One-way Mars One mission detractors now include some Muslim clerics

How Bas Lansdorp and the rest of the Mars One team imagine the first human colony on Mars will look in 2023.

We've written before about Mars One, the combination space mission/reality TV spectacle that aims to send at least four civilians on a one-way journey to the red planet. On the whole, Ars is skeptical, but despite delays, the project continues to push onward. Thousands of people have applied for the trip, in spite of the fact that the project as it's currently outlined has neither the money nor the technology to get off the ground.

But one thing that might stop at least some hopefuls from donning their spacesuits is a fatwa—an interpretation based on Quranic scripture—issued by the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the United Arab Emirates. A trip like the proposed Mars One mission, from which there is no plan (or really even possibility) of return to Earth, "poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam," ruled the committee, which saw its fatwa published in the UAE-based Khaleej Times.

The fatwa compares the trip to suicide, which it notes is forbidden in the Quran: "Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another." The fatwa notes that there exists no "righteous reason" to embark on the mission and that participants will potentially incur "punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter."