Biggest dead end job: <ever>
 

NASA is looking for volunteers to fly to Mars - the snag is that you won't come back.

It is actively investigating the possibility of humans colonising worlds such as the Red Planet.

The settlers would be sent supplies from Earth but would go on the understanding that it would be too costly to bring them home.

NASA revealed that it had already received more than $1 million to commence work on the project at its Ames Research Centre in California.

Centre director Pete Worden, who claimed humans could be living on Mars by 2030 despite the inhospitable conditions, said: "The human space program is now aimed at settling other worlds.

Worden told a conference in San Francisco that he had discussed with Google co-founder Larry Page the potential for one-way trips to Mars.
Scientists say much of the cost of such a mission is associated with bringing the astronauts home - the price of sending 20 Mars settlers with a one-way ticket would be equal to bringing four astronauts back.

Experts say a nuclear-fuelled rocket could make the journey in four months.
Of all the planets in the solar system, Mars is the most likely to have substantial quantities of water, making it the best bet for sustaining life.

But it is a forbidding place to set up home. Temperatures plummet way below freezing in some parts.

The thin atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, so oxygen supplies are a must.

Mr Worden suggested that new technologies, such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome, could be explored ahead of the mission.

Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, scientists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies envisaged sending four volunteer astronauts on the first mission to colonise Mars.

A one-way human mission to Mars would not be a fixed-duration project as in the Apollo program, but the first step in establishing a permanent human presence on the planet, they said.

send the hobos!

yeah, send the homo's I mean hobo's

Ahem, sources? National Enquirer?

Ok, ok... MSNBC

Send Barack Obama & Joe Biden .

I'm pretty sure $1 million isn't enough for a project like this lol

no no ... this story its totally true simon ...

"unlikely to be fit to return due to radiation poisoning" lol!

I am content with the idea of grabbing my girlfriend and taking her with me.

Dude i know! This part totally got me interested now:

"The settlers would be sent supplies from Earth but would go on the understanding that it would be too costly to bring them home."

can I have a clickable link? google isnt giving me anything

http://www.space.com/news/mars-one-w...on-101021.html

http://www.marsnews.com/

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease...y-trip-to-mars

"You and a stranger would board a spacecraft and travel for six months — absorbing levels of radiation so high that your reproductive organs would be destroyed — before arriving at your new planet."....lol

well there goes the idea of bringing my girlfriend

wear super radioactive protection suits that allow "reproducing" haha

Thats fine, reproduction is overrated. Unprotected sex for everyone!

Why not take a couple of Rats. (one male, one female)
By the time they get there ... well it's food..cut NASA's costs by heaps!
They could take nice fluffy white ones.

let's say it workout for 20yrs sooner or later the world will go broke (funds -0-) and no more supply's sent there. i hope they can by that time grown their own plant and maybe there wouldn't be any inbreeding going on after 50yrs

i bid they seen all men there! thinking it be to hard on the women of the world to go there!
i die for a women any-day but for a another guy will i have to think about that one

Why not try the moon first? Heck, why not try the uninhabited areas in Australia, Canada, and etc? Scientists really know how to waste money. Spend it on protecting, rehabilitating this planet we have right now first, rather than surrendering to the fact we are going to mess up this one.

^^ not too many people think like you around here, sir.

to them, the planet is just fine and global warming is an Al Gore *fake scientists* money making scheme. Drill baby, Drill!

I was told by a teacher 36 years ago...
"Build a mountain range across any desert and you can get rain."