The main problem with this article to me though, is that it ignores that we won’t see a return on investment on this trip. At least not in the foreseeable future. That’s the difference with blokes like Marco Polo, Columbus, etc. Of course knowledge for knowledge’s sake is nice and I’m not denying that there might be some spin off science that will do well on Earth. But I can’t help thinking there’s cheaper ways to go about it.

How about we spend that money on developing better AI for the robots we can send without a horror show unfolding on the Red Planet, forcing families to see their love oned die horrible deaths of starvation. (in case you forgot, settling new land isn’t a picnic and it never was)

Making one for a person is much harder, but not impossible. And it needn’t be a pure self-sufficient environment. You can take materials (and people) in from the asteroids or planets of the solar system. You can make inflatable spaces, and you can extract oxygen from most rocks in the solar system.

I think space mining is the most obvious first step. Moving asteroid material into LEO would make it possible to construct spacecraft and satellites without needed to launch material. The gold and platinum metals would be useful on Earth. The idea is the same – leave the miners to keep mining, no return, but the miners could build up quite a bit of money for their grandkids. Eventually you would start bringing people back and forth, but the first goal should be to make enough profit to send more miners… it’s for the good of the human race.

Given a choice, many people would stop such profitable mining only when they died. Others would keep mining until “relieved” and someone else came to finish it. And who are we to deny people’s choices?

Who wants to be safe and anonymous among 6 billion others?

Also, setting up a garden in a artificially lit room with a constant power source (nuclear) would not be too difficult. You could do that on Mars or on an asteroid or in deep space. An asteroid may be best, as you can transport valuable material back to earth.

With the technological aspects of starting a martian colony relatively avaiable, the main concern now is the psychological stability of the volunteers. Unless you plan on forbidding one of the genders (which obviously brings up its own psych problems), sex is something that needs to be taken into account, This is compounded by the fact the people most willing and capable of leaving Earth forever are young, single individuals with a sense of adventure. And with four people you’re pretty much creating forced partnerships, or worse drama if there is rejection (Having “Not if you were the last avaiable man on the planet!” not be an exaggeration is probably a bit of an ego-killer),

The other point is the necessity of any given person. We have to assume that in such a precarious situation, injuries are going to happen. And with only four people, the other three won’t really be capable of shifting the workload if one is incapacitated. If two people get injured, everybody dies.

I’d really have to say, 12-20 people is pretty much the minimum requirement for a one way trip to Mars.