
Mars One Is a “Money Grab” Where Everyone Loses - xaro
https://www.inverse.com/article/42965-mars-one-is-a-money-grab-where-everyone-loses
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Mars One is like the Fire festival of space

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jdpigeon
Funny enough, when Mars One launched I happened to be at a conference that was
sharing a venue with another conference on Mars planetology. It was great
because of all the conversations it allowed us to start. However, I think
about half the scientists I talked to agreed with my assessment that it was
either a 2012-era social media pipe dream (e.g. Kony) or a scam.

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celim307
I mean, pay to apply? Any company serious about this effort knows they should
be chasing the handful of people mentally and physically capable of surviving
timhis endeavor, not the other way around.

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upofadown
If they are actually spending their money on things to advance their cause
then it is not a scam. It is likely an unwise enterprise and a terrible
investment, but a scam is different...

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blackrock
Even the Chinese government called Mars One to be a scam [1], and advised
their citizens to avoid the organization.

So when you've got China calling you out to be a fraud, then you must
definitely be doing something wrong, in order for them to bother issuing a
public statement like that.

[1]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/24/chinese_papers_bran...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/24/chinese_papers_brand_mars_one_hoax/)

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zingmars
EVEN the Chinese government? You say that like they're in business of scamming
people. And honestly reading the original Chinese articles it doesn't look
like an official government position or anything. It's just a newspaper that
happens to be owned by the ruling party posting an article on things happening
in the west.

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RobertRoberts
I would suppose the commenter was referring to the fact that most of the
business scams based on fake products (that us normal everyday people would be
directly affected by) come from China.

And since the Chinese government has large stakes or outright ownership of
those businesses, they are culpable in massive worldwide product scams. (I
really don't think I need to link the news articles for this it's so
pervasive).

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voidmain
The best thing to come out of Mars One is the satirical ad campaign by the
state of South Dakota. "Why die on Mars when you can live in South Dakota?"

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/21/news/economy/south-dakota-
ma...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/21/news/economy/south-dakota-mars-
ad/index.html)

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8bitsrule
MO promotes the concept of going to Mars ... that seems to be its main raison
d'etre.

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shmerl
Is it even still a thing?

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novalis78
MarsOne definitely introduced the concept of colonizing Mars to a wider
audience. For that, I think, they get far less credit than they deserve.

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hinkley
No, no it didn’t. For one, this is the first time I’ve heard of it.

And more importantly, I think you are forgetting Robert Zubrin and Mars
Direct:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin)

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reustle
"I didn't know about it therefore nobody did"

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hinkley
And your retort to the “more importantly” part?

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zulban
Popularising an idea isn't accomplished 100% by the first person who tries. I
love the Mars Direct plan and I even travelled to see Zubrin at a Mars Society
convention, but the man is absolutely shit at PR.

There's definitely some bad with MarsOne, maybe it's mostly bad. But saying
it's all bad is simplistic and ignorant of how public awareness is raised.

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hinkley
Sure, but I’ve seen news clips and Discovery channel specials and a bunch of
other media. Most of them these days mention Elon, many many talk to or about
Zubrin and their experiments (IIRC they just did a new one last fall?). If
they dig deep enough they might even get Kim Stanley Robinson to answer a
couple questions.

But I’ve never heard them talk about Mars One. Which makes me believe there’s
a bubble and I’m not the one inside of it.

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saas_co_de
They are as likely to go to Mars as Elon musk so at least they are in rare
company

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theothermkn
> They are as likely to go to Mars as Elon musk so at least they are in rare
> company

While I've left your comment unvoted-upon, the downvotes are justified, in my
view.

That said, I think Musk's optimism about Mars is pretty unjustified, but for
reasons unrelated to launch vehicle technology, reasons that are shared by
Mars One. The main reason is that we simply do not know how to sustain human
life, in the long term, in less than 1 Earth gravity without deleterious
effects, including the possible cessation of reproduction. This is to say
nothing of the lower light levels on Mars, the rigors of designing CELSSs, the
psychology of performing while never being able to go outside again (or
possibly even never being able to return to Earth due to bone loss), and so
on.

Musk has even said that the trip to Mars will be "fun" because you'll get to
throw a ball around and play games in zero-g. He betrays a lack of serious
engagement with the challenges of human spaceflight, to say nothing of the
ongoing challenges of living on Mars. He understands the romance of gritting
your teeth and eking out a living in a space Western, but not the realities of
it. Mars One seems to share similar problems of vision.

Eventually, I think that, among other possibilities, either grown-ups will
step in with regulation, or the grown-ups will stay away in droves from either
project.

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gizmo686
>The main reason is that we simply do not know how to sustain human life, in
the long term, in less than 1 Earth gravity without deleterious effects,
including the possible cessation of reproduction.

We do not know when the difficulty starts. Given our current knowledge, it is
entirely possible that Martian gravity is sufficient for human health. We also
know that even 0G is not acutely lethal (although the short term effects of
returning to normal gravity are less then encouraging if we expect the people
to be able to work as soon as they land on Mars).

This is just to say, we do not know how much of a problem Martian gravity is.
There are still all of the difficulties we do know about.

It will probably be a long time (if ever) before we get a sustained "colony"
on Mars, but humans setting foot on Mars is reasonably possible in the
relatively near term. If we really wanted to, we could even make a "colony"
simmilar to the ISS, where we have a permanantly staffed base, with a crew
that stays for "short" (~year) time on Mars, combined with a year or two of
total spaceflight.

I'm not remotely convinced this is worth doing. But it seems possible if we
really wanted to do it.

