Are you sick and tired of life on Earth? If so, Bas Lansdorp of Mars One may have the answer. If you act now, you can be part of a select group of individuals who will win a ticket to the Red Planet with no scheduled return in the hopes of beginning a human settlement on Mars.

The chosen subjects will take-off in September of 2022 and with that, they will say goodbye to our home planet forever.

Bid your friends and family adieu, they are not coming to visit. Never again will you sleep in the comfort of your own full-sized bed in a home with access to all of the amenities that we take for granted.

On Mars, you cannot go out to eat, go bowling, or go clubbing on the weekends. Once you land after seven months of emotionally-draining space travel, you are subject to the confines of your Personal Living Unit and the red dust that surrounds you on every side. Your only major hobby is trying to survive.

If you become ill, forget about going to the hospital or the family doctor. Aside from a Life Support Unit and whatever supplies Mars One may have sent you with, you are left to fend for yourself and hope that your immune system is strong enough to battle whatever ails you.

There’s one more catch- Mars One hopes to have the entire journey and the lives of its subjects internationally televised in the form of a reality show.

Mars One plans to train 40 “qualified” astronauts and choose the four subjects who will spend the remainder of their lifetime on our neighbor planet through a voting system open to the viewers of the reality show, which the company estimates will receive as much viewer traffic as the Olympics. Although I cannot see myself watching such a program, I can see how Mars One believes it would appeal to the masses.

Lansdorp confirmed that Mars One has received thousands of emails from women and men of all ages, backgrounds, and education levels expressing interest in becoming the first human beings to set foot on our barren neighbor planet.

According to Lansdorp, Mars One is particularly searching for volunteers who are “the kind of people you and I would like to be stranded with on an uninhabited island.” They are looking for people with the ability to work well in groups and who have attitudes that resemble those of old-fashioned explorers.

The team argues that the technical skills such as medical care and engineering can be learned in the required eight-year training program. However, I doubt that the voyagers can absorb much more than the basics of each field before takeoff in such a brief period of time. Lansdorp shared with CBC that the selected individuals would be citizens who “are at their best when things are at their worst.”

I cannot rationalize what type of person would be willing to sacrifice all that Earth has to offer for the sake of science. Do these volunteers detest life on Earth so much that a solar system vacation is their only way out? Perhaps they’re looking to create meaning in their life and have had no success doing so here on Earth. The thought of such individuals is truly rather disheartening.

Who in their right mind would volunteer to spend the rest of their life with the same three people doing the same exact things every day? I think I might die of depression before I even got to Mars.

Although, I suppose the rest of their lives may not actually last that long while they fend for themselves on a foreign planet.

Their supposed purpose is to pioneer a settlement on Mars, but I cannot understand why such an experiment would even be necessary before we can develop the technology to send them home again. Furthermore, I cannot imagine why a Martian settlement would be necessary at all.

Is Mars One preparing for Earth to become so uninhabitable that humans must seek refuge elsewhere? If the voyage’s main purpose is purely to entertain the masses, then Mars One has potentially found the most morbid way of producing a profit that we have ever been introduced to.

Perhaps Earth’s citizens will be vacationing on Mars years down the road. Maybe our lives will turn out just like “WALL-E” or “Zenon Z3”. This may be the future of the human race and the end of life as we know it.

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