Name: Mars One.

Age: A year and a half since the mission was announced.

Appearance: The most expensive portable toilets in the galaxy.

Oh. Are they like those fancy Japanese ones that play weird music? I don’t think so. These cubicles just fly to Mars, land, and then provide food and facilities for a group of human colonists.

That’s pretty fancy, even if they look like toilets. It is indeed.

When do they launch? Well, Mars One, the Dutch non-profit foundation behind the mission, says all the technology already exists, and it reckons it can launch the first preliminary expeditions in 2018. The first four settlers will take off in 2024, and land in 2025 after a seven-month journey.

Cool! And who will those settlers be? Well, 200,000 people applied, and 1,058 have made it through to round two. They can be any healthy adult in the world, basically, and the final six groups of four will eventually be chosen by an international reality TV contest. There is a catch, however.

What kind of catch? They will never come back.

Oh well. A price that some might be willing to pay for such a historic experience. And there’s another catch.

Yes? They’ll all be dead within a few months.

Ah. A historic but rather short experience then. How come? A group of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology reckon that growing lettuce and wheat, as Mars One plans to do, will create peaks of oxygen intensity that will cause an unacceptable fire risk. They also think that the equipment, designed for zero gravity on the International Space Station, will keep breaking in the gravity on Mars, which is 40% of Earth’s. As a result, the organisers will struggle to send up enough spare parts, let alone the next four people.

Tricky. Although those do sound like problems that, theoretically, could be solved. Yes. It’s almost as if they are saying that the project will be heavily delayed and go vastly over budget.

That’s crazy talk! I know. Ridiculous.

Do say: “It’s a unique opportunity to spend the rest of your life with three people who hate humanity so much they want to live on Mars!”

Don’t say: “Still, with a bit of luck you might spend the rest of your life in the company of three corpses.”