[ExI] one way trip to mars

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Taking a page from England's past, are there any criminals willing to
> exchange their life sentence on earth for a pioneering colonial life
> in The New Americas (or New Australias) ?

Difference is, one could - theoretically - return (to Europe, if not to
England) from Australia.  Merchants did it a lot.

> Aside from these considerations, there is always marketing and
> outright capitalism:  get paid big bucks for the sake of your family
> in exchange for completing useful work on Mars.  You definitely won't
> come back, but your family is practically guaranteed to a better life
> than if you continue your current 9-5 routine.

This is the exact argument used to recruit labor in the less developed
regions of China/India/etc.  Infamously, this is often used to recruit
children into prostitution - their parents will never know.

In other words: sure, you can get warm bodies that way.  But mere
warm bodies are not all you need - most things of interest on a Mars
mission that you can do with unskilled labor, you can do better with
teleoperated robots controlled by skilled labor.  (The main thing you
can't do that way - make babies - is, if isolated to itself, almost of
"flags and footprints" value: symbolic, and part of the solution, but
not by itself the thing you'd need to do to establish a truly viable,
self-sustaining colony.)