While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.
Krauss also points out that he knows people who would be willing to go right now.
If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”
Would you guys be willing to travel to Mars knowing you’ll never come back? Would Michele Bachmann being elected president help in your decision? Four more years of Obama? Vote below.
Hilarious comment from Mr. Glum, “Um, pilgrims and colonists were going somewhere with an oxygen atmosphere.”
Good point!
Only if I get to kick it with Quato.
Only if they give me a Wii. Ok maybe not.
Um, pilgrims and colonists were going somewhere with an oxygen atmosphere.
Will you die from running out of supplies or will you die of old age eventually on Mars? That is an important distinction. Seriously, are we going to send someone to die on Mars or to live their remaining life on Mars. I would go to Mars under the second condition.
Of course there is a higher risk of accidents and the ability to grow food is diminished. You don’t want seeds that cannot be replanted and you need them to be modified to work under lower light conditions, lower temperatures, and higher carbon dioxide levels. Or you could grow them under plastic green houses, but you still have the lower light conditions.
What Benjamin said.
The supply of astronauts is enormous. There’s billions of them. Surely one or two will have the courage to boldly go where no man has gone before.
[Duplicate comment deleted. Please don’t double post! – ed.]
Just need two volunteers, one man and one woman.
Sign me up. And how hard would it be to get a Bill Gates or Richard Branson to commit to firing off another supply pod every year or two?
I for one think we should kill the whole manned exploration thing right now before it becomes a monster of Technocrats telling the rest of us to serve their needs. An manned mission to Mars will cost a trillion dollars when we all ready have an 11 trillion dollar deficit its lunacy.
The smarter scientists have all said we get far more bang for the buck by sending Sats and robots. We were promised all sorts of great advances with the Space Station none of it has panned out. All those beautiful pictures from Hubble have been brilliantly retouched. We need to pay very close attention to the crap we are pouring into the environment like the thousand radioactive steel barrels of radioactivity we dumped off the Northern California coast. Clean that mess up and then we will talk.We are a thousand years plus from traveling anywhere near the speeds to get to another life sustaining planet.So right now its like Christopher Columbus discovering the Sahara Desert ,great but nobody is going to move there and you should not be asking me to pay your rent.Your survey proves their are a bunch of whack jobs in the Space program.
I’d be willing to go if all of my needs were guarenteed to be met (sex being one of the more important ones; the last thing we’ll need is a gender disparity. Bad things would happen).
It seems far more likely that any colonists sent into space would be chemically castrated. Not only would this increase productivity, but it would insure that the colony would remain dependant on Earth for new workers.
#8 – And a big robot programed to say “Warning! Warning! Danger Will Robinson!” at least once a day.
Just one man and one woman? Why? So they can reproduce? And then what happens between the kids and the parents, or between the kids in order to continue the bloodline? Better offer to send one man and 47 virgins… there’s plenty of volunteers for worse jobs if that is the reward.
“I for one think we should kill the whole manned exploration thing…”
Agreed. Anything scientific a human can do on Mars a robot/machine can do cheaper and more efficiently.
Pick up rocks? Yep. Analyze samples? Yep. Look around? Yep.
Rerun – Capricorn One
I can’t believe you guys would want to go to Mars and live out the rest of your lives in a tin can. The natural world is so beautiful and the company of other people is so important to our mental health. It would be a fate worse than a life sentence spent in prison.
Forget “Science”! We need to consider going to save mankind. We have no guarantee that life exists anywhere else in the universe, nor do we have any guarantee that the Earth will survive a bad sun spot or stray meteor.
We currently do not have the technology to send people to other galaxies, and we won’t get it by just sitting on our bums arguing over whose religion is right. We are ever to gain the technology to leave the universe, we need to start with going to another planet.
It would be irresponsible of us as the only known life in the universe not to do everything we can to survive beyond our only planet.
“live out the rest of your lives in a tin can”
“the company of other people is so important”
Rex, some of these guys live in little cubicles.
And some of them the only company with other people occurs on the internet.
In fact, this is an old news article and should be deleted … some of the Dvorak blog commenters are posting from Mars via the internet as we speak.
Internet access would be a problem on Mars. There would be a delay of four to twenty light minutes between Earth and Mars. TCP/IP times out way before that. You would be stuck with UDP.
Let’s send the guy who slapped the other shopper’s child in WalMart. He needs a “time out.”
I’d go once a small colony was established. I wouldn’t want to go to Roanoke but I’d be happy in Williamsburg.
Working with two or three hundred other people to help terraform Mars would be great life’s work.
As far as dying there of natural causes. I’d guess it would be dangerous enough that a good percentage of the population people would probably die in accidents, but this is the way that humans have lived throughout most of our history. It’s only recently that you can expect to die in your old age of natural causes. Coincidentally this has taken the fun out of exploration.
So far, it looks like there are 153 pussies that said no.
[And were you one of them? – ed.]
If the governemnt promised to treat them as colonists and not dead ducks, you’d have millions of volunteers. You could send supplies every few months, and eventually they’d be self sustaining.
Of course, all’s well and good until congress cuts their budget…
OK If we were headed to Omicron Ceti 3, hell yeah – let’s go! My wife couldn’t keep her cats! Otherwise the real point for the exploration of space is resource collection.
I can’t believe there are 200 pussies who said no!
I would vote for Alfred1 to go. Yes.
Thats the same decision I feel I’d be making in deciding to get a work visa for India. The fear vs allure of the unknown and strange places.
I think I’d “rather” go to Mars. No atmosphere, no smells.
I grew up exploring the desert I wouldn’t mind growing old(er) exploring a new one.
Sign me up.
Sister Mary: Why did all them wimmen say no?
#26 Mars has an atmosphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars Not sure how it smells though.
OK, send older people (not really old) because you don’t want to bring them back.
Lighter gravity would affect bone density which would cause problems if they came back.
No decent atmosphere would let radiation play hell with their DNA.
The idea of one-way trips has been the basis of a few Science Fiction books, one of my favorites being the first “Rocheworld” book by Robert L. Forward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld
In the book, scientists were -competing- for the chance to spend the rest of their lives doing research & making discoveries that no one on earth could.
An equal number of men & women are sent, but they are all sterilized so that they won’t have any children – because it would be immoral to bring children into such a “dead-end” situation.
The inter-personal relationships in the book are like a precursor to some of the current “reality” TV shows – except that no one can be “voted off the island” on a spaceship. 🙂
The ending of the book also explores what it would be like to be the last member of such an expedition – elderly and infirm – after all the other people have died due to accident, suicide, or natural causes.
The idea of a lifetime of research – with no possibility of funding cuts – is probably very attractive to most scientists, but most people don’t think about how a bunch of elderly people would take care of themselves as their bodies deteriorate with age.