The Real World: Olympus Mons

Ray Bradbury (author of, among other things, The Martian Chronicles), died yesterday at 91 which is mostly sad. Don't get me wrong, it's a bummer that he's gone and I really hope someone's preparing to preserve his neural pattern so we can build some sort of android duplicate, but still, 91 is a damn good run.

Pictured: one of the many rovers we sent to Mars to prove
everything Bradbury wrote wrong. Thanks NASA.

Above: The first Martians.

Fortunately, Bradbury did live long enough to see this Dutch company announce plans to colonize his favorite planet. They hope to have a permanent colony established on Mars by 2022, which is amazingly soon. But before you start packing your oxygen tanks and wooden shoes keep in mind that this isn't so much a noble first step into the final frontier as it is a reality show in one-third gravity. The plan is to get four people to cram into a spaceship, fly seven months to the Red Planet and live there like, forever.

Because people going about their daily lives
in free fall has always made riveting television.

Cameras will then record every minute of their lives and beam it back to Earth for our voyeuristic amusement. To keep the colony growing, new colonists would arrive every two years or whenever the ratings start to dip. Finally we'll be able to see what happens when the first humans on Mars stop being polite and start to go batshit insane at the crushing realization that they've agreed to spend the remainder of their lives with each other. It is, I'm sure, totally not a recipe for disaster.

I always thought that the people on reality shows were about one and a half episodes away from bludgeoning to death and eating their fellow cast members as it is, and that's without being locked in a biodome hundreds of millions of miles away from the tulips and fjords of their home planet.

Watch next week's episode to see who gets voted out the airlock.