Hundreds of years down the line, who's going to know who was the President of the United
States or something?
But everyone will remember who were those first four people who stepped on Mars.
In 2012, the nonprofit Mars One announced plans to colonise the red planet.
More than 200,000 people around the world applied for a spot on the four person spaceship.
There are now 660 finalists.
Those who go...
Will never return to Earth.
It might put me in danger but that's the whole point.
Takeoff
If we hit the atmosphere too fast, the heat shield fails and we would be incinerated.
Not a nice way to die but it would be almost instantaneous.
If I die on Mars, that will be great.
Pi, not the pastry kind, the mathematical kind. So, I know 90 digits of Pi.
3.141592655897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089
37510582097494459230781640628620899
Are you sure that last nine isn't an eight?
No, definitely a nine.
We're going to be considering how to get from Earth to Mars. So, what we'll do, we'll start
with.... knocking that.
Ryan, have you ever had sex?
No, I haven't.
Do you want to?
Not particularly. I don't have any desire to have sex. In fact, I've never actually
kissed anyone before.
Have you ever masturbated?
Erm, yes. But there's kind of erm... there's a scientific reason for that.
What do you mean?
Well, it raises your risk of prostate cancer if you don't.
Minus G times the mass of the sun divided by R2.
So this is the first velocity booster that we need to get onto our transfer in orbit.
I think the most important thing to do in life is to leave a legacy. A lot of people
do that by, say, having a child and having a family. For me, this would be my legacy,
to try and find out if there's life on Mars, to inspire a new generation, to lead to the
beginnings of the first civilisation on another planet. That is my legacy.
I'm 29 years old, I was born and raised in Iraq. In this culture you will first be treated
as an object.
I have to hide my hair, I have to hide all my body parts, not to show my hands.
I wasn't happy.
Do you feel like when you left Iraq you were saying goodbye to your family forever?
I did.
And it's a kind of, in a way, I see it as just the same. If I ever made it to Mars,
it's going to be the same experience as me coming to the United States.
Going back is not an option, never. I don't feel like I need a family to be able to survive and exist.
What about sex? There is never going to sex on Mars. How do you feel about that?
It's not a big problem for me not to have sex for... indefinitely.
I don't want to... How can I say this? I feel kind of shy to say it. It's just... you can
satisfy yourself.
After ten years I have the plan to become an astronaut. To live in Mars.
Do you know where Mars is?
You're joking, man!
One way ticket. It's one way. Just to go, it's not to come back anymore.
I think this world is not a good place to live any more. We have so many diseases, we
have so many armed conflicts, we have natural disasters, we have inequities, we have so
many problems that I believe it's not possible to solve.
I would like to see a better world compared to this one and I think a good way to solve
those problems is start from the beginning.
For us who stay here on Earth it will be as though this person has died.
For us this person doesn't exist.
But this isn't suicide. One think he is committing suicide, but it's not suicide.
Quite the contrary, he goes there because it is God's mission. It's humanity's mission.
When I was very young, around the age of two, my dad left me and my sister who had only
just been born.
He made a conscious choice not to support or care about my sister and I throughout our
entire childhood and that makes me feel almost... does he not care about us? Are we not worthwhile
of that?
It does make me angry. I do worry because my sister and I feel like... did we miss on
something when we were younger that almost everyone else had?
Has your sister been ok without a father?
Erm... I'm not really sure I want to answer this because I don't want to talk about something
that she wouldn't want on the camera.
There is a reason but I'd rather that not be on the footage. Because I just love my
sister to bits and there's no worse thing to see than someone almost losing who they are.
Didn't you ever, when you were little, think... where the fuck are you?
I didn't have a father figure really being my actual father but I had the advantage that
my grandparents kind of filled that in.
I know but what about your father?
I don't know because what... because I don't know what a father's supposed to do because
I haven't had one.
A lot of the traumatic experience that I've had throughout my life has been due to people
abandoning me and I suppose now, if I get to go to Mars then I would be abandoning everyone.
I mean, it's not like I'm like: "Ha ha!I will punish those who abandoned me by abandoning
everyone!" It's not like that at all.
Bye. Take care Ryan.
Well, the last time I hug him, if it does come to that moment, then I will tell him
how much I love him, I will certainly cuddle him, I will kiss him. Then I will just tell
him to enjoy his life and never, ever forget how much he's loved.
I think love is a word that refers to an emotional need. I have never felt it and I don't think
that I believe in it. I believe that there is... nobody has this kind of emotional effect on me.
Love is not something that I need.
If I fall in love in the next... before I go to Mars I will have a terrible problem
to deal with that.
It's something that you can't control. You can't avoid completely but you can control
when you feel that your feelings are changing. You can try to stop at that point.
So that's what I'm trying to do.
Let me offer the following thought and I want you to comment on this.
I think that the Mars One mission is a great and noble idea.
But there is a contradiction.
The only people who could go on that spaceship, who could commit to going to Mars forever,
have to be somehow crazy.
True or untrue?
Define crazy. Crazy is the unfamiliar. Crazy is the different person. What is crazy for people?
For me, I think, my sister, older sister, is crazy for having her dream to be to have
kids and have a husband and grow up and die.
Have you imagined someone disappearing forever?
I'm not afraid of death.
I'm afraid of something in this life but I'm not afraid of death.
All of us we're going to die.
We will never see him again but maybe we'll see him in heaven.
I will see him in paradise only.
If you're just one of seven billion people on Earth it's so difficult to make yourself
stand out and do something big.
I don't know, 50 years down the line, if I'm on Mars and there's a dust storm raging or
something like that, and I'm cold, being able to think and look back and knowing that it
mattered, what I did, in the end that does make it worthwhile to me.
You're going to die here or there, it doesn't really matter.
Why you're going to die is what matters for me.
If I die on Mars that would be an accomplishment.