Suicide trip to Mars – 400 sign up

Four hundreds unqualified volunteers have signed up for a proposed as part of a cost-effective private industry effort to colonize the planet.

Getting to Mars is one thing. Getting home is something else entirely. Any team that makes the journey to the red planet will have to take everything it needs for the return trip with it and that’s just not practical. One simple yet radical solution is detailed in the November 2010 Journal of Cosmology: what goes to Mars, stays on Mars, people included. It’s the ultimate suicide mission, yet it’s also an idea that a lot of people with iffy skill sets say they find very attractive.

Journal of Cosmology editor Lana Tao said she initially thought the responses to the proposed mission were a joke but as the emails continued to roll in, she realized they were sincere. Among the serious (and seriously under-qualified) volunteers was 69-year-old computer programmer Pasha Rostov, who wrote, “I do VERY well with solitude. 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. And I am ready to go to Mars. Sign me up.”

For the record, the one-way trip to Mars won’t be launching anytime soon; the Journal of Cosmology estimated it would be 20 years before a privately-funded mission could get off the ground.

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