While most people aren’t tempted by offers of one-way tickets to Mars that come with built-in guarantees of dying a sad, lonely death on the empty red plains of a faraway planet, there’s still a not-insignificant number of people out there who may like to offer their measly lives in tribute to Space Emperor Musk anyway. As loathe as we are to stand in the way of their sacrifice, it may still be a good idea to highlight some grim realities of Martian living that they might not be aware of.
Working from the assumption that the trip itself won’t turn travelers into floating corpse balloons before they even get there, Mashable has outlined some of the cool ways to horrifically die on Mars in a new video.
In summary: You can die on Mars from all the water in your body—including your precious urine—boiling up. You can die from terrible cancers when Martian UV exposure quickly destabilizes your molecules. You can die from starvation because the planet’s soil is so toxic that it’s impossible to grow crops. You can die in a planet-wide, month-long dust storm consisting of incredibly strong winds that also suck up all available moisture. And, you can also die of good old-fashioned hypothermia since Mars is extremely cold. There are, the video explains, so, so many ways to die on the planet.
Sure, none of these terrible things may actually happen to people who head to Mars equipped with proper, well-tested and maintained safety equipment designed to withstand the its natural hostility. But, considering the kind of people currently most interested in getting people there, well, we wouldn’t count on not dying in any number of awful accidents, even if they are preventable in theory.
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