Roman Mars on One-Way Trip to Mars

Apropos of Maggie's entry on whether people would be willing to go to Mars if they knew they could never return, the eerily aptly named Roman Mars filed a radio report on the matter last year. It's beautiful and chilling, noting that a one-way trip is far cheaper and easier to manage. There would be plenty of volunteers.

Glenn Fleishman, @glennf, is the Executive Editor of The Magazine, a fortnightly electronic periodical for people interested in everything. Glenn also hosts The New Disruptors, a podcast about connecting creators and makers to their audiences, and writes as “G.F.” at the Economist's Babbage blog. He is a regular panel member on the geeky media podcast The Incomparable. In October 2012, Glenn won Jeopardy! twice.

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otaking241

if we don’t, China will.

I think this should be our mantra for the new era.
SAMO1415

First!??? Does this mean I get to go?
- edgore
  
  No, it means that like the hairdressers and the telephone handset sanitizers, you *have* to go.
Stefan Jones

Do these folks really know what they’re getting into?

The trancendentalist glory that Anon #10 refers to will quickly fade.

The “settlers” are going to spend the rest of their lives in cramped, dank underground shelters with very limited diets, limited medical care, and limited social options.

Comparisons to frontier life on Earth are romantic folly. The settlers won’t be carving out a new nation with the sweat of their brow; they’ll be utterly dependent on fallible machines for their lives and ability work and move about.

Any improvement in their lot will mean, for a very, very long time, us here on Earth sending them more machines and raw materials. (Magical nanotech assemblers are looking more and more like jet packs, flying cars, and fusion power.)
- bob d
  
  “Magical nanotech assemblers are looking more and more like jet packs, flying cars, and fusion power.”
  Nah, jetpacks, flying cars and fusion power are at least *possible,* even if practical issues prevent them from being ubiquitous or even built. Nanotech assemblers, on the other hand…
  
  Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has a nice analysis of the idea of space as “frontier” where he completely demolishes the whole idea:
  http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html
teapot

Can’t we just send all the assholes to Mars against their will and then have this lovely, green planet for us happy mutants to start a new civilisation based on steampunk and things we are supposed to just look at?

Thats what I vote for!
- Anonymous
  
  Not far enough away
bob d

I hope their willingness to go isn’t based on assumptions about subsequent missions to Mars, because the history of NASA after the Apollo program should have disabused them of those.
standingstill

Yay, Mr. Mars! You got BoingBoinged! I’m putting my vote in for you to be the next guest blogger :)
- Glenn Fleishman
  
  He is awesome.
Ned613

one-way trip to mars means no ticker tape parade. count me out.
- Ned613
  
  Wait. Just thought of a work-around. Hold the ticker tape parade before the mission.
  
  [Mental note: call NASA]
  - edgore
    
    [Mental note: call NASA]
    
    No, no, no you are doing it wrong – [Mental note: File process patent for a method of dealing with pre-emptive celebration. Then sue NASA when they do it]
imag

The first people on Mars will be Chinese. I’d put fifty bucks on it.
Anonymous

Since I would only go for the favors of gorgeous adoring babes when I back then I guess I’d have to say no.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Since I would only go for the favors of gorgeous adoring babes when I back then I guess I’d have to say no.
  
  What will be truly amusing to see is the usage of this pickup line in bars around the world:
  
  “I’m shippin’ out to Mars in the mornin’, darlin’. Looks like I ain’t never comin’ back. All for the good of humanity, y’know. Final Frontier and so forth. Where no man has gone before and whatnot.”
  
  “Didn’t the Mars Mission blast off last Tuesday?”
  
  “Naw, that’un was just a decoy, get the Chinese off our backs. The real McCoy takes off tomorrow. And wouldn’t you like to grab y’self a piece of Heroic History right now, before it’s gone for good?”
morgonmae

Those people haven’t seen The Flaming Lips’ “Christmas on Mars.”
Anonymous

The people to select are those that know they will not live much longer but can still be active for the last few years they are alive, what greater gift to give to the terminal ill than immortality in reaching the heavens.