Ken Silber has a review of what look to be an interesting new book on exobiology.

"Even a one-way mission, he believes, would not lack for scientific volunteers."

Well, unless you have a completely self-sustaining life-support system that will last for several decades, is this guy's premise really that we'll find microbiologists and paleontologists willing to take a trip to Mars or Titan and then, after a couple of years, pop a cyanide capsule?

Yeesh.

Not necessarily. I certainly have long supported one-way missions to Mars or the Moon. As long as the supply ships keep coming in regular order, and you start with excess supplies in case a supply ship fails for some reason, there is no reason why you couldn't live out a natural life on another world, working as long as possible.

I'd go.

It sometimes seems that we've run out of people willing to 'boldly go' since the sixties, but I know that isn't true. Since I'm not going (too old, too fat, too stupid, too poor, etc.) I'll just keep dreaming.

My dreams take the form of writing game programs that only I end up playing. I've got a galaxy of 100 stars and 4000+ planets (Main's, Moon's and Kuiper's) that's running at a reasonable speed but I've only a rudimentary A.I. written so far.

Some lonely planet might be just the place to finish writing it?

Hello Rand et al. Ward was specifically talking about Titan (not Mars) with regard to a possible one-way mission. Here's from the book (p251-2):

Unfortunately, chances are that any humans hazarding the long trip to the Saturnian system would be embarking on one-way trips. As dangerous as a mission to Mars would be, it pales in comparison with what would be required of the humans and machines leaving on the seven-or-more-year trip just to get from the earth to Titan. But actually to see the rings, to land on the ruddy moon, perhaps to make the most important biological discovery since Watson and Crick, I think that there would be no shortage of volunteers. Scores of terrorists blow themselves up yearly. Surely we can ask the same sacrifice for a better cause from our scientists, especially the older ones.

Suicide bombers strap on explosives and detonate them with the expectation of going to paradise. I think that's a very different sort of commitment than going one-way to Titan. We'd be asking small groups of people to spend the rest of their lives confined to small habitats (except when you don a spacesuit and step outside), knowing they'd never see their homes, family, etc. again.

That's very different from spending even a few years on a research station and returning, or building a sustainable colony to actually settle. I think you'd get very few volunteers for that once they sat down and tried to seriously visualize what that would be like after ten or twenty years.

Of course, I have to expect that if we had a space program capable of getting a research crew to Titan and supplying them indefinitely, that program would actually advance fast enough that a return mission could be launched much more cheaply within 10 or 20 years.

I'm reminded of the stories the late Dr. Robert Forward wrote about explorers investigating the worlds of Barnard's Star. They also set out with the expectation of spending the rest of their lives doing so (and all were sterilized first...it was explicitly not meant to be a voyage of colonization), starship technology of the time giving them no option.

Yet, late in the lives of those who'd not died of various causes, they indeed greeted another expedition with better propulsion technology who'd not only traveled faster, but were capable of a return trip.

Heinlein's 'Time for the Stars' had a very roughly similar idea.