QUESTION:
Once we start going to Mars regularly, who should go. Should families go?
Should jail convicts?

ANSWER from Geoff Briggs on February 25, 2000:
I don't think too much attention has been paid to this question --
which assumes that initial science bases (presumably established by
federally/internationally-funded projects) have already been
established and that the advanced infrastructure is in place to allow
people to make routine affordable journeys to Mars.

I myself would suppose that at this future time the question would be
answered by the "marketplace".  Surely it will remain expensive to
travel to Mars for some considerable while.  I would expect that most
travel would be funded by commercial enterprises (high technology)
who wished to establish a division of their company on Mars and
populate it with highly skilled employees.

Self-funded emigrants from Earth would need to be sufficiently
wealthy, have skills that would enable them to be self-supporting on
arrival, and be extremely highly motivated.

I would guess that emigrants would find it much easier to create
families once they had arrived on Mars rather than to uproot a
complete family from Earth -- for reasons of cost and motivation.  A
man and women meeting on Mars would already share the means and the
motivation.  Their children would not have to be dragged away from
their friends and their natural environment.

The ability for families to be formed on Mars does indicate the need
for there to be some parity between the numbers of men and women who
would emigrate to Mars.  Presumably, the marketplace would also deal
with that to some extent.

I can't conceive of any circumstances where it would make sense to
send criminals to Mars though I can see the analogy with the forced
emigration of convicts to Australia in the last century.  Times
change.