A new human colony on Mars?
Sure, being one of the first people to land on Mars would be pretty cool. But what if you couldn’t come back to Earth to brag about it?
Much of the buzz surrounding two scientists’ proposed trip to Mars published in the Journal of Cosmology has ridiculed the mission for its cost-efficient yet unappealing suggestion that the trip be a one-way flight, in which passengers must live out the rest of their lives on the red planet.
So who would willingly give up life on Earth for exile on a strange and inhospitable planet? Four-hundred people, apparently. Journal of Cosmology editor Lana Tao told Fox News that she received 400 emails from willing volunteers after the proposal’s publication.
(Send your name instead of yourself to Mars.)
“I am ready to go to Mars. Sign me up,” wrote 69-year-old computer programmer Pasha Rostov. “I do VERY well with solitude,” he wrote. “I am handy with tools, very good at making things work, have generated my own solar energy, built three houses (with my own hands) and am quite sane and stable.”
(Who needs Mars: Japanese probe reaches Venus.)
But life on Mars is likely to be an experience with extreme psychological consequences.
“Each day will be pretty much like the rest,” said Albert Harrison, a professor of psychology at UC-Davis and astronaut psychology specialist. “The environment, once the novelty wears off, is likely to be deadly boring. Despite being well prepared and fully equipped there are certain to be unanticipated problems that cannot be remedied. One by one the crew will get old, sick, and die off.”
Sounds like a pretty dismal adventure to the great beyond to us. [Via Fox News]