Mars One Needs YOU

The colonization of other planets—it’s been coming, you know it has. And I, as a child of the original Space Age, am very interested to see what happens. This story, about the Mars One Colony (which is a privately funded venture not related to any space agency like NASA) is intriguing.

The Mars One group is looking for colonists. And, apparently, it’s an entry-level position because it looks like all the training is on-the-job training. (Eight years of OTJ training, mind you.) Successful candidates will get along well with others and be willing to live the rest of their lives on Mars.

Now that hiring approach is interesting to me, as a former employment recruiter. And I can agree with it only because there is so much training prior to the actual colonization. I mean, you could learn a lot of stuff in eight years. Eight years will get you a professional degree. And, presumably, the Mars One training would be more intensive and specific than a regular university course. So yeah, you’d want to recruit for the intangible traits—like the ability to live isolated from all other human beings in the galaxy (other than the three other colonists).

Because what you don’t want is somebody who is the keeper of all the knowledge of, say, horticulture feeling unconnected to all the other humans on the planet.

You see what I’m getting at here?

Still, I think the people who are chosen for this program—and the ones that come after, since this company plans to send up a colony every two years—have to have a very special personality. They have to have a very deep sense of purpose that would drive them to leave their families, friends, jobs, planet, and (basically, let’s face it) most of the rest of humankind. They would really have to believe in the adaptability and resilience of the human body and mind. They would have to have so much faith in technology and science—there is no safety net. And they would have to truly believe that humans have a right and a destiny to be on other planets.

That is something special.