The American Idol-style audition process for those who want to take part in the proposed Mars One project to build a human outpost on Mars will provide a great laboratory for the study of human systems.
To Raye Kass, an adviser to the project and a Concordia University professor of applied human sciences who wrote a column in Montreal鈥檚 Gazette about it recently, the process must be irresistibly interesting.
In my view, however, the Mars One project is a disingenuous and unethical adventure in human manipulation and hype.
The only vision it represents is an updated version of the greedy foresight of 19th-century industrialists and 21st-century media barons.
Kass鈥檚 analogy of the Mars One project with the travels of Ferdinand Magellan and Ernest Shackleton is compelling, but it breaks down quickly. It is safe to say that although no one is known to have circumnavigated the globe or travelled to Antarctica before the time of Magellan and Shackleton respectively, the technology to accomplish these projects was well established.
In Magellan鈥檚 case, people had been sailing those waters for at least 1,000 years before he left Spain.
Anyone who signed onto those adventures would have understood the existing technology well enough to make a reasoned assessment of the risk.
Those who set sail with those men would also have understood that although they might not come home, they would have a reasonable probability of living the rest of their lives (should they survive the trip) somewhere else where human habitation was established in some way.
Neither of these is true with the Mars One project.
Mars One commits to using 鈥渆xisting technology.鈥� What existing technology? Canadian astronaut Julie Payette has said that the technology is not anywhere near established to get people to Mars, land them safely, support the payload necessary to sustain life, allow humans to move about on the planet, and so on. No opportunity to 鈥渒ick the tires鈥� appears to be in the plans of this project 鈥� until, that is, the applicants have been so inculcated in the fantasy, so completely examined for suitability and so publicly displayed as potential heroes, that withdrawal would be extremely difficult.
Finalists will be emotionally attached, not to mention manipulated and pressured, long before they have a chance to objectively evaluate the vehicles, equipment, systems and protocols that will protect and sustain them.
If we are going to use early explorers as an analogy, we should do so honestly. Few of the participants in early explorations went for the good of humankind. Many were so desperate to leave their wretched lives that even a ship setting sail for the unknown was better than their current existence. Many were criminals, many were ordered on the voyage and some were actually kidnapped. Magellan鈥檚 was a voyage of colonization, greed and military intervention. The outcomes of many of these travels, once you remove the myths, were genocide, tyranny and environmental degradation.
If history is to be our guide to the best-case scenario for Mars One, it鈥檚 a good thing there aren鈥檛 any sentient beings on the red planet, because they would probably be killed or enslaved, and whatever riches they might possess would be stripped from them and shipped back to Earth for the pleasure and profit of a fortunate few.
The corporate structure of Mars One, according to its website (mars-one.com), is clear: It will own everything.
In other words, Mars One is setting up a company town on the planet. I would ask Kass what research into human systems shows about a structure where people own nothing and have no autonomy to make decisions. If our history of company towns is a predictor, Mars One employees won鈥檛 have an environment for, as Kass puts it, 鈥渟elf-reflection and a willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships.鈥�
In a 2010 review of a book by Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy, The Economist noted the worst company towns were not much better than gulags and the best eventually 鈥渨ere forced to adopt a more ruthless attitude to their corporate assets.鈥�
Mars One will sell and license merchandise 鈥� and, notably, media rights. Given the potentially riveting human drama of people competing for spots 鈥� like an interplanetary version of Survivor 鈥� and the high ratings the minute-by-minute account of a potential space disaster might reap (remember Apollo 13?), Mars One could be the most successful and profitable reality-TV show of all time. And we all know how honest and ethical those shows can be toward participants and viewers.
Kass states that 鈥渨hen the human spirit stops exploring, something has been lost.鈥�
I submit that Mars One is demonstrably not that kind of exploration.
David Gobby is an administrator at Concordia University鈥檚 School of Extended Learning and has an MA in human-systems intervention from Concordia.
