To Boldly Go: Meet the 400 Volunteers for a One-Way Mission to Mars

Hmm, I missed the one-way only part. Should have read the article more. Sounds so depressing. I bet a few people would kill themselves.

If it were me and 399 women, I could do my duty.

Be some long, busy days - but with proper scheduling, the time would just fly by.

i hope its real. id go in a heart beat, how many others in history have done that? you and the other 399 people would be the first colony on an alien planet.

i would hope no one started to lose it. but with 400 people you could easily stave off cabin fever just by socialization, sports, movies, who knows.

i personally would cure the bordem with art supplies, models, alcohol and satellite radio. hopefully marijuana would be legalized by that time.

I would go in a heartbeat and I am pretty sure many people would contribute $$$$$$ to the project just to get me away from here..........lol

My most burning question is

Could I adapt my harley to run in the martian atmo?

Wow. I had no idea so many people were this disconnected from what is actually out there.

You can't grow corn on Mars. Its dirt is poison right now.

You can't grow anything on Mars. It is too cold, it is too dry, and the atmosphere doesn't have much protective ability, so you and your plants will fry. With radiation. Literally. There are regular lethal blasts of radiation.

You can't ride your harley - you can't BREATHE on Mars. There are no roads on mars even if you could. A dirt bike might be better - but the gravity is different enough that it might be problematic. It would need to be much heavier, unless you want to literally fly when you hit a rock. Even an ATV would be better. There are no sources of hydrocarbons, so maybe making your ATV run on solar might not be such a bad thing. Don't forget your sun block - it'll make your corpse less tanned when they get to you after a solar flare.


The trip right now is one way because you can't afford to get on and off. Once you realize what a gargantuan mistake you made going with no plan, you'd scare everyone else off. Further, the trip there will be quite likely to make a significant number of people die of cancer before the year is out. More women than men possibly. And the trip back would exacerbate the exposure to a point that it is possible all of the returning colonists would die.

Bored. Oy. Just trying not to DIE should alleviate the boredom.

You can't have children, because there is no indication that women can bear children without the right mix of stimuli. Do you know if a blastocyte can implant in lesser gravity? Do you know if we need certain electromagnetic stimuli for fetal brains to develop? Do women ovulate normally without a strong tidal force?

If you did have children, they can't leave the tiny bubble you made. If they did, can they come back to Earth? They were born and developed in a far lesser gravity. Going from a heavier to a lesser gravity makes sense, but can bones that develop in a lesser gravity adapt to a greater gravity?

Being so dumb that you take seeds for orange trees when you colonized Canada is one thing. Going to a place that can't even grow seeds and not being aware of it is a whole new level of dumb.

en.wikipedia.org...



(Yeah, after my kids are grown I would go. Please, for the love of God, don't send me with these people. I don't wanna die.)

reply to post by Aeons

This is precisely why I mentioned I'd go with 399 women, and the intense scheduling bit.

With 399 women, I wouldn't even notice there was nothing (else) to do.

If there is nothing else to do, when you literally will die if you don't work, you're planning on dying. Quickly.

You might last long enough to go through all 399 first. You know, if they didn't KICK YOUR ASS for not doing your share of making sure everyone didn't die.

I would love to go Its been my dream to be among the first human space colonists since I realized it was an inevitability. Sure there are risks, but imagine the pay! No I'm not talkin that worthless paper crap, I'm talkin the bragging rights. You'd be able to say you brought space flight into the mainstream. Once we have that first extraterrestrial colony, do you think we're just gonna stop? No the Martian colonists will pave the way for the rest of the solar system and eventually the rest of the galaxy. Plus wouldn't you want to be there just in case there are natives? You don't want the "white man" going over there unsupervised because I'm sure I don't have to remind you what he did to the taino in cuba ( en.wikipedia.org... this states "Within a century the indigenous people were virtually wiped out" however if you read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States you'd know that the entire population was gone thus rendering the word 'virtually' unnecessary in the wiki statement)

Personally I have tons of experience with plants and horticulture in general. I've done a little bit of everything; landscaping with tractors and backhoes and shtuff like that, greenhouse grow (from seed) and sale, plant i.d (hundreds lol) mulching, pruning, creating different soil mixtures to optimize pH for specific crops. Most importantly I believe my ability to build and maintain hydroponic stations would be a great asset to the effort. (I'm sure a lot of you are familiar but for those who aren't, hydroponics is basically a method of growing plants without the usual need for soil by feeding them nutrient-rich water) So where do I sign up?

reply to post by Aeons

Aside from the fact that some of us are really, really . . . special, I think if I were there with 399 women, the biggest problem wouldn't be food or water, but whether the engineers can build a large enough ship to haul enough toilet paper.

reply to post by Juston



Sign me up

Oh hell ya id go! Imagin how cool that would be? it would probly take 3 years or sumptin just for the trip there and more than likely the whole thing would just blow up at some point cuz theres a lot of things that could go wrong in that amount of time. but still that would be AWSOM : ) id go in a hart beat

As I said in another thred about one-way travel to mars.

We should colonize it the old fashioned WWI way - by sending as many as we can. We succeed by partially terraforming the area and partially adapting. 95% will die. Newborns (once we succeed in that) will suffer greatly but with time a couple will survive.
Building a base to host scientists is just not good enough. We won't be able to terraform the planet in thousands of years. The only way is to conquer it by sacrifice - and do it while we still have billions of population available. With good planning and enough people we can seed the planet permanently in a thousand years.

When a large enough space faring ship is available of course.
I would go in an instant. Its every pioneer's dream.