After decades of popular-press articles, a serious proposal to start the colonization of Mars with one-way missions has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In a recent issue of the Journal of Cosmology (journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html), physicist Paul Davies (Arizona State) and geologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State) make a strong case for sending two two-person teams to Mars — and leaving them there. With the prospects of return missions currently stuck on the drawing board — we can’t even get back to the moon, let alone Mars, under NASA’s over-cautious safety-at-all-costs philosophy — they propose that if we’re going to go anywhere in space in the next decade or two, Mars is the destination and one-way is how it’s going to happen.