Who Are the People Who Want to Go to Mars? | StarTalk

Who are these people who want to take one-way trips? They don't like it here on Earth. Are they the adventure types? They're the people who want to die young. What is... who are these people?

I think that's what we see. First of all, it's everyone. It's all kinds of people. It's men and women, all the young, it's engineers, of course, scientists, but also politicians, lawyers, soldiers. It's all kinds of people.

I think it's actually very comparable to the kinds of people that explored the Earth, which could also have been anyone. Anyone could step on a ship and sail across the ocean. Anyone could decide to leave their village for new opportunities.

I was looking up some numbers. Back then, 500 years ago in the great Age of Exploration, most of a crew would not return alive. You look at Magellan's crew; how many he went out with, and how many came back alive. I mean, in some cases, you'd lose most of your crew. And that's just here on Earth; you can breathe the air and food was there waiting for you when you landed.

So of any projections of survival rate, the design of our mission is not detailed enough yet to give percentages. But I am certain that it's not going to be a safe mission to Mars because there's no such thing as a safe mission to Mars.

I think it will be more risky than climbing around Everest, which has a two and a half percent risk of not returning alive, and hopefully less dangerous than climbing K2, which has a 25% risk. Exploration has always been dangerous, and what's important for Mars One is that we identify the risks.

We make sure that everybody knows—I'm not just our candidates, which for them it's the most important, but also our investors, our media partners, the audience. And then, if something does indeed go wrong, just like with the Apollo program, people will understand that this was something that could happen.

You know, guaranteeing complete survival is inherently part of being on the frontier of discovery. All of our candidates know that this is a rescue mission, and they know that they are going on a mission that has these kinds of dangers.