Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

> The crew is actually going to stay and live on Mars, with the intention to remain there, for the rest of their lives.

Wait what? Isn't that a really important part of the problem that shouldn't be just skimmed through as a mere detail on the video? Aren't the ethical issues that would arise from this, by itself, be enough to make everything else unviable. Humans live for a long time. What if after 10 years living there, the show just didn't raise enough money. "Hey crew, you'll just have to suicide, we won't send anymore food". Just so many huge issues come to mind. With not many obvious solutions. I would be interested to hear to which solutions they have, if any.

edit: their incredibly short FAQ answer about ethics doesn't make me anymore hopeful. They don't touch on any of the obvious hard problems and even dare to make an absurd analogy with immigrants from Europe to the Americas:

http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/19-faq-health/231-is-this-ethi...

Oh please, those clowns aren't actually going to fly anyone to Mars. They aren't even remotely close to solving the genuinely hard engineering problems involved. So worrying about ethics is rather premature.

If someone announces his intention to build a time machine I wouldn't get too worked about the ethical concerns of changing history.

You say that with such certainty. I may be thick, but I haven’t seen enough to be convinced whether or not they know what they are doing and what problems are solved or unsolved.

How do you know?

I think it's a shame you were downvoted, because you seem to be asking an honest question: is this possible, or not? I've ranted a bit about why this isn't possible here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210984

But, if you want to know exactly why going to Mars is so difficult, and why so many projects have failed, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_dif...

Or simply do a quick search on the internet for 'Mars difficulties' or 'Mars curse'.

Thought experiment. Imagine that we could send people to Mars, but we knew with 99%+ certainty they would die “prematurely” there, ahead of time. And those astronauts knew that.

Would that be ethical?

I sure think so. I know some people would disagree, but that doesn’t matter. As long as those involved know what they are getting into, it’s ethical enough to work.

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