The name "30 Seconds to Mars" sounds like there might be a story behind it–and there is. Years ago, Jared Leto found a thesis written by a professor from Harvard.
It was a treatise on how over the last 200 years we’ve seen exponential growth in technology. One of the subsections of this paper was entitled "Thirty Seconds to Mars," and it posits that if you were to take all of human evolution and put it on a timeline, we’re metaphorically just thirty seconds away from colonizing Mars.
Jared thought that was a pretty cool way to looking at the human race’s place in the universe, so he adopted it for the name of his band.