At the point in time when Mars One stopped taking application for a one way trip to Mars, they had amassed 200,000 applications. Now Mars One has pared down the application base and in doing so has eliminated over 99% of the applications under consideration.
Mars One's list now contains only 1058 applicants. The percentages now according to a recent Popular Science Article:
- 55 percent of the new applicant pool is male and 45 percent is female. That's more masculine than the general population, but still substantially more gender balanced than U.S. Congress.
- 63 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher, while 3 percent of the total hold medical degrees (who wouldn't want a doctor on Mars?). Less than 7 percent of people on Earth in 2010 had college degrees, which means Mars may soon be the most educated planet in the solar system.
- 76 percent of applicants are employed, 15 percent are still in school, and 8 percent are unemployed. If surviving as a colonist on another planet counts as a job, expect Mars to have an employment rate of 100 percent.
- 43 percent of applicants come from the Americas, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Asia, 5 percent from Africa, and 4 percent from Oceania. That hardly jibes with the distribution of the world population; if it did, 60 percent of Martians would be Asian and 14 percent would hail from the Americas. A closer match is the distribution of global wealth by nation, of which the Americas claim 35 percent.
As the article points out, the news ... bring a private mission to the red planet one step closer to reality. The next step for Mars One is final crew selection, for putting humans on Mars by 2025.
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