The Mars One Project and The Meaning of Life

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space, because there’s bugger-all down here on earth.”

-Monty Python and The Meaning of Life (1983)

A friend of mine shared something about the proposed plans from Dutch group Mars One to begin sending people to Mars every two years, starting in 2024 (I guess I’ll still be alive by then). In a comment, explaining why he doesn’t find the fear of dying on Mars, or in the vast, incomprehensible silence of outer space, my friend said something along the lines of “So what?” People die in North Dakota, too.”

For some reason, I found that to be really funny. It’s true, of course. People do in fact die horrible or uninteresting deaths in North Dakota at a pretty steady click. I’ve been to North Dakota. I haven’t been to space (not physically, anyway). It is perhaps not fair of me to compare the two. I can tell you that North Dakota is a pretty horrifying place to trade in your mortal coil for whatever happens after the fact. All I have to go on with whether or not dying in space would be fun are movies.

Even the most optimistic science fiction films suggest to me that I am just fine with never leaving this planet.

Chances are, I never will. The Mars One project isn’t sending people off for another full decade. Regular jaunts to Mars is a concept that is even further away than that. I love space exploration, and I can’t be a complete cynic about what Mars One is trying to accomplish. Yet at the same time, I’m glad that this is something that will probably never be made available to me. I’m not crazy about walking down my street at four in the morning, because we don’t have any streetlights. I hate games that involve closing my eyes, even the sexy ones. Chaos is fine, but after a certain point, uncertainty can leave me in less-than-rugged hysterics.

And I don’t think anything better emphasizes uncertainty than signing up for the most ambitious space project, since we decided to go check out this thing called the moon. Thanks. I’m content to stay on this rapidly-dying planet.

But over 20,000 people submitted themselves to the Mars One screen process. Of those hopefuls, a hundred now remain. The next round of tests will cut that number down to twenty-four. Those are the people who will get to go Mars, if this group actually pulls off everything it says it will. If all goes according to plan, twenty-four people will have the opportunity to embark on the greatest adventure the world has ever conceived.

Will they actually get there? The odds aren’t great, given the poor history of unmanned missions to Mars thus far. The official website for the project claims that getting people to Mars is well within the grasp of humanity, assuming everything goes according to plan between now and 2024. The website provides a decent amount of information on the ethics and technological feasibility of the endeavor (along with a donate button, and an online shop for anyone who wants to say they believed we could make it to Mars before it was cool), but it’s all just information. The candidates themselves range from scientists and academics, to people who just think it would be really rad to live on a planet that looks like Arizona. In Time.com and CNN articles about the potential interplanetary emigrants, the general consensus is that yeah, dying on Mars is kinda scary, but who could possibly turn down the opportunity nonetheless?

Actually, I don’t know if I could turn it down either. Amazingly, no one has asked an overweight, aging smoker who drinks too much, if he might be interested in a space mission that with currently technology, would give me about sixty-eight days to live, if I made it to my destination at all.

Astonishing, I know.

I don’t really know how I feel about all of this. The cynical part of my personality goes to war with the stupid dreamer side of things, whenever stories like these make the news. Cynicism thinks this is a giant waste of time, a stupid idea that is ultimately going to go down in flames. The dreamer would make the argument that we won’t know what we’re truly capable of, until we embrace unrealistic hopes, fail in the glorious effort of trying, and attempt to learn something meaningful from the mistakes. These are two voices in my personality that are forever arguing with one another. Cynicism wins out more often than not, because cynicism has a better sense of humor.

It is cynicism that believes privatizing outer space is a really disconcerting idea. As much as I want to live in the 1990 version of Total Recall, the notion that Mars One could lead to a new way for the wealthy to completely fuck us over leaves me thinking that in the end, going to Mars wouldn’t really change humanity. Aspiring to redefine the heavens just means we’re going to take all our shitty products and personalities, and move them to a different part of the universe.

I sometimes believe the question of whether or not we should go to Mars and beyond comes down to whether or not we are emotionally ready for such a venture. I don’t believe that we are. I don’t think the rest of the universe is really keen to meet a species whose primary achievements are landfills that can almost make it to the moon on their own, the Kardashians, genocide that comes as easily to us as breathing, and Pogs.

Okay, Pogs were kind of neat.

We have pretty much destroyed this planet. The next couple of generations, assuming we hang on that long, are going to be sickly, in perpetual danger from the lunatic elements, and unhappy on a level that we cannot even begin to imagine. Keep your compost pile. Recycle to your heart’s content. It doesn’t really matter anymore. We failed, and we’re really starting to get a sense of the consequences we can enjoy over the next few horrific decades.

Does a species that did such a decadently shitty job with an entire planet as we did have any moral right to start all over again?

Since I’m not a complete monster, part of me believes that we do. Or at least, that if we can give ourselves another chance in the form of interplanetary emigration, then we may as well try. I don’t know if I truly believe we are hopeless, beyond even the faintest impression of redemption. If we truly are, I suppose this will be revealed to me as I get older.

It’s easy to make fun of Mars One. It’s just as easy to assume it will fail. Even so, I’ll keep up with the current crop of 100 aspiring contenders, many of whom seem like fairly rational people. So that’s something, I guess.

I’m not going to mock this whole thing. I’m going to follow the chronology that will eventually and inevitably take us to 2025, and I’m going to try to imagine what it’s going to be like for the twenty-four people who are eventually going to be launched into space.

Either they’ll let us know from Mars, or they’ll let us know that yes, dying in North Dakota probably would have been preferable to dying in the vastness of the universe.

I’m curious. That has to count for something. It’s not the first thing I would do with a giant pile of money, but since the U.S. Government is so insistent on cutting NASA’s funding, I guess we have no choice but to task the challenges of navigating deep space with people to other parties.

And at least Mars One has a bitchin’ website. If that doesn’t get us to Mars, I don’t know what will.