Christian Science Monitor – by Elizabeth Barber
One year ago, Mars One announced big plans for the Red Planet: a human settlement. The colonizing mission, planned for 2023, would be stylized like a reality TV show, but with the added drama that its participants, the would-be first humans to set foot on another planet, will never get to go home.
Despite that caveat, the foundation announced on Monday that it has received some 202,586 applications from hopefuls eager to live out the rest of their lives on another world – or, to be, exact, within 200 square meters of combined interior space and on a swath of the barren planet accessible only when clad in a protective suit.
“Its kind of a no-brainer to me, though I know that a lot of people don’t feel that way,” says Matt Ambler, a recent Yale graduate and an IT consultant in Washington DC who applied to be among the settlers.
“This is going to be a pretty important thing to do with my life,” he says. “Talk about leaving your mark on humanity.”
Mars One reported that the applicants came from 140 countries, with about a quarter coming from the United States, 10 percent from India, and 6 percent from China. Brazil, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, and Mexico, each put up about 4 percent of the applicants. All of the countries named in the applicant pool place above 100 in the UN’s Human Development Index Ranking for 2012, with the exception of China (101) and India (136), and presumably offer a higher quality of life than can Mars.
The foundation says it will select around six teams of four individuals in 2015. Those teams will spend seven years in training, and the first team will leave for the Red Planet in 2022, arriving the following year. After that, teams will arrive on Mars every two years, and the application portal will reopen to “replenish the training pool,” according to Mars One’s website.
The mission, which will be outfitted with technology purchased from private developers, to expected to cost about $6 billion, a point that the foundation has called its “biggest problem.”
So where will that money come from? Viewers like you.
The fictional Hunger Games, imagined in the 2008 book, fed on a population’s interest in watching people grapple with a 1-in-26 chance of being reunited with their families; Mars One expects that its pockets will brim with the investments of people eager to watch people with essentially zero odds of going home.
“People are interested in a manned mission to Mars; Mars One uses this interest to finance the mission,” according to the foundation’s website, which cites revenue from Olympics broadcasts as evidence of what viewership can bring.
That means that, after Mars One removes the “unsuitable” applicants – applicants must meet certain physical requirements, including perfect vision and a height between 5’2” and 6’3” – viewers will have a say in who gets ferried to Mars, never to come home again, the group says.
Already, applicants who eschewed anonymity have posted videos on the foundation’s websites describing why the public should choose them to colonize Mars.
“You have to appeal to the public to go,” says Jessica Eicher, a senior at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Ms. Eicher’s fiancé, David Barbeau, is also an applicant, and the couple expresses plans to become the extraterrestrial equivalent of Adam and Eve.
“Our shared dream is to have a family on Mars with the combined support of the entire human race,” writes Mr. Barbeau, a firefighter in Anchorage, Alaska, in his Mars One application profile. “After all, it takes an entire earth to raise an off world colony.”
At the moment, Mars One says on its website that it will “strongly advise the settlement habitants not to attempt to have children,” given the unknown effects of reduced gravity on conception and fetus development.
“We just feel like people would like us,” Eicher tells the Monitor. “Everyone can relate to a family.”
John Traphagan, a religion professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an advisor to Mars One, says that Mars One is above all looking for tolerant individuals who will cope well with the close quarters.
“The capacity to work well with others is exceedingly important,” he says, noting that in addition to screening for good-natured applicants, Mars One also plans to develop training schemes to prepare the would-be colonizers for the extreme isolation.
Still, all that might not be enough to ward against the possible physiological trauma of the Mars expedition, says Dr. Traphagan.
When Mars One launched in May 2012, the brainchild of Dutch scientist and entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, the blowback was immediate. Besides physical safety concerns, like the effects of radiation on the new astronauts, there were social and psychological worries: Will the group be able to emotionally withstand seven months in a cramped and noisy spaceship, where the only available food is tasteless and freeze-dried and where a shower is just not possible?
Will those astronauts be prepared to cope with living out the rest of their lives with no expectation of seeing their friends and family ever again, or without hope of again experiencing the basic comforts – or even just the lapping waters and warbling birds – of their home planet? Will living what Traphagan calls “restricted lives” with no prospect for travel away from the base, nor anything new to see or plan or hope for, drive the perpetual astronauts mad?
And will these recruits be prepared to live until the end with just each other, or will this be a parable of how, as Jean Paul Sartre put it, “hell is other people”?
“We don’t know,” says Traphagan. “Humans really don’t have much experience off our planet. We really don’t know what we’re getting into.”
To date, there have been a few studies on long-term isolation, in which participants have been quartered up and monitored for the sociological and psychological effects of such extreme togetherness. But Traphagan notes that participants in those studies benefit from a known release date.
“You know that the year is going to end,” says Traphagan “But on Mars, it doesn’t end. There’s no way to simulate going somewhere and never returning.”
Mr. Ambler, among those who have posted a video to Mars One, says that he is not afraid of the one-way-ticket aspect to the mission.
“That’s the whole point of a colony,” he says, citing the early American settlers. “You go there and you live there.”
Of course, what happened to the England’s first attempt at a settlement in the New World, the 1587 Roanoke Colony, remains a mystery, and Mr. Ambler acknowledges that.
“I’m really not afraid of this,” he says. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0910/More-than-200-000-people-apply-for-a-one-way-trip-to-Mars
WHAT A CROCK OF SHIT!
I’ve seen this kind of movie before. It’s where the whole reality show is nothing more than a computer generated Hollywood stunt, designed to make people think they are on Mars when in actuality they are just cryogenically frozen in some tube in space, if that. Isn’t this what they did in 1969 when they faked the landing on the moon? And now they are taking people from all over the world to embrace another one world order. If this is real, I’m sure there are already colonies on Mars (as Fritz Springmeier has often stated) and they are just waiting to control the people who come there. Remember: you can’t have a place to go to unless it is controlled by the Zionists or members of the elite and I’m sure there will be plenty of Zionist Jews on that ship if it is true.
Maybe this will be a part of their fake alien invasion crap that they are trying to create.
On the other hand, even if this is true, do you really think after everything that is going on that they are going to have the time to train 7 years for that shit? Maybe it’s underground with no distractions or maybe they plan on destroying the entire world (which according the Bible will never happen) and then start a few 200,000 people on Mars by 2023. Good way to depopulate only to start fresh on some other planet. Hell, I’d give anything to be off this rock. I’m sick of this Nanny state world we live in. Tell me where I can buy my own ship and I’m gone.
Naw NC I hate it here too but this is where I am from, We can send those PTB off too the moon screw them clown boys. 🙂
If we send TPTB there, they will come back and try and destroy us with some death ray or some ship the size of 3 or 4 football fields thrown to the ground, thus wiping half the planet out like the dinosaurs (if you still believe that theory).
The only thing to be sure is to exterminate every last one of them from existence because they will never stop destroying everything until they’re dead. We both know that.
Yea I know NC but I just love the visual of the last two standing and with their mentality they have got to kill the other off, therefore they would be the last man standing LOL. 🙂 They are dumb as a box of rocks.
Send the Kardashians.
Nah! We’re already wasting too much money as it is. lol
People want to go where there is less or no government oppression.
This was the biggest reason for the move west in the 1800s.
There is now nowhere on this planet that one can get away from
people who think they can take what you worked hard for because they
wrote something on a piece of paper allowing them to take things.
http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php
“And then there were none.”
What happens when a planet that has been isolated from oppressive governments is visited.
This isolated planet lives by one rule. MYOB Mind your own Business.
Sorry, but if you think leaving this planet to go onto another planet will make you free, you are gravely mistaken. You know who first gets to step foot and colonize those places. Not ordinary good people like you or I. Nope. First it’s the rich elitists with the power. Then when they feel they have everything their way or under control, they send out for slaves…I mean volunteers to come and enjoy what they have to offer for a fee and no one else will be able to gain access to any alternatives. And if those volunteers happen to try and go their own way. POP! And into the Martian ditch you go.
The same thing generally happened in the U.S. with Britain trying to take us over by hanging or shooting anyone who went against the King, who was 3000 miles on the other side of the damn ocean and it will happen anywhere in the world or universe.
No one is ever really safe. Don’t kid yourself, Bullwinkle. As long as there are people, there will always be someone in that group willing to control everyone else for power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I propose a fly-by of Mars, with the entire Congress dumped out .
Sans parachutes.
Along with every stinking last Zionist on the planet.
I’m telling you, if you do that, they will come back and destroy us. You can’t just throw them away like tissue. They will not stop and will always find a way to destroy us, even if it’s from another planet. That’s what they do. The Zionists were kicked out of almost every country in the world and still came back to try and destroy everyone. I don’t think kicking them off to another planet would make any difference. They don’t seem to take a hint.
I dunno, NC. Without parachutes, the odds of them surviving the landing are pretty much nil. 🙂
Ahh! Didn’t understand the “Sans” thing. My bad. D’OH! lol
Ok, then I agree with you. Go for it! lol
🙂
Hmmm, that’s a pretty good idea. Or maybe something like a TV reality show that everyone could watch, called “Mars Slingshot,” or “Agenda 2023,” or “Mars Hit and Miss.” The whole planet would build a giant slingshot that could launch 1- or 2-man capsules into space, and everyone would vote to choose the planet’s 200,000 top scum, saving a skeleton crew from Hollywood who would do the interviews and film all the preparations and anxiety and the actual slingshot launches. It could be the most popular and longest running daily prime time show Monday through Friday. The slingshot launches could be monitored with existing satellites and the Hubble telescope, with a panel a la star search or some such providing a running commentary and scoring how close the slingshot launches get to Mars.
If we went with the slingshot method, Enbe, the sun is a much bigger target, no?
Oh, HELL NO!!!
Security question: 9+11
I’m hearing Twilight Zone music.
Haha! Don’t worry, I got that one earlier, too.
Then it MUST be a ‘conspiracy’, NC.
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is that your Mr. Bill impression? LOL
I guess they’re tired of waiting for the rapture.
News year’s day 2013 was rough on the end-of-the-world crowd.