ASU professor Paul Davies is co-author of a paper in Journal of Cosmology, suggesting that the initial exploration of Mars be one-way trips for people, just like many colonists left their homes forever in historical times. The idea is getting a lot of news media attention. The article is one of many from a new book, The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet.
Ref: To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, and Paul Davies, Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 12, 3619-3626