Shortly before the beginning of 2014, some mass media wrote about the next stage of the Dutch project Mars One’s selection of candidates to fly to Mars. On Research Gate this news evoked some discussion among narrow professionals, which was initiated by Vyachaslav Zholudev from Jacobs University on RG on May 15, 2013 and has received 57 comments by now (with total 1338 views), but that discussion hardly touched any moral, ethical or civilizational aspects of the problem, which made me assume that such a discussion may be necessary for a broader range of scientists, primarily for humanities scientists.

As known, Mars One project was founded as a private business model by some Dutch companies little-known at that time. And as private business in most cases is immoral, when it applies itself to a serious matter in which it lacks competence, it usually turns it into a profanity and show. Hollywood’s fantasies seem to be getting real.

From a psychological perspective, this project appears to be aimed to exploit the feelings of two types of people. On the one hand, these are laymen, who make up the majority and who look forward to be entertained by various, preferably deadly dangerous, shows. On the other hand, they are a relatively small percentage of dreamers who still cherish the old human dream of conquering space. Many of them, those feeling fit enough, have applied to participate in the project, totaling to about 200 thousand people, even though they were aware that they would not be able to come back to the Earth. This is where the immorality of the project developers lies. They want to send people, naive dreamers, to certain death to please millions of insatiable laymen and earn easy money and fame. But this project, having no solid scientific, technical and ethical foundation, can turn into a bluff and not reach a final phase in the end, which would be the best possible outcome for it. Using a Nobel Prize winner in physics as a scientific guarantor for the project, or even ten such guarantors, seems ridiculous. Such a project requires joint efforts of many research and technology institutes.

Such projects have always been the prerogative of scientific, space and military agencies of the leading world countries. Think of the Soviet-American space race, which along with the nuclear race, led in the end to a grand scientific and technical progress and the worldwide flourishing of education in natural sciences.

Now the world leading powers, including the U.S. and Russia, are conducting systematic research, development and testing of devices to further explore space, including the development of the rationale for launching a manned spacecraft to Mars. But even they do not announce as prematurely and loudly as Mars One’s project people have done about sending humans to Mars in the near future.

I think we have no ethical right to declare the launch of such a project and in this way to fool people unless we can clearly answer a number of questions, such as where to launch a rocket, where to get fuel for a return flight, where to get water, food and electricity for Mars colonists, how much load do they need to take aboard, what kind of load should it be, can we use, and if yes, how can we use the moon and the satellites of Mars as staging posts, what should self-contained life support systems look like, is it possible to create some acceptable atmosphere and environment to survive on Mars for future colonists, how to dispose of human waste once on Mars, are there any remains of the biosphere on Mars and are there any chances that humans will destroy it in no time, how to deal with deadly radiation, etc.

If these and similar questions are answered, there will be no problem to raise enough money to launch manned spacecraft to Mars. You can set a charitable fund to which many people may want to donate U.S $ 100-200, or you can start a public corporation. All this can be private money, but it will be needed only after multi-billion-dollar public investment has been used to prepare a solid ground for such a launch. In the above discussion on RG, a famous researcher Donald Rapp suggested all Mars One project proponents reading his 600-page book “Human Missions to Mars” which will help them understand why NASA is not planning to send people to Mars until 2080.

Ideally, in order to achieve greater synergy and avoid wasting funds, the project must become international and be carried out under the auspices of the UN, then in addition to its direct purpose, it will help the entire international community consolidate its efforts, while the present community suffers from lack of trust to each other.

The participation in such a grandiose project of the countries with different ideology and religion, belonging to different civilizations and having their own space programs (US, EU, Russia, China, Brazil, Iran, etc.) may become a kind of alternative to the concepts of the “golden billion” and mondialism. This is the project which can give us a chance to save our fragile peace on the Earth, unlike the reality show project the Dutch companies proposed, which is only trying to cash in on the all-time human dream of conquering space.