Tweet
Concept For Mars One Colony Bryan Versteeg and Mars One
The number of Earthlings looking at a potential*one-way ticket to Mars has just shrunk by 99.5 percent.
People*started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013*through Mars One, a Netherlands-based*private venture*that wants to land humans there by 2025.*By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than*200,000 people had submitted one.*Today, Mars One announced that it's*made a short(er) list of*1,058 applicants.*
*Here's what the numbers tell us about Mars' potential future inhabitants::
- 55 percent of the new applicant pool is*male and*45 percent is female. That's more masculine than the general population, but still substantially more gender balanced than U.S. Congress.
- 63 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher, while 3 percent*of the total hold*medical degrees (who wouldn't want a doctor on Mars?). Less than*7 percent of people on Earth in 2010*had college degrees, which means Mars may soon be the most educated planet in the solar system.
- 76 percent of applicants are employed, 15 percent are still in school, and 8 percent are unemployed. If surviving as a colonist*on another planet*counts as a job, expect Mars to have an employment rate of*100 percent.
- 43 percent of applicants come from the Americas, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Asia, 5 percent from Africa, and 4 percent from Oceania. That hardly jibes with the distribution of the*world population; if it did, 60 percent of Martians would be Asian and*14 percent would hail from the Americas. A closer match is the distribution of global wealth by nation, of which*the Americas claim*35 percent.
- 107 countries are represented in the applicants and,*at 28 percent of all those accepted into Mars One's second round,*the United States has the largest pool of candidates.
- 34 percent of potential Martians are younger than 25, about 65 percent are between the ages of 26 and 55, and 2 percent are older than 56. In contrast,*40 percent of Earthlings are less than*25 years old*and 17 percent older than 56.
The defining moment for Mars One will be selecting its crew (or crews) for a 2025 voyage, but the news*does bring*a*private mission to the red planet one*step closer to reality. A bigger*step occurred earlier this month, when Mars One*announced a contract with Lockheed*Martin to craft a design concept for a robotic lander. Its goal: to find and prepare a landing site for the first*human visitors to Mars.
More...