Gadget Blog

Would you apply for a reality show handing out one-way tickets to the  little red planet? Maybe not, but  you’d probably watch…

We’ve seen reality TV give people the chance to eat live bugs, score a record deal, re-animate a dead career and pretend to be a cat. But now, thanks to the Dutch, reality TV is going to select two would-be space colonists from a crowd of hopefuls and fire them at Mars.

Mars One is a not-for-profit organisation  that’s devised one of the most ethically  questionable media events ever conceived.

By crowd-sourcing colonists in a Britain’s Got Talent-style show it will generate the interest  and funding needed to establish the first  permanent settlement on Mars by the year  2023. At the time of writing, 30,000 people  have paid the necessary $30 to be considered  for the first two available spacesuits.

Unmanned drones will be sent up to build the beginnings of a home in the years  before the manned mission. After that, the  competition winners will just have to hop in a  space capsule and arrive at the pre-fab, droid- made Big Brother space house. Sounds easy,  but there’s a catch: they’ll never return.

Not only would it be far too complicated to  re-launch a return mission from the surface  of Mars, but after a few years in the planet’s  reduced gravity, the colonists’ bodies will  have irrevocably changed.

 “The human body will have adjusted to  the 38 per cent gravitation field of Mars, and  be incapable of returning to the Earth’s much  stronger gravity,” Mars One’s website warns.

“This is due to the total physiological change  in the human body, which includes reduction  in bone density, muscle strength and  circulatory system capacity.” Even Ant and

Dec announcing that in their cheery, Geordie  accents won’t make it any less terrifying.   Pete writes for LS:N Global, the news network  for tech trend agency The Future Laboratory.  Read more about space tourist on p96