NASA offers you life in prison: on Mars

NASA's Ames Research Center is working on its "Hundred-Year Starship" project that will sell you a one-way ticket to Mars:

Pop Sci, Google News, Google

This job is clearly not appropriate for losers. It's kind of dramatic: NASA needs to save some money. The return trip is more expensive, roughly by a factor of five or so, and NASA wants to save the money by sending settlers who have the balls to do the unthinkable.




Would you have the courage and desire to spend the rest of your life in a space suit in between red stones, living at permanent risk that the vital technology may stop working at any moment? Would you be eager to work for some hypothetically brighter future of the people who continue to live on the blue planet rather than the red one?

If you wouldn't but if you accept that they will surely find someone who will be ready to participate, do you have any moral complaints against the plan?

I wonder how the life - and its end - would work in the absence of hospitals, hospices, good entertainment centers, classical restrooms, and millions of other things. Could the job be safely done by prisoners or terrorists? It's surely a topic for a very emotional movie.

NASA expects such an expedition to be there before 2030.