Okay Weirdo, You Can Go to Mars for (Less Than) Four Years

I know you weird freaks are obsessed with going to Mars, and guess what? You can go — stop cheering, I’m not finished — but only under one condition: you have to promise come back in under four years.

Oh my god, shut up.

“Aww, but I wanna stay longer!” you’re saying. “Aww, only less than four years? But whhyyyyy?? I wanna seeeee Marrssssss.” That’s you. I’ll tell you why, you weirdo. Because of the radiation.

Oh, what? You don’t believe me? You’re saying you’re gonna go up there and stay longer than four years no matter what I say, because “there will be so much to see” and “probably I’ll just live there forever, among ‘my Mars community”? And now you’re saying that you at least want to stay up there until you “find out FOR SURE if Marvin the Martian is based on a real guy” because you want to “see if he’s single or at least ENM” because if he’s “even half as sexy as he is in the cartoons” then you’ll be “beyond good to go”? God, I knew you would be like this.

Well, you don’t have to take my word for it. The radiation news comes from a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles — they figured out that using our current shielding technology for spaceships and astronauts, astronauts would be safe from radiation as long as their mission to Mars didn’t last longer than four years.

“This study shows that while space radiation imposes strict limitations on how heavy the spacecraft can be and the time of launch,” said Yuri Shprits, UCLA research geophysicist and co-author of the study, “and it presents technological difficulties for human missions to Mars, such a mission is viable.”

But there are two kinds of radiation on Mars, and I bet you didn’t even know that, did you, you sick dork? Well, there are energetic particles from the sun and there are galactic cosmic rays. The study’s authors say it would be best to plan your filthy little visit during solar maximum, when the sun is at its most active, because that’ll “deflect” the other radiation, uh, somehow. I don’t know. It’s your trip.

Pack your bags, freak. Get ready to “fuck Marvin.”