I think human beings on another planet is galvanizing. Fuck the moon, we,ll be an interplanetary species for the first time. Fuckin PYRAMID MINES, dog! The thing is, the long-term plan for Mars was to build large factories specifically designed to pump out super greenhouse gases the will over centuries provide a liveable atmosphere. This is looooooooong-term planning. These people are going to live on a tube until they die which is when they get shot out the vacuum. What are they gonna do, store the dead in their little bio-dome? The project is fascinating, but these people are losing everything. That will be the last, most advanced technology they ever use. Imagine a kid being born in the colony. "Honey, we come from Earth. A planet with water and mountains and endless beauty with porn, booze and drugs! You'll never see it. You're a Martian. Sucker. Check out your shit-stain coloured home, E.T. Go break down some minerals into smaller minerals I'm gonna go fuck me a jar of Crisco."
You don't waste viable organic mass like that. Eat the motherfuckers. They will become Firefly's reapers.
Realistically though, who thinks we can actually pull this off? And how would we do it? From what I can gather, there are at least a few (if not half a dozen or more lurking) members of this board who possess legitimate knowledge as to the logistics of this. That's what I'm really interested in. Assuming we had willing and trained participants, how close is science to actually pulling this off??
A decade probably. What I understood from Nat Geo, radiation permeates the hull of every vessel we currently have. People would be fried by the time they even reached the planet. <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_thr ... osmic_rays</a> Sooooo, until a suitable method is tested then cleared, this is all just talk.
Mars in ten years? No chance. Particularly with the type of mission they have planned. You'd think a smart first move would be set something on the moon. Say a reusable base. A lot more attainable, not in the time frame, but still.
Plus there's the psychological and physical profiling. Before you even reach this dusty shithole, you live in a claustrophobic, pressurized containment unit eating rations for I don't know, twenty odd months with no privacy whatsoever. In that amount of time you'll probably lose muscle development and essentially your ability to walk being in zero gravity for so long. Unless these people are steel-nerved athletes, you're going to have a cluster of gibbled, mad-as-a-hatter arrivals on Mars.
If I was stupid enough to go on this mission, I think I would've training in hand-to-hand combat, and figuring out how to smuggle a gun there. Because I would have the only gun, and I would be the master.
Don't you know all martial arts master sleep with their eyes open? I'll sit in a chair like Jean Reno in Leon/The Professional. Same cool-ass shades too I fucking DARE you to creep.
They have as much chance of making the red planet as those Heaven’s Gate fuckers had of a peaceful journey on Hale Bopp. I suspect the outcome will be crispier with less unfortunate Nike product placement.
If somebody asked me five years ago, I would have gone, no questions asked. Now that I've got an infant daughter, I need to stay down here for another eighteen years. Call me back when I give her the boot out of the house on her 18th birthday. Hell, maybe she can come with me then. Amen to that. Can you imagine Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus being such a bunch of whiny pansies? Here's the thing, guys. You're going to die here on Earth, too. And, at the end of your life, when you're senile and pissing yourself, nobody's going to want to talk to you, either.
It is a LONG time before any of us are senile and pissing ourselves. Until then, as its been explained, there is nothing to do on that planet but go insane. Columbus didn't know what he was looking for, but he had nothing to lose and he was also a huge asshole, half-mad and a cold-blooded murderer. We have detailed layouts of that planet. It is what it is: a barren rock with nothing whatsoever on it except a giant creepy face and a fun tobagging hill: a Volcano that almost touches space and is as wide as Texas. Before I die, I want to do things like watch my kid grow up, visit Hong Kong, have a life of some sort and eventually retire in Arizona which bares a slight resemblance to Mars in places but it has other things like breathable air and....anything. Even if you DO go the distance and die of old age there, you lived and died in a tube in a forboding vacuum. There will be one fun thing to do on Mars before the half-stupid amateur astronauts who watched to much Star Trek start raping and/or eating each other: basketball. For once, us honkies can be stars because if you can dunk a ball on earth, you can make a three-story dunk on Mars. I guess Track and Field would be more fun too. Is the whole science aspect of it fascinating and important? Absolutely 100% it is. But they are going about this all wrong. It's not big enough, they're not giving themselves enough time to prep, its not ambitious enough. Everything about this screams "impulsive". We don't even have a foolproof capsule that humans can survive in for even close to as long as it takes to get there. They would arrive baked potatoes. Just think about it: TWO YEARS in claustrophobic conditions with people you don't trust. The largest Spacecraft ever built was the Soviet N1 and it blew up. It was meant to carry three people. The Space Shuttle carried Seven. With the resources we have you can only build a craft so big before it simply will not take off, or crash and burn a giant hole in the world. This mission has what, 20 or 30 people going? The very thought of the initial trip to the planet sounds like a real-life horror story. If I knew I was going to Mars and a giant Bio-Dome would be greeting me with lush vegetation, resources, sources of entertainment and my family, it would sound amazing to be part of a ground-breaking expedition. But they are not taking tons of steel and glass to build those things. They're going to live in a glorified version of the thing E.T. died in. The only reason to take this mission is if you have nothing else to live for.
Well, I'm thoroughly convinced that you don't want to go. To me, all that stuff you described is technical issues that can be resolved given enough time and resources. You build the colony ship in orbit (kind of like the ISS) rather than launching it all at once. You invest resources in solving the problems of radiation and bone density loss. You put your perspective colonists through rigorous training and toss out any that don't make the cut or seem like they're going to snap. Make sure that they *do* trust each other and their ground team back on Earth before they go out there. It's not like these guys are just going to pack twenty people into a spaceship and say "whoop, off you go". Of course, as with any massive engineering project, they're not going to make their projected launch date - not even close. Especially since a lot of the problems with the enterprise don't have a practical solution yet. I'm also quite concerned about Mars One being able to meet its financial requirements - where the fark are they going to get the six billion dollars (make it twelve for realism) to launch the first four people? Selling ad space to Exxon-Mobil on the rocket? Maybe they'll hit Bill Gates and Carlos Slim up for some cash. So my biggest fear isn't that I'd die en route, or once I'm there, or that it will be uncomfortable. My biggest fear is that, not only will the rocket not get off the ground, but that there won't even be a rocket due to wishful financial thinking on the part of some douchebag. But, if it meant a chance to be the first (or, hell, the tenth or twentieth) person to set foot on Mars, I'd still go. I love my family, and have a lot of great friends, and I would definitely miss things such as proper food and the blue sky, but this sort of stuff is something I've been dreaming about since I was a kid.
Has this come out as a hoax yet? Is this still a thing? I feel like there should be more updates about it.