.
Re:DOA (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you define a value of "us"? How many people is that?
I mean the species. But if we had space elevators, and we stopped breeding, and we built sufficiently large ships, we could probably get a significant portion of the population out of here.
Do you realize how little difference there is between you and a regular doomsday cult?
Yes. The only difference is that most of them are worried about something that will probably never happen, whereas I am concerned about something that will probably happen eventually.
Re:DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:As a bonus (Score:3, Insightful)
No they thought they might fall off the end of the world. Anyway you are right they will most certainly die (relatively quickly) but I am sure many previous explorers had a high change of death.
But in the end, if we ever want to expand to other planets some people are going to have to take incredibly risky step of being the first people to go.
Can we wait until we have better technology, yes, but at some point we will go (or at least I believe so).
Their deaths will provide invaluable knowledge about next time, in a much quicker fashion than laboratory tests, and simulations.
Think of it this way people climb deadly mountains http://gearjunkie.com/worlds-10-most-dangerous-mountains [gearjunkie.com] the worst has 41% death rate and what for? Someone has already climbed it, you aren't going to live there. At least with going to Mars are knowledge of colonizing planets will be increased, and if they will be famous for a very long time.