13-Year-Old's Plan: Be First on Mars

Alyssa Carson has already given a TEDx talk in Greece, and the 13-year-old is due on Jeopardy this coming week. But these are small achievements compared to her goal since she was 4 years old: to be the first human to set foot on Mars, CNET reports. "NASA takes people like Alyssa very seriously," a rep tells the BBC. "She is of the perfect age to one day become an astronaut—to eventually travel to Mars," and she's already "taking all the right steps."

Among those steps: She's traveled throughout the US and Europe attending various space programs, her website says, including Space Camp seven times and NASA's Space Academy three times. She speaks Spanish, Chinese, French, and "some Turkish," she writes at the site, and she's an ambassador for a non-profit focused on creating a human colony on Mars, Yahoo notes. Her dad tells the BBC the family has the next 20 years planned out, and Alyssa wants to go to Mars even if it means never returning. Mars "could possibly be our next Earth," she says. "I am the Mars generation." (India recently joined the Mars club, and it did so on a relative shoestring budget.)