Have you signed up to go to Mars yet?

I haven't, but apparently over 78,000 people have submitted their names to be among the first Mars colonists. This is a one-way trip. The mission would be to establish a permanent colony of Earthlings...sort of a beach-head for our quest to inhabit two planets.

I don't think 78,000 will be enough. There is nothing there...no infrastructure to support a colony. Mars is an extremely hostile environment. We still don't know if there is sufficient water on Mars...evidence suggests that there might be some frozen  water under ground. What air there is would not be breathable, being mostly carbon dioxide. There is only a small amount of hydrogen. Some scientists think that Mars is too small and its gravity is too weak to keep hydrogen from drifting off into space. Even if we manufactured hydrogen or imported it from Earth we might not be able to use it because it would want to drift away. The average temperature is well below zero so storing hydrogen in frozen water might keep it contained...water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen and both are in short supply on Mars.

Scientists think that lichen, that scaly stuff that grows on rocks, would survive on Mars. I don't think lichen is very tasty. I hope Monsanto is developing some genetically engineered lichen that tastes like chicken.

Given our dismal history of 16th and 17th century colonization efforts, most colonists die off the first year or two. During those early years, probably most colonies failed but they had help. There were hostile natives and hostile European raiders. The Spanish wiped out the French colony down by Florida and the Portuguese did the same thing in Brazil.  The Indians were initially somewhat friendly but the colonists soon made enemies of the Indians who wiped out some of the early colonies.

I'm hoping that they are planning on some sort of psychological evaluation and screening process. There would have been a better outcome if they did that before folks climbed aboard the Mayflower. Same is true for that bunch down in Jamestown. These people are going to be cooped up in a space transport for months on end and they will probably run out of beer early in the trip. That's what upset the Pilgrims. People will be going bonkers before they ever get to Mars.

That 78,000 crowd of people is only about twice the size of my little town. I'm thinking that it would be wise to establish more than one colony. Chances of survival might be better with several colonies going at once....lets say five separate colonies. That way a space super bug/virus will only kill off 20% if it wipes out one of the colonies. Okay, five colonies with almost 16,000 folks in each colony. Of that 16,000 there would be a huge number of people engaged in life support and infrastructure maintenance. Remember, Mars is hostile and not making life easy. There would be a bunch engaged in government services and health services...police and fire services, eventually there would be schools and medical clinics. Living in a reduced gravity environment might have some peculiar health effects.  Mars gravity is less than half of Earths but more than the Moon...remember those guys bouncing around on the Moon? Golf courses would have to be really big.

So maybe half the colonists are left to do whatever they are supposed to do once the other half has the place under control...sort of. Somebody has to do the laundry. Somebody has to cook. Somebody has to manage food production. There goes another bunch of people.

Are we going there to exploit natural resources? Mars is red because of iron oxide...it's sort of rusty so we figure we could mine iron, I guess. Maybe other stuff, too. The smart way to do this is with robots so we would need a robot factory and people to design and build robots.

Because of the lower gravity we could use Mars as a way station for exploring other planets or solar systems...blasting off Mars would be easier than Earth. Of course, the Moon would be good, too. At any rate, we would need some sort of space port for sending or receiving space travelers.

For some reason all of these Mars colony scenarios look suspiciously like prisons to me. We wouldn't want to go the penal colony route like the Brits did in Australia but we would need strict discipline and almost a prison-like adherence to rules. There would be a strong leader or a strong ruling body and everyone would be expected to follow the rules. Somebody would be in control...like Richard Branson or Bill Gates or -- a David Koresh?  This would be beyond what we  think of as normal military discipline. That takes a special kind of person...someone willing to be subservient or submissive to an absolute set of rules. Somebody who would be organized and willing to follow a schedule and never deviate from the expected performance. Somebody who would almost be a robot....hey, wait a minute. We would have humans performing like robots? That hasn't worked too well in our history. Nazi Germany had a go at it but you know how that went. Stalin tried but that didn't work. More recently, modern advertising has a lot of us behaving like robots but we are still not fully buying into it.

So why not scrap the human colony idea and send robots? Humans are not space colony material. We already have some robotic explorers on Mars running around and drilling holes and analyzing rocks. If we send fifty or sixty more with specialized skills we could make some progress without having to worry about food and breathable air.  The idea of sending humans has some romantic and science fiction value but wouldn't it be easier to send smart machines?