No pain, no gain.
No guts, no glory.
No ticky, no laundry.
I’m thinking largely of money here. Sure, NASA have screwed up – more often than not – but they get multiple bites at the apple because they’re NASA. A third-party thing… it’s not clear to me where their money is coming from?
Honestly, @bryanlunduke? For every General Patton that wins a battle, there are a hundred who got all the pain and all the guts and got a ticket, and got no gain and no glory and nothing but misery, failure, and sadness. They just don’t get in the news, which is roughly equivalent to them not existing…
Honestly. It’s like a wise man once said…
Better to reach for the stars and fall short (and crash land in Jersey) than to have reached for a PBR and overshot and shoved your hand into a bowl of expired tapioca.
And you can take that to the bank.
Huh. Now that’s an interesting notion. NASA does tend to deserve to get multiple Muligan’s. Whereas a non-NASA group likely has an empty Muligan jar.
I LOLed at this. 
According to the head of the company, they’re looking for investors who will make their money back through advertising later when the project is mature enough to warrant attention by selling advertising. It is essentially the Google model. Google was able to survive until they could become profitable because their backers had deep enough pockets. For all of its technical wonders, Google is financially successful because we are compelled to pay attention to it. This company would like to harness that same device to fund space exploration.
This issue of advertising is why many sceptics have criticised it saying that they should be sending four MacGyver clones not ‘ordinary’ people. Why didn’t they train the Mars rover to fix the space craft? Because it’s automated. Astronauts don’t generally have to fix the space craft and if they do that is about the point the whole thing goes wrong anyway. The people they want to pick are ‘interesting’ people so you will feel compelled to watch. Also, this is the breeding stock for the start of a separate civilisation, so there are a few more factors to consider than if they are handy with a swiss army knife. I imagine in the end, the people they do pick will be all of the above as there has been a huge response from people that want to go.
While this is referencing an unmanned Mars mission, I still find this statistic fascinating:
The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”
–jeremy
When it comes to a Mars Mission on Reality TV, this will be how War of the Worlds will start…Earth sends the Jersey Shore to Mars. Mars responds in kind with the annihilation of Earth. “Where is my space modulator?”
It’s funny that no one can comprehend wanting to get on a technologically sketchy one way ticket too a new land that’s pretty inhospitable when that’s exactly what loads and loads and LOADs of people did a few hundred years ago to settle north america. Boats were lame, lots of people did die on the way from all kinds of things (entire ships sinking, scurvy, malnourishment, the flue) and then when the arrive loads died too. Entire settlements were lost in the exciting early years. And yet people kept going. The point is the whole pack up your maybe not great life, take a crazy chance/adventure and go live in some new frontier thing? it’s actually pretty palatable to lots of people and tons of examples litter our history.
Now as for the technical and financial feasibility? You kids are so keen on Elon Musk, the man who wants to put millions of people on mars in his life time. That also sounds a wee bit ambitious.
And then as to the astronaut selection. You guys seemed to have some wacky ideas on how that was going to work and used it to take the piss out of mars one but you were a bit off base. They have a big pool of people sure, but a big part of that is to try and find so talented people and use the rest as chaff for the show. The first part of the show will be loads of people just competing and that will be used for raising funds. I would assume they plan to wheedle it down to the more competent over time, and then transition it from competition style to documentary style show.
Anyways, I’m not convinced it’s going to work either (but I’d love it to, and even the work/research they get done trying may be of use ot later missions), it’s got some exciting hurdles but I do think you were overly uniformed and harsh on it regardless.
Extremely palatable.
Even when your life is already pretty great this appeals to many. I come from a long line of people who felt the call west, from the colony at Jamestown to present day on the West Coast of North America. It’s part of my DNA. If there’s an unexplored frontier… I am, as those that came before me were, driven to explore it. Risks be damned.
As a wise man once said, “A bird in the hand can smell what the Rock is cookin’”.
and then this
I believe in what you are preaching, brother Lunduke. I joined the military a long time ago and was able to put boots on 6 of the 7 continents. I understand the burning need to explore but not every colony is Jamestown…some are Roanoke.
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Hot damn! You, sir, are well ahead of me. While my travels have let me explore the majority of states in the USA (I think I’ve got 7 or 8 left to hit), I’ve only recently managed to get across the Atlantic for the first time. And, while I’ve made it close to South America… I’ve never actually set foot there. So my continent count sits at a paltry “2”. I’ll work on that.
Ha! Too true! On the flip-side, without parts of history like the Roanoke Colony… we wouldn’t have nearly as many good X-Files episodes.
It’s like the saying goes… “If you can’t stand the heat… try, try again.”
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memo to self: name the next episode “Croatoa” 
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Apparently this podcast includes the topic of bitcoin - [I found this MIT article][1] .
Oh, I just realised this was for 1x21 : Everything Old is Old Again.
[1]: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537246/why-bitcoin-could-be-much-more-than-a-currency/
Also this is Y-Combinator is amongst the non - for - profit & Bitcoin markets
#Mars.
David Bowie this man was perfect, one of the absolute best lyricists ever. Life on Mars? this masterpiece is and always will be my favorite song of all time.
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