Mars One Finalist Announces That It's All A Scam

[Veilex]

Earlier this week, a colonist candidate for the one-way mission to Mars broke his silence and spoke out against the Mars One project, calling the selection process dangerously flawed.

After filling out an application (mostly out of curiosity), former NASA researcher Joseph Roche, now of Trinity College, became one of 100 finalists to live in permanent settlement on Mars. In his interview with Elmo Keep for Medium, Roche expressed many concerns, ranging from inaccurate media coverage (there were only 2,761 applicants, not 200,000) to Mars One’s psychological or psychometric testing (or lack thereof) to how leading contenders earned their spot (he says they paid for it).

“When you join the ‘Mars One Community,’ which happens automatically if you applied as a candidate, they start giving you points,” Roche explains. “You get points for getting through each round of the selection process (but just an arbitrary number of points, not anything to do with ranking), and then the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to them.” And if media outlets offer payment for an interview, the organization would like to see 75 percent of the profit. As a result the most high-profile hopefuls, he says, are those who brought about the most money.

So far, he’s completed a questionnaire, uploaded a video, got a medical exam, took a quick quiz over Skype, and… not too much else, it seems. Despite making the final 100, Roche has never met anyone from Mars One in person. A planned multiday, regional interview seems to have been cancelled.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/whats-going-mars-one

[Fred Sanders]

1. Media outlets offered payment for an interview, and the money went to who? What media outlets?

[FSogol]

2. It should be by nomination. I nominate Michelle Bachman, Jenny McCarthy,

Newt Gingrich, and Paul Ryan. Do I hear a second?

[Jackpine Radical]

4. How 'bout a fifth instead?

Scott Walker.

[FSogol]

8. Welcome aboard, Scott, plenty of room on Mars....

[Mr.Bill]

10. How about Ted Cruz?

Or are they only taking Americans?

[FSogol]

11. I think we can make an exception for Cruz.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. I was kind of bummed that I hadn't heard about the program in time to apply,

but if that's the case, I apparently didn't miss out on anything.

[Veilex]

5. Related: "Mars One CEO defends 'scam' claims, delays manned mission until 2027"

http://www.techspot.com/news/60120-mars-one-ceo-defends-cam-claims-delays-manned.html

[dissentient]

6. The moment I heard about this I already knew not one "candidate" would ever be stepping one foot on

Mars.

We will not be going to Mars any time soon, not a manned mission anyway, maybe in a few hundred years, at the earliest.

[Warren DeMontague]

15. a few hundred years?

I'll take that bet.

I fully intend to live long enough to see a human set foot on Mars. And I am not going to be alive in a few hundred years.

I think my odds of being alive through the 2030s are pretty good, though.

[struggle4progress]

17. It's not going to happen for simple logistical reasons. The round-trip will take nearly two years,

and life support is extremely expensive.

The landing problem is technically tricky, as shown by repeated failures of landers.

Communication with earth would be a major problem: at best, the time between transmission of a message and reception of a reply would be six minutes, but at worst it's closer to 45 minutes. It's extremely difficult to conduct conversations under such circumstances. Imagine what your internet experience would be like if a server took six minutes to answer each packet request from your computer: you couldn't possibly load a webpage in less than six minutes.

And there's no real advantage to going there, except to say we've been. We could get a lot more information a lot cheaper by robotic methods: machinery doesn't need two years worth of air, food, and water for the trip, so good sensor-based experiments can be sent to the planet for a fraction of the cost. If one wants actual samples of Martian rock and dust, it would be much cheaper to design a completely mechanical system to land, and return to earth with collected material, than to send a crew to do that.

[cpwm17]

19. I agree.

People watch too much Star Trek, and take it too seriously. Star Trek will never happen in real life. Humans have no place away from Earth.

[Warren DeMontague]

21. It wouldn't require "star trek" level technology to send humans to Mars.

And whether you like it or not, humans are going to leave this planet.

[cpwm17]

23. Mars sucks.

There is little there for us. There is a reason we evolved here on Earth rather than on Mars.

It's far cheaper and much safer to send robots to Mars. We get far more science for the buck that way.

It cost about 300 billion dollars in today's money to send twelve men to the Moon. It was fun, but there was little practical point to the adventure. Just think of all of the wonderful science we could do with that kind of money.

And we will never be able to explore as human travelers beyond our solar system:

http://www.universetoday.com/17044/bad-news-insterstellar-travel-may-remain-in-science-fiction/

Some sobering news from a recent rocket science conference: It is highly improbable that humans will ever explore beyond the Solar System. This downbeat opinion comes from the Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, where future space propulsion challenges were discussed and debated. It is widely acknowledged that any form of interstellar travel would require huge advances in technology, but it would seem that the advances required are in the realms of science fiction and are not feasible. Using current technology would take tens of thousands of years, and even advanced concepts could take hundreds. But above all else, there is the question of fuel: How could a trip to Proxima Centauri be achieved if we’d need 100 times more energy than the entire planet currently generates?

[Warren DeMontague]

26. You may be right about interstellar travel, although I suspect I do 10 totally impossible things

before breakfast, from the perspective of someone living 1,000 years ago. So 1,000 years from now... Who knows?

But even if interstellar travel is off the menu, there is a tremendous amount of interesting real estate in the solar system.

As for human endeavours in the short term, You may stop NASA, but you can't stop Elon Musk. And so on. And whether or not people think it is worthwhile, sooner or later others will go, because that is what humans do.

A reason we evolved here? Life originally evolved in the oceans. Are you living in the ocean, now? I'm not.

That is what life does, it grows, it expands, it spreads.

Like a disease? Maybe. Or a field of flowers. It's how life works and given the history of life on this planet life would very much like to spread off of it, if it hasn't already.
.

[Chathamization]

28. There's a reason humans haven't colonized Antarctica, and don't plan to

And Antarctica is paradise compared to Mars.

You brought up the oceans too. More real estate that's a million times better than Mars yet hasn't been colonized. I doubt people are going to say, "Antarctica is too inhospitable, let's go to a place that's a million times worse."

[Warren DeMontague]

30. Maybe.

One difference between antarctica and mars, mars has a much more manageable day/night rhythym, near the Martian equator. And temperatures are often better than they are in Antarctica, too, although of course the lack of atmosphere means no one is going out without a spacesuit anyway.

The oceans? man, just the other day I was reading some freakout here about how annoying tech billionaires are planning to build "spooky" libertarian floating islands, which is bad and terrible because bioshock. And libertarians. Spoooky!

But people can't piss and moan about how awful it is that something is being talked about as a serious idea, AND also try to use the lack of anyone pursuing that same idea as proof of....well, I guess people can, sort of par for the course in some parts.

Look, we can argue about it all day, one of us is right and one isn't. You arent going to change my mind, and I dont particularly care if I change yours, or not.

I believe it will happen. I also think that the staggering amount of resources in the solar system - water, rare elements in asteroids, etc- means that motivated people and nations will exploit them.

[Chathamization]

31. We don't even know if humans can survive on Mars long-term

Plans I've read hope they can deal with the radiation by having people live below the surface (not sure how much you care about the day/night rhythm when you are living underground). We don't really have a sense of how dangerous low gravity environments are (if we'll see similar problems to the ones we see in zero gravity), or how it'd affect something like carrying a child.

It's true that if you go to the warmest regions, in the summertime during the day the temperature can reach something that's generally considered pleasant - before plummeting at night to a temperature comparable to the coldest temperatures found on earth. I don't really consider that being "temperatures are often better"; temperatures in Antarctica still tend to be much warmer than the average temperature for the Martian mid-latitudes.

Antarctica would be laughably easy compared to Mars. If the Mars One people (or whoever else) were serious about going to Mars, they might as well start prototyping there. See if they can create a self sustaining colony in Antarctica where people are happy to live for a decade without ever leaving. At least when things go wrong - equipment breaks down, someone snaps from being locked in a box with 7 other people for 10 years - we'd have a chance of saving them instead of slowly watching them die.

[Warren DeMontague]

20. Yes, it will.

"landing problem is technically tricky, as shown by repeated failures of landers." - how many failures recently, as opposed to the earlier days of space exploration? Actually, out of the last 20 years, with the sole exception of the Mars Polar Lander, NASA is batting .1000 in terms of successful landings. Pathfinder. Both MER Rovers. Mars Phoenix Lander. AND Opportunity, in which an SUV-sized nuclear powerer rover was lowered onto the Martian Surface remotely by a rocket-powered skycrane.

Ludicrous to say it can't be done for that reason.

The communication lag is more of a problem for robotic craft, which is why the computer programming has had to become that much more sophisticated- the machine has to be able to take care of itself without immediate human instruction.

Humans don't have that problem. And they are also capable of functioning without conversations with Earth, or internet access.

No real advantage may be debatable, however, there certainly are plenty of people on Earth who want to go.

...but there's not much point in arguing about it. Either I'm right, or your are. I suspect we'll know for sure in a couple decades.

[Liberal_in_LA]

7. news outlets fell for the scam. i listened to many broadcasts about this. what a shame

[jeff47]

9. Next you'll tell me the guy in my email isn't really from Nigeria.... (nt)

[MisterP]

12. what, they don't have $400 bil either?!

maye they'll sink money into flying cars and vactrains?

[ND-Dem]

16. Flying cars were developed long ago.

Aerocar International's Aerocar (often called the Taylor Aerocar) was an American roadable aircraft, designed and built by Moulton Taylor in Longview, Washington, in 1949. Although six examples were built, the Aerocar never entered production.

Civil certification was gained in 1956 under the auspices of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA), and Taylor reached a deal with Ling-Temco-Vought for serial production on the proviso that he was able to attract 500 orders. When he was able to find only half that number of buyers, plans for production ended, and only six examples were built, with one still flying as of 2008 and another rebuilt by Taylor into the only Aerocar III. In 2013, the Disney film, Planes honored the design with a character based on the aerocar, Franz aka Fliegenhosen.






http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerocar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulton_Taylor

[nilesobek]

13. Thousands of rockets carrying water,

building materials, oxygen and tools would have to be launched in order for a life support system to be established and give the colonists a chance to survive. Its been a scam from the beginning. They are not going to Mars, but if they did, the travelers would die.

[Warren DeMontague]

14. Eventually, people will live on Mars.

But this outfit isn't gonna be the one to do it.

[hunter]

24. Why? Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact it's cold as hell.

If something like Lockheed's fusion power works out, or we get over our fear of fission powered engines in space, I think visiting Mars might be a much more reasonable goal than it is now. Chemical rockets and ultralight tin cans like the International Space Station would not be a nice ride to Mars, and there are just too many ways to die along the way or once you get there.

As a conservative sort of amateur engineering enthusiast, here's how I'd get people on Mars:

First use robots to establish a very comfortable ready to move-into "Mars Base" with heat, electricity, water, air, gardens, and radiation protection. The entire endeavor would be nuclear powered, either fission or fusion.

Once the unoccupied base is fully established, then you send the people in a fission or fusion powered craft with big multiply redundant ion engines capable of making the trip in weeks or months rather than years. The manned Martian landing craft itself would utilize all the experience gained by landing unmanned machines on Mars.

But by my personal philosophy I don't see much reason to have humans in space. The International Space Station is interesting to me and worthy of support, and a manned astronomical station on the far side of the moon would be intriguing to me, and okay maybe a big commercial hotel on the moon, essentially a big bounce house for wealthy people, but beyond that I think we humans are creatures of this earth. Let's leave space to our intellectual descendants, either artificial intelligences or humans genetically modified to survive in harsh space environments, the sorts of beings who could walk around naked on the surface of Mars like it's a nice day on the beach in Hawaii.

Providing, of course, our civilization doesn't perish in the environmental catastrophe we've created...

[Major Hogwash]

18. Ha ha ha!!!

Ohmigod, this is funny.
Cue any 1 of a 1000 quotes by Mr Scott!!!!

[Orrex]

22. And the complementary laser pistol was only good for twelve shots.

[Oneironaut]

25. No! It can't be!

Next you're going to tell me that Galt's Gulch was a scam too. I just don't believe it, sorry.

[zappaman]

27. Now I don't feel so bad I wasn't picked!

[LisaL]

29. They are lucky if it's a scam.

If they could actually deliver anyone to Mars, they wouldn't last long up there.