A Dutch company has been formed to send volunteers to establish a settlement on Mars by the year 2023. The company’s recent press releases inform us that the colonists’ adventure would be filmed and broadcast back to Earth as part of a new reality TV series. Profits from the global airing of the show would help fund the project. One detail: these settlers would not be coming back to Earth, but would stay permanently on Mars. Hoax? Delusion? Strange PR stunt for some other undertaking entirely? Hard telling, but here’s the website for Mars One, the group of people that includes among its number a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The company spokesperson, with a very straight face, says they’ve put together a business plan that will let them accomplish this multi-billion-buck interplanetary Exo-Big-Brother in a series of steps that culminate in landing the first four Earthlings on the Red Planet within the next dozen years.
After the initial “what the frack?” response, the scheme conjures up eerie echoes of a short-lived TV series called Defying Gravity – wherein a small group of astronauts is launched on a mission to the planets. En route, they have their every act recorded for a documentary film that’s vital to the funding of the mission. By the time the series got yanked, most of the crew was hallucinating like mad and no one was getting much science done. There was also an odd plot device about some kind of libido-suppression drug they were all issued which, of course, certain scoff-law astronauts refused to use-as-instructed.
In any case, it’ll be entertaining to see if the Mars One gang is serious, and if they can actually line up partners for their epic, aka crazy-as-over-caffeinated-weasels, idea. We’ll be thrilled… and stunned… to report on any progress.