I saw a few headlines in print yesterday about some large quantity of people applying to colonize Mars. I was out for most of the day, and off the Twitter for much of that, so I never actually read the articles, and if I went to find a link to one or two of them, well, that’d just slow down the whole writing process, wouldn’t it? Possibly through the application of actual facts.
But the premise is pretty easy to grasp. There are a lot of people who claim they want to move to Mars, and we’re not at a point where you can just wake up and say “hey honey, pack a bag, I think we’re moving” (I think we’re still at a point where that conversation is dangerous even with the destination still being on Earth, and even with that conversation being about a new breakfast location.) So there’s an application process, which means that someone, or probably a group of people, will have to judge the applicants.
And that’s where things will start to fall apart. I’m going to make a few guesses here. The people making the decisions will be attached in some way to the Mars program, and even if they’re not super-uber-geeks, they were brought onto a team of literal, actual, non-figurative rocket scientists, so there had to be some affinity there.
And if I was a rocket scientist, I would have had to have some extensive training, probably more than a home study kit of 7 DVDs, and I would have had to make sacrifices to get to where I was, and some choices about social interaction would have been made.
I’m also assuming, for no real reason, that the people making the decision won’t be going to Mars. Because if they were, it breaks my whole theory, but also, because I need a real reason to hide that transparency I just shared with you, let’s say that they need to heroically stay on Earth to keep judging applications. You can’t telecommute for that job, seriously. Have you been to the Starbucks on Mars? The wifi sucks.
SO, winding this up, if you had the job of choosing a group of people who you’d never see again, what would you do? Would you pick the ones who were more like you, who you think you’d get along with? Or would you choose to send the people you really didn’t like off to another planet?
Yeah, me too.
Britain sent a lot of their prisoners to Australian penal colonies once upon a time, but despite what you may have heard, that continent actually had more immigrants than prisoners move in over that period. And 150 years later everything turned out OK, despite the fact that I recently learned pumpkin pie isn’t really a thing there. I’m not sure how long it’ll take Mars to settle out with my population projections.
Photo: NASA