200,000 people want to go one-way to Mars: Worst. Idea. Ever.

Could you live on Mars?
Image by Kevin M. Gill http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/8145809230

There’s a team of crazy Dutchmen planning to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars in 10 years’ time. They asked for volunteers for a one-way trip to the red planet, and more than 200,000 people put their hands up. Two-hundred thousand!

I was not one of them. You couldn’t pay me enough to do something like that.

It’s not that I couldn’t handle the trip there. I’ve done long trips before. Sure, Mars is 210 days away – a bit longer than 24 hours flying to Europe – but I’d soon settle into the trip, read a book, write a blog post or two.

I could maybe even handle being away from my family. Of course I’d prefer it if Bill and Baby G happened to be on the same trip to Mars as me, but I understand how people put family ties aside for the common good of space exploration.

The problem I have with it is the type of people that will be chosen to go to Mars with me. And how I’d be stuck with them… forever.

You see, the crazy Dutchmen plan to fund these missions via a reality TV show here on Earth. A kind of Big Brother on Mars. Except there are no eliminations. No chance to get out of it. Ever.

No chance, I guess, until the ratings drop and they stop broadcasting the reality show. Which in turn stops the funding and… oh wait… were you guys on Mars expecting another shipment of food next month? Sorry, the masses have spoken. We’re now sending a bunch of chefs to the moon for a low-gravity version of My Kitchen Rules. #MKRmoon.

So the funding has been cut, there is a sincere apology from the Dutchmen and I’m left on Mars, with a bunch of people who were chosen for no other reason than they look good in the shower.

Then what do we do?

You’ve all read what happened in Lord of the Flies. And they had a whole island to share, not a tiny space pod on a -55 degree planet with no oxygen.

Oh, and did I mention in that situation they were harmless children?

To me it seems like a massive investment to send a bunch of loonies all that way for a reality TV show that will last one, maybe two, seasons tops.

There’s a much easier solution: simply go to the barren national park where they filmed the 1969 moon landing, apply a red film filter, and set the whole TV show there.

Oh wait, am I one of *those* people??

Well that’s a story for another time…