Skepchick—aka Rebecca Watson—isn’t impressed by Mars One:
If you’re not familiar, Mars One is the ambitious—to put it lightly—plan to colonize Mars and to pay for it all with revenue from television ads by making it all a reality series. How ambitious, you ask? Well, they plan to start sending unmanned cargo to Mars next year, using rockets and materials that have mostly never been tested. A few years later, the chosen 24 colonists will take the 9-month trip to Mars, where they’ll supposedly set up all the housing and infrastructure they’ll need to sustain them for the rest of their miserable lives….
I’ve skimmed through the 100 people in this current Mars One round, and I found one engineer for about every 30 corporate accountants and international relations majors who think their best qualification for the job is being born in the ‘60s or having a spiritual outlook. There’s going to be another round of applications this year, so it remains to be seen if they actually end up choosing 24 people who know what they’re doing, or if they err on the side of reality TV tropes and choose 24 people who will entertainingly fight and have sex on camera as they slowly march toward their cold and hungry deaths.