Tech barons dream of human colonies on Mars – but I can’t think of a worse place to die | Jordan Prosser
Before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the moon, the US military was envisaging a long-term lunar outpost, but the cost proved prohibitive. The Apollo missions came and went amid ever-decreasing television ratings. Mars One declared that by 2023, then 2024, then 2025, then 2027, they would send four astronauts on a one-way mission to the red planet, topping up the numbers every few years until they had established a long-term, self-sustaining, off-world settlement.How did they intend to pay for all this?
- ▪Before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the moon, the US military was envisaging a long-term lunar outpost, but the cost proved prohibitive.
- ▪The Apollo missions came and went amid ever-decreasing television ratings.
- ▪Mars One declared that by 2023, then 2024, then 2025, then 2027, they would send four astronauts on a one-way mission to the red planet, topping up the numbers every few years until they had established a long-term, self-sustaining, off-wor
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/07/tech-barons-dream-of-human-colonies-on-mars-but-i-cant-think-of-a-worse-place-to-die |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:00:06 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T15:15:42.806Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T15:15:42.806Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | uWChvhsLmOM4 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘There is simply no scientific precedent for a group of humans living indefinitely at 38% of Earth’s gravity, let alone permanently cut off from their friends, family, history and culture.’ Photograph: vrcraft/Getty Images/iStockphotoView image in fullscreen‘There is simply no scientific precedent for a group of humans living indefinitely at 38% of Earth’s gravity, let alone permanently cut off from their friends, family, history and culture.’ Photograph: vrcraft/Getty Images/iStockphotoAustralian booksTech barons dream of human colonies on Mars – but I can’t think of a worse place to dieJordan ProsserHumans love to do stupid things to reach far-off places – but even the wildest frontiers on Earth have at least the possibility of a return homeThu 6 Aug 2026 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 6…
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