foxnews.com/science/2013/05/ … y-project/
Dammit! My last refuge from insanity and now they’re planning to muck it up with humans…
If you’re reading fox news, the neighborhood is loooong gone. 
No no… Fox rips off articles from real news agencies and passes them along. You just have to stay away from their “political” news stories. Hey, I’ve got my bus ticket to Mars… You wanna come along? It’s really peaceful there and there isn’t too much squabbling. Well, the greenies are a bit of a problem now and then, but they’re very much in the minority. Most Martians are peaceful and quite likable. I should have never left…
Of course I want to come along, I’ve been waiting years for your invitation!
So they’re going to whittle down hundreds of thousands of applicants down to four people. I understand some of the skills required, but I’m not sure what sort of psychological makeup one would need in order to sign on for a one-way trip to Mars. To the loved ones left behind, it would almost be like dealing with a death.
On the one hand it’s a hugely exciting prospect, but on the other hand, seems like you’d be signing up for a very lonely life.
I think it would be great if we could, as a world, just vote certain people off.
This thread also reminds of me the band Ice T once had called Body Count. They had a song called there goes the neighborhood. Real classic stuff.
OK. Off we go! No need to be lonely, my friends will love you. But if you feel like you need humans around, we can start an organization… we can call it Martian Geographic. No wait. We’ll call it Martian Chronicles in honor of Mr. Bradbury. You can be the head photographer and we can explore the canals or maybe Olympus Mons and we can beam it all back to earth in a quarterly special. We could even set up a facebook account and have a bunch of humans like us. Will that do? I must have time to develop the hyper-oxygenation plants. We never bothered before, getting our oxygen by splitting water at the poles, But I suppose we’ll need to begin making above ground habitat possible. Make a list of animals you would like to have running around. Humans seem to need animals for some reason. It might take a few decades to get a suitable habitat up and running, but we’ll have time. Did I forget to mention that on Mars, you’ll live 200+ years? Something in the water. Anyway, you’ll be too busy to get lonely. Just the translation of Martian literature into English will take several decades . You’ll have oodles of fun.
Oh, I hope most people go to Mars.
Sorry, that won’t happen. We have a strict immigration policy. Most people will have to stay here in their living hell. The quota for humans or any large animals is 452 per species. That’s the same number as we have observers here.