Like hoverboards, teleportation or a pair of smart glasses that doesn’t make you look like an absolute twat, space colonisation is a technological advent long-promised but as yet undelivered. Before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the moon, the US military was envisaging a long-term lunar outpost, but the cost proved prohibitive. The Apollo missions came and went amid ever-decreasing television ratings. By the mid-1970s, the general consensus was that we’d been there, done that, and bought the commemorative ashtray.

Besides, why shoot for the moon when you can travel an extra 228m kilometres and colonise Mars instead?

In 2012, against the backdrop of stagnating global space programs, one private not-for-profit in the Netherlands seemed poised to kickstart this new chapter of human civilisation. Mars One declared that by 2023, then 2024, then 2025, then 2027, they would send four astronauts on a one-way mission to the red planet, topping up the numbers every few years until they had established a long-term, self-sustaining, off-world settlement.

How did they intend to pay for all this? Well, besides an Indiegogo page that rather embarrassingly failed to hit its $400,000 target, Mars One planned to sell broadcasting rights to both the decade-long astronaut training program and the subsequent mission as a reality TV show; Big Brother in space. Sure, we all enjoyed our nine days with the jolly crew of the Artemis II in April of this year, but who would want to spend 10-plus years embedded with the same bunch of squeaky-clean air force jocks? Here was Mars One’s other big selling point: an open call-out for anyone in the world to apply, no prior aerospace experience required.

Two hundred thousand people expressed interest in the mission but a little under 3,000 formally applied. Mars One whittled this down to 100 finalists, many of whom began rearranging their lives in the whole-hearted belief they would soon be headed into space, never to return. But no TV deals were ever made, alternate revenue streams were called into question, and Mars One’s grand ambitions began to look less like “disruption” and a lot more like another fake-it-till-you-make-it tech-utopian pipe dream. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2019, to the utter shock and dismay of literally no one – except perhaps those 100 finalists, who were now forced to get on with life alongside the rest of us Earthbound plebs.

The only thing more powerful than the human survival instinct is the human drive to do stupid things to reach far-off places. The peaks of mountains. The bottoms of sea trenches. The north and south poles. But all of these journeys, even the unsuccessful ones, have historically been anchored by the promise of a return journey. I personally cannot fathom the level of delusion (or is it self-sacrifice?) required to sign up for a one-way mission into space. Let alone one where you would have a GoPro strapped to your face 24/7 so all of humanity could livestream your existential meltdown as you realised you would never pet another dog or eat another prawn.

Sure, Survivor’s been on air for 25 years and 50 seasons, but Mars One’s rickety business model put an enormous amount of faith in terrestrial audiences’ unwavering interest in a group of nobodies puking up for 10 years’ worth of G-force training then pooping into plastic bags for another nine months in space. No doubt the day of the Mars landing itself would be a big boost for ratings – and I imagine the betting markets would do morbidly good business that day, too – but where to after that?

As the old adage goes, don’t imagine the car of the future; imagine the traffic jam. The daily grind of setting up a habitable base on a hostile planet – growing edible plants from seed, maintaining oxygen recycling systems – wouldn’t exactly make for must-see TV, besides the fact that anybody on screen could die in an infinite number of grisly ways at practically any second. But there would be no weekly challenges. No tribal council. And certainly no voting anyone off, short of shooting them out the airlock into the cold vacuum of space (which would make for a pretty gnarly Up Late episode).

Mind you, dying as a D-list celebrity in the canyons of the Valles Marineris might not even be the worst reason for ending up on Mars any more. If you find yourself taking that even giant-er leap for mankind in the near-to-distant future, my guess is it will be for one of two reasons: either you’re the emissary of a cashed-up nation-state showcasing their military might; or you’re there as the brand mascot of a despotic tech company, saluting Emperor Bezos while Katy Perry does a celebratory fly-by.

And once you settled in, what would life actually look like? With little to no atmosphere, the surface of Mars is bombarded year-round by solar and cosmic radiation. A summer’s day at the equator might reach a balmy 20C, but elsewhere it can get as low as -153C. Cyclone-strength winds can kick up “global dust storms” that block out the sun for months at a time. And there is simply no scientific precedent for a group of humans living indefinitely at 38% of Earth’s gravity, let alone permanently cut off from their friends, family, history and culture. Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov holds the record for the longest single stretch of time spent away from Earth: 437 days (roughly 16 seasons of Survivor). What happens to the human brain and body beyond that is anyone’s guess, but give it a few years and I’m sure Mr Beast will pay someone to find out.

The only real upsides to living on Mars instead of Earth, as far as I can tell, are that a Martian year lasts 687 days, meaning half as many obligatory work Christmas parties with your (surviving) teammates – and, if/when the sun explodes, you’ll have about four minutes longer to enjoy the view. Which is why my personal feelings about off-world colonisation are ultimately quite similar to my feelings about the metaverse, that much-touted, dead-on-arrival virtual loserdom that many in the tech sector believed we would all be occupying 24/7 by now. Anyone who wants to spend their one wild and precious life on Earth chasing digital ascension or interplanetary conquest can knock themselves out. I’ll be down here petting dogs and eating prawns. More real world for me.

• Jordan Prosser is the author of the novel Blue Giant, which is available now in Australia from University of Queensland Press and 26 September in the UK from Dead Ink Books