In the present scheme of things, as humans eye the colonisation of the Red Planet as their definite high-end destination, it’s a pleasant surprise to find 62 Indians ‘short-listed’ for the future expedition. That 6.2 per cent of the aspirants who want to settle in Mars happen to be Indians is not quite surprising, given that our superpower ambitions have now been suitably edited and expanded into supraterritorial interests. But the reason for the one-way trip to Mars scheduled for 2024 is quite, for want of a better word, intriguing. It will be a private mission to send four men and women to establish a permanent colony, but which will be under constant observation! Doesn’t this ring a bell? Oh yes, the Hollywood blockbuster The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey! Well, if an NGO, Mars One, based in the Netherlands, can kickstart a worldwide process to attract application for earthlings to participate in an extraterrestrial reality show, then only the heavens know what are in store for us, in fact, in not so distant a future. Already, much of reality looks like a warped version of a science fiction novel, with technological divide both increasing and decreasing at an accelerated rate. But in case human reality becomes a skinned version of a made-for-television ‘reality’ show, albeit unfolding on Mars, 55 million kilometers away from Earth, then we wonder what would remain as essentially human anymore. Perhaps, we should brace for a more complex reality, the ostensible next step in the story of human civilisation, which would now expand its base to the near Earth planets, and then, within less than a century would venture out of the solar system altogether to hold televised experiments on exoplanets and star systems. But if the other side of such self-experimentation is made-for-TV consumption, we do need to reassess the meaning of what’s human all over again.