The newly formed partnership between Virgin and Google – poetically named Virgle – seeks to expand the human race’s dominion into outer space, specifically by inhabiting Mars.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin heroically announced today that they had joined forces in an attempt to lead hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

“Some people are calling Virgle an ‘interplanetary Noah’s Ark,’” said Virgin Group President and Founder Sir Richard Branson in a press release. “I’m one of them. It’s a potentially remarkable business, but more than that, it's a glorious adventure.

“For me, Virgle evokes the spirit of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo, who set sail looking for the New World. I do hope we'll be a bit more efficient about actually finding it, though.”

An invitation encouraged all who dared to envision the future as a journey to the stars to become Virgle Pioneers, test their Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan.

“Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B,” as soon as 2014, the invitation said.

As you probably guessed long ago, the announcement, by no coincidence made on April 1, April Fools’ Day, is a prank. An elaborate one though, as the masterminds behind it even bothered to create a YouTube video featuring Brin and Page (looking suspiciously amused), who asked viewers to submit their applications, in the form of a 30-second video.

This is not Google’s first April 1 hoax. The first such practical joke was played in 2000, when Google announced a new MentalPlex search technology that supposedly would read the user’s mind to determine what the user wanted to search for.

Then there was Google Gulp, in 2005, a line of “smart drinks” supposedly “designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty,” or last year’s Gmail paper, which offered users the possibility to request physical copies of their messages.

While Page and Brin do not intend to take us up to Mars in the near future, we are still more than welcome to complete the questionnaire – at least for the fun of it.