Who Wants to Live on Mars?

Don’t everyone raise their hands at once.

The founders of Virgin and Google are planning to found the first human colony on Mars in the year 2014. Here is the website. It even has a questionnaire you can fill out to apply to be a Virgle Pioneer (kinda like the Western Expansion, only this time you’re strapping yourself to essentially a bomb and hoping for the best instead of fording the river in your wagon).

In the founders defense, the colony is not expected to truly flourish for the first hundred years. This reminds of a science fiction novel in which the colony sounds Utopian in theory, but goes horribly wrong. Who knows, maybe it will work. Or maybe this is a huge practical joke (not fair to the people who have already packed their bags and started training for weightlessness).

I am interested to see if this will really work. Maybe Mars is a good alternative to Earth, especially since we’re crapping it up so much. Personally, I will watch all the action from Earth. As long as there is oxygen in the atmosphere and trees in the ground; my feet will stay planted firmly on the planet in which I was born.