Covering technology news on April 01 is often a perilous practice, fraught with tantalising fictitious pitfalls gouged into the bedrock of journalistic credibility and looking to prey on a jaded writer’s gullibility and calendar-based ignorance.
Google and Virgin join forces for \'colony on Mars\' April 01 prank. Credit: Google/Virgin.
While The Tech Herald successfully managed to dodge the April 01 bullet this year, it would appear that search engine giant Google and media titan Virgin have been working hard to catch other, not so vigilant newshounds in their net of jovial deception.
Admittedly, a joint venture to colonise Mars might not have fooled many, but it’s at least good to know that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson can still find the time to take a break from global domination to playfully nudge the ribs of the tech industry.
This particular galactic jape came with the heading “The Adventure of Many Lifetimes,” and openly offered that: “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B” via the absurdly named “Project Virgle.”
Plan B, in this instance, would involve mankind reaching out into the stars in order to bring its special brand of homeworld housekeeping to an unsuspecting red planet situated not very far from our currently ailing world.
“Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars,” wrote Branson on the official Google Blog. “Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it's high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.”
With humanity spread across the globe amid crops, highways, skyscrapers and elevated atmospheric CO2 levels, Project Virgle outlines that, from 2014, the Google and Virgin partnership will be leading hundreds of (unspecified) users on one of the grandest adventures in human history in an effort to create the first permanent human colony on Mars.
While such an event might happen in the extremely distant future, the likelihood of anyone partnering with Richard Branson to take mankind to Mars is genuinely amusing. Considering his inability to run an uninterrupted service on Virgin Rail, a distinctly ground-based mode of transport, it’s somewhat hard to believe a queue of “hundreds of users” enthusiastically clamouring to board a jointly developed space vehicle with even half of the Virgin logo stencilled on the side.
Nice gag though.
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