virgle - the open source planet

Have you noticed all the talk about space on the web lately? First there was the story of NASA's space station treadmill named after Stephen Colbert, then news that Milky Way could taste of raspberries, and then Wired's showcase of these stunning space photos taken from the Hubble in early celebration of the telescope's 20th anniversary.

Now that I'm a blogger contributing to the space chatter is part of protocol. So, I decided to deep search the internet and see whether I could find any fun sci-fi dandelions hiding away in the black holes of cyberspace.

And I finally found one. It's called Virgle.

A year ago, Google announced a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google called "Virgle." The goal: to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars.

Starting 2014, Project Virgle will send spaceships carrying supplies and hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle pioneers, to the planet over the next 100 years. Project Virgle's ambitious plan also includes becoming the first open-source planet, relying on the diffused network of Virgle pioneers to create a civilization "whose development is driven by the unbound human imagination." If you are extremely gung-ho, you can apply to be a Virgle pioneer. I applied, but got shot down because I was "distressingly normal."

Bummer.