Yes, it is totally nuts. NO ONE on Earth has the means to establish a Martian settlement (or even launch a mission to found one) within the next decade. Certainly not an obscure Dutch startup still seeking investors to pay for its launch site and first rocket boosters. Refer to Sprites recent thread on the Biosphere project, where we revisited all its overly ambitious disasters. We could not even establish a self-contained and sustaining human environment ON EARTH without the residents having to sneak out after just a few months to avoid expiration by, well, expiration.

There are so many things wrong with this I do not even know where to begin, but the best place is probably the year and a half or so it will take to get there. The record for longest uninterrupted time in space is just under 438 days, months less than a Martian trip would take. I looked it up when I first heard about this lunacy, and found a statement by Valeri Polyakov (who set the record) that the experience "provided all the conditions necessary for murder." So instead of one psychologically screened professional soldier who said the experience was enough to make him homicidal, why not send a dozen or two civilians for a trip four months longer?

That is just how long it would take to GET there; afterward they would need to (very quickly) set up permanent habitation and all infrastructure to maintain it indefinitely. That assumes, of course, colonists arrived with everything needed for permanent settlement and got it all up and running before exhausting whatever oxygen and water they brought. The more they needed to bring to survive that period the more they would have to haul out of Earths gravity well, and the more unfeasible the whole prospect becomes. Sure, if they set up greenhouses plants could theoretically convert Martian CO2 into sufficient O2—eventually. Yet, as Isaac and I discussed elsewhere a while back, the Martian atmosphere is also pretty thin, so I would not expect much oxygen quickly even once greenhouses were built.

The clock would be ticking from the moment they touched down though, and the things they needed to do before running out of initial supplies would take weeks or months, not hours or days. The record for longest period on the lunar surface, by the way, is 74 hours, and only 22 of that involved Extra-Vehicular Activity: Work fast (but make NO big mistakes (and there is no such thing as a "small" mistake in this context. )) Even THEN they will not be back in a normal comfortable environment, just (hopefully) no longer dependent on a vast array of complex machinery to continue enjoying luxuries like breathing.

Even if they arrived AND got a habitat up and operational before consuming all air, water and food they brought, they STILL would not be out of the woods yet. In fact, on a planet never more than a few degrees above freezing even during equatorial summer, with an almost entirely CO2 atmosphere at negligible pressure, they would NEVER be out of the woods: They would be one malfunction or piece of stray debris from instant death for the rest of their lives (one way or the other.... ) If anything—ANYTHING—went wrong, at any point, rescue/resupply would take a year and a half. That is, if they spotted a problem while landing and radioed, "we need another x NOW!" the response would be "Roger that; ETA 16-18 months." Even that verbal exchange would take at least half a minute, at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Also bear in mind it took a Saturn V to put THIS on the Moon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module

That was just 10 tons of metal occupying about 80 m³ of space so 2-3 people could spend a maximum of 3 days on the Moon. Obviously, sending 10 times as many people 100 times farther for an indefinite stay will take a BIT more equipment, and every last atom of it must be accelerated to roughly 35,000 mph just to escape this planet, let alone journey to its destination in anything like a timely fashion (and since the trip will be long and the crew will have no readily available sources of air, water and food until they can supply their own, time will be of the essence.) According to Wikipedia, rather than a 10 ton 80m³ lunar lander, Mars One means to send 3000 m² of cargo in solar panels alone (although the Wikipedia link to that statement on the Mars One site now returns a 404 error.) Now, if all the equipment were ferried up to the space station to be collected and transported from there (much as von Brauns first proposed manned Martian trip) that might be feasible (though still costly,) but it is hard to envision the countries who jointly own the space station participating in that.

All of that applies to any means of return also, and is not like we can just send another vessel to pick up colonists. Even if a colony succeeds it is unlikely any colonists could return to Earth in under a decade—if ever. Hug your parents, siblings and kids REALLY tight before you leave: You will probably never see any of them again even if you manage to avoid a slow miserable death millions of miles from home.

The US government (still the only people who have put a human being on another celestial body) cannot do this, is not even contemplating a Martian ORBIT until (according to Obama) 2030-something. China has discussed a possible manned mission between 2040 and 2060. Mars One says they will send a PERMANENT manned mission in 2023—once they have enough money to pay for it and volunteers off the street to crew it. I guess people caught on to the "Nigerian prince" scam. That is evidently Chinas conclusion: http://www.space.com/21270-private-mars-colony-scam-china.html

Frankly, I HOPE that is all this is; it would still be far more benign than the possibility they sincerely plan to send a bunch of idealistic but naïve people to almost certain, slow and agonizing deaths. Even by comparison to Jamestown, over half those people died, and their journey only took about three months without risk of hypoxia, explosive decompression or absolute zero. It really sounds less like Jamestown though than the colonial fraud Gregor MacGregor perpetrated by claiming to be "cacique of Poyais;" the difference there will be no British fleet on Mars to carry the few feverstruck survivors to a nearby ACTUAL colony.