The opportunity to settle on Mars is simply too good to pass up for Dr. Adriana Marais, one of five South African finalists in the Mars One initiative.

The programme hopes to recruit several people on a one-way trip to the Red Planet, although there are several significant challenges that still stand in its way by most accounts. But if anything, Marais has some impressive qualifications, with an extensive background in quantum biology, for one. The Mars One finalist was on-hand to talk about the opportunity and more at a Heavy Chef event in Cape Town on Wednesday night. What did we learn from the talk then?

“A one-way nature simplifies the mission,” says a quantum biology researcher, Adriana Marais. As one of the Mars 100, she says her family has been supportive of her endeavour. Her father is even writing a science fiction novel about the landing of a female protagonist, based on Marais’s venture, on a far-off planet. “If the mission doesn’t go off, they would probably be partially relieved,” she says.

WILL earthlings be packing for Mars in just 10 years’ time?

“Watch this space,” said November Tuesday Rostrum guest speaker Adriana Marais. She gave a mind blowing but highly plausible presentation on the Mars One project, of her hopes for a one-way ticket to the red planet and of her aspirations of being among the first people to colonise it in 2026.

I want to be one of the first citizens of Mars.

As a researcher in the field of quantum biology, and more recently in a field I would like to call quantum astrobiology, I spend a lot of time inside a huge picture of reality that extends from the tiny scales where atoms exist, out to the edges of the universe billions of light years away, on the quest to understanding life.