Kent Bush: Mars One is more reality television than rocket launch

The great thing about a 10-year plan is that there are so few things that are truly impossible.

In 10 years I could go from only playing golf a couple of times a year to becoming the top golfer on the Champions Tour.

Even though today I only run if I am being chased by a bear, I can make plans now to compete in the Boston Marathon in 2025.

See what I mean? You can make almost anything sound good as long as you aren’t planning on doing it for 10 years.

The planners of Mars One are benefitting from just that kind of long-range “anything can happen” logic.

They are going to colonize Mars. Of course they are going to start the colony with four people in 2026. Then they will add four more every other year until Mars University is able to take on Mars State for the first interplanetary collegiate football championship.

Now that they found those cloud plumes on Mars, I hope they have a domed stadium in which to play the game, or else it could get acid rained out. Of course the world’s most appropriately named man, planetary scientist Nicholas Heavens says that clouds on Mars like the plumes photos appear to show are impossible, so I am sure we can start figuring out which team cheated or how the Martian refs blew a call to decide the game.

Despite the possibility of unlikely weather patterns on the Red Planet, more than 200,000 people signed up to become those first four people to claim a Martian ZIP code as their own. That list has been paired down to 100.

Not surprisingly, 50 men and 50 women have been selected from every corner of the world. The breakdown goes like this: 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, 7 from Africa and 7 from Oceania.

If this sounds a lot like “Big Brother” or “Survivor” casting, it should. The Mars One folks are more than happy to auction off exclusive filming rights for interviews and training of the potential crewmates. In the next eight years, before the would-be Martian quartet boards an imaginary vehicle for what would be about a 150-day one-way trip away from Earth, there will be a series of reality shows in which people from around the world help select the winning candidates.

In fact, if you join their “online community” you can be a part of the voting on many portions of the training and the mission.

That is exactly how NASA does it.

Forgive my cynicism, but this sounds a lot more like a product launch than a rocket launch. But for now, these are 100 people who might become one of the first people to populate another planet in our solar system.

It doesn’t happen for eight years, so anything is possible, right?

Kent Bush is publisher of Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star and can be reached at kent.bush@news-star.com.