A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica | Hacker News Reader

A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica

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206 pointsjd115124 comments

You can sustain a lot, when you know you will have respite. I've got a weekend off in April, I can make it until then!

As folks remark something like a Mars mission may be a life sentence. It will be a different ballgame. It almost seems inevitable that folks will break.

A common occurrence on the early pioneer prairies in America was mental health problems. My Dad was 3rd generation in Iowa, and he knew several older folks who'd lost the plot. They talked exclusively of their past; they didn't follow conversations; they only functioned within their small world of the farmstead. They were largely treated normally as far as could be managed. But they had a relatively congenial ecosystem to live within. Won't be that way on a Mars colony.

Basically every person they send to Mars needs to be mildly autistic. Highly regimented, low social needs, etc.

People with autism do not generally have lower social needs than neurotypical people. They just have poorer ability to reason socially.

It's like being deaf in one ear. That doesn't mean you don't like music any less, it's just harder for you to hear it.

I suspect one would need bigger problems than autism to willingly give up, forever, the opportunity to experience life's most basic pleasures: walking, wind, water, grass, trees, flowers, sunlight, food, and other people.

Yet there are a generation of people today that are essentially hermits in their apartments, who do that.

Do you mean during the pandemic? Otherwise, how big is this population?

Its been growing for 30 years. Just google 'social isolation'.

I think GP is referring to a society-wide problem. As a Gen Z-er, I concur - at the risk of sounding dramatic.

> low social needs

People with mental health issues have greater social needs. A desire to be isolated doesn't equate with low social needs. For example, depressed people may want to be alone, but require more effort and energy.

People who had poor mental health outcomes during COVID were mostly extroverted. Introverts actually did better, including myself.

Losing your mind comes from the machinery of the brain failing, which is almost always caused by stress in these kinds of scenarios. Emotional stress is the most acute kind of stress. Isolation and unrelenting physical danger are very emotionally stressful. It doesn’t intrinsically create psychosis, it creates stress which might cause psychosis. The human race is filled with stories just as harrowing as a well funded and planned Mars colonization where people made it through. If you disagree you simply haven’t read your history. Life 2000 years ago was unimaginably cruel, let alone one million years ago.

Just because people in 2020 mash together stress, depression, psychosis and other things doesn’t mean anything. These mental illnesses have biochemical underpinnings and they aren’t intrinsic aspects of the human experience or doing certain things, like going to Mars.

People fetishize the impossibility of things. They also fetishize doom. Global warming has become political not only because of the people who deny it but also because of the people who fetishize the doom and gloom of it. You can recognize these people by talking to them about potential solutions or how to fix it. Invariably they don’t want to think about solutions, think it’s impossible to escape the end of the world and tend to want to turn to some kind of spiritual/naturalistic repentance even though it wouldn’t fix anything when you run the numbers. Same thing with Mars. People fetishize the impossibility of it. You can’t possibly go there without going insane. The radiation will be impossible to deal with. The gravity can’t possibly sustain human life.

It’s all hyperbole. There’s valid counterpoints to all of it. But it goes in one ear... and out the other.

Future of space explorations for sure. Similar situation portrayed in Ad Astra (2019) where the main hero's father have gotten stranded on a space station on the edge of the solar system for many years and went insane.

Humans are delicate machines. Gotta know how to keep the monkey happy.

Can't help but think of the short story of a group of explorers encountering what turns out to be an endless space station: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/roauss.htm

Orangutans are about as good as it gets at enduring solitude for apes, possibly all primates, and even then females don't live far from their mother and sisters, and children require 9 years of attention and frequent physical contact.

Humans are machines?

On that topic, I recommend the first season of The Terror.

Plot from Wikipedia:

"The Terror is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848. The series' first season begins with the Royal Navy's polar explorer ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror having recently left Beechey Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, heading south toward King William Island into uncharted territory, seeking to find and confirm the existence and navigability of the fabled Northwest Passage. The ships are soon frozen and trapped in the ice, and those aboard must survive the harsh weather conditions and each other, while being stalked by an elusive menace."

I really, really loved the first season of the Terror. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys that genre of stranded arctic explorers.

Pretty much anything with Jared Harris in it is good (The Expanse, Fringe, Chernobyl)

I hope Foundation is as good as it is pretty...

It's good!

The book is also enjoyable, and covers a little bit more detail.

In 1893, Fridtjof Nansen took a ship with a 12 men crew to North of East Siberia, purposefully sailed the ship to get stuck in sea ice, and hoped that the ice movement with ocean currents would take them to the North Pole. The ship spent 3 years stuck in ice, but didn't quite flow over the North Pole. These people didn't go mad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nansen%27s_Fram_expedition

What kind of food did they store and eat that was to last five years? And water? The wiki is light on these details in my skimming of it.

They mention building a shelter with walrus hides so I'd imagine they did a fair amount of hunting rather than trying to bring all their supplies with them from the outset. Shackleton's voyage used a similar approach.

At this period in time, before Vitamin C was discovered, fresh meat, in particularly raw meat, was critical for survival. The canned food didn't contain vitamin C so scurvy was a constant problem.

The competent explorers learned the habit of eating raw meat from the inuits.

That said, the walrus hut was built by Nansen and Johansen after leaving the ship.

That wiki article was a super interesting read. I might find a book that goes more in depth.

Try Ronald Huntford's biographies. His books about Amundsen/Scott and Shackleton are also worthwhile. Such an amazing period.

In summary, Shackleton and Nansen are admirable for courage an endurance. But Amundsen is far ahead of them all in competence, and that is what counts.

And then you can also try "The worst journey in the world" by Ansley Cherry-Garrard. An expedition in darkness...

It is funny and slightly dissonant that Roald Amundsen, the greatest polar explorer of all (forgive me Fridtjof) is mentioned in a subordinate clause as "The Belgica’s first mate, a fellow Norwegian named Roald Amundsen".

I too noticed that the author didn’t connect the first man at the South Pole with Amundsen

Yeah I also thought that was weird. This article is adapted from a book, so maybe his accomplishments are noted in an earlier, more detailed description of the expedition

I see that H.P. Lovecraft is mentioned but not his work on the topic: "At the Mountains of Madness". I recently discovered a great adaptation of his book by the Japanese Artist Gou Tanabe. If you are into B&W ink drawings you should really check out Tanabe's books.

The Gou Tanabe adaptation deserves much more recognition among HP Lovecraft fans: it is simply fascinating. The story is told so well + the chapters about history of alien beings are just great.

Gou Tanabe's "Color from Outer Space" and "Haunter of the dark are great too, but "At the mountains of madness" is probably the best.

Haven't read all of Lovecraft, but my favorite story of his is "At the Mountains of Madness". I really enjoyed this audiobook of it as well:

https://www.audible.com/pd/At-the-Mountains-of-Madness-Black...

I hope someday that Guillermo del Toro is able to make a movie adaptation.

https://movieweb.com/at-the-mountains-of-madness-movie-guill...

It’s a terrifying book. The pace and forced anticipation of it is brilliant, and was the first book to give me nightmares as a kid. A del Toro adaptation would be similarly fear inducing.

> Among the first things he said when he rediscovered his voice was that he was going to murder his superior, chief engineer Henri Somers, as soon as he had the chance.

One has to wonder what where his thoughts for two weeks ..., probably, for whatever reason thoughts where around time when engineer told him something that he did not like, and it was so minor, he would forget about next day in normal times, without giving any thought what so ever.

"I need some Belgian fries. Right now!"

A modern version of this is people losing their minds on Twitter. Consumed by anger, paranoia, hysteria, all day, every day.

And a futuristic version will be Mars. Mars twitter will be the mouth of madness.

First

>A current theory among social scientists suggests that pibloktoq [a temporary madness found in Inuhuit peoples] was not a congenital malady peculiar to the Inuhuit but rather a severe stress reaction arising from early contact with Western outsiders.

Could someone explain this theory to me?

secondly, I sincerely doubt that the early expeditions had anything remotely resembling adequate nutrition, besides enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

I would imagine a very restricted diet combined with not seeing the sun for 6 months would fuck up a lot of people

In fact, scurvy was a major problem for early expeditions, as they didn't understand it's vitamin C deficiency.

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

They merely ventured too close to the forbidden plateau of Leh.

Leng

Future of expeditions to Mars?

Even the Moon. ISS visitors are selected very, very carefully to minimise these risks. But as soon as you get a slightly larger colony further from Earth, mental health is going to become a problem.

Which is why Mars is a tougher project than it seems. The ferry part is relatively easy compared to the incredibly difficult challenge of building a self-sustaining stable ecosystem that can survive on a manageably small umbilical to Earth, and the even harder challenge of building a political system that doesn't explode into factional war, regular suicides, and/or mad dictatorship.

Musk is already a little eccentric and doesn't seem like someone with the world's highest EQ. I suspect he's underestimating how hard it's going to be to make a colony work.

I agree. This is what I don't get. We don't have a real permanent colony in space. We don't have a real permanent colony on the moon. Mars is so much further away with less access to resources. It is fine to goal to someday get to Mars but we should have a plan for sustainable living in orbit, then on the Moon, and that will help us know how to get to Mars.

I think the one of the main problems, lack of sunlight, shouldn’t be a huge issue on mars.

Nutrition and a sufficiently large social, group on the other hand, may be a problem

> lack of sunlight, shouldn’t be a huge issue on mars.

Mars only gets 43% as much sunlight as Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars). On top of that, Mars's lack of a magnetic field like Earth's makes cosmic radiation there worse to the point that colonies will likely be underground, or behind heavy shielding aboveground: https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html

I stand corrected

Mars has significantly less sunlight (in terms of irradiance) than Earth

That might be more of a problem in the higher latitudes, but on Martian equator, sunlight at noon will be comparable to sunlight at noon somewhere around the Baltic Sea - still perfectly fine. Also, Martian atmosphere is thinner and blocks less light than ours. (Unfortunately it also does not prevent harmful UV rays from reaching the surface.)

One possible problem not discussed would be the giant dust storms that can cover large tracts of the planet for weeks. We don't have this kind of weather on our cradle planet.

True, but a day on Mars is pretty much the same length as on Earth, which is great for the human cycle. Googling says that lux 100k on Earth would be roughly 44k on Mars, so a lot dimmer, but still better than months of darkness on end.

Now the real question is whether colonists can/will live on the surface? But then a secondary addition, due to modern technology we now have much better lighting that can approximate natural lighting, even underground.

In every book I've read on the subject they mentioned going underground to protect against radiation. The lack of a thick magnetosphere apparently means any surface equipment / personel would be subject to unacceptably high quantities of solar radiation. I guess living in a hole on another planet isn't as glorious as giant geodesic glass domes but I sure hope somebody does sign up for it.

Colonists would still have to deal with months of almost darkness during dust storms.

Well war is probably very healthy. In a way

Was thinking the same thing.

But… although I do 100% drink the Elon Koolaid about "us" colonizing Mars, I really doubt that humans, as we know them today, are the creature that is going to be there.

It will instead be some planet-specific tweaked versions of us and other creatures, eventually in a different substrate even, as opposed to bags of meat.

When you think of it that way, the possibilities for mental health are just a sub-problem of the larger problem of aligning AGI.

I said I drink the Koolaid, and the above may sound out of line with what Elon has been saying about making humans multi-planetary.

But if you read between the lines of what he says, I think this is already his view; he just doesn't say it the way I did above because (I think his reason is) the freakout factor is too high. It is consistent with what he does say. Lately he has been saying "make life multi-planetary" and "make consciousness multi-planetary" not just humans. He still says humans too but it may be a loose usage of the word humans, and I don't doubt there will be a transition period with some homo sapiens. Long term, not so much.

OK that kind of got far afield but the point is mental health is going to be a different equation by that point. Maybe harder actually, but different.

Not just mental health, but physical as well. Humans are not well suited for long term high G environments, while I have every expectation that we will someday make it to other planetary systems I doubt the meatbags will be coming along.

It's the solar radiation, not high G's, that is the main problem with colonising Mars given Mars doesn't have a functional magnetosphere. At best Martian colonists will be the modern day equivalent of Morlocks if they want to have a sustainable colony on mars.

Not if you design the habitation appropriately. Something like a 1m layer of water in the roof and thick glass windows would provide pretty decent protection.

Sleeping underground would be a good idea though.

Water's not that easy to come by on mars though! Sounds like a pretty miserable existence either way.

Yes absolutely.

I feel like I want to hear more about what you're saying but despite reading it several times, your comment remains pretty opaque to me. Could you elaborate in a more plain English how exactly you think Mars colonisation will actually go? My understanding is that Elon considers this unmistakably as a concrete near-term goal, whereas - certainly to my knowledge - "tweaked versions of us... in a different substrate" seem significantly closer to science-fiction still (despite Neuralink etc.). So I'm curious what concrete things and time lines you were referring to...

I assume he's talking about loading human consciousness into computers or artificial brains, and running them in a data center on Mars. Meanwhile here in 2021, I can't get 5.1 surround to work on Disney+ or HBO Max over HDMI ARC on a 6 year old TV. I enjoyed watching the first season of "Upload" on Amazon Prime though!

Yeah, someone else said it — transhumanism, basically. Timelines are medium to high single digit decades from now, not one or two decades.

It's already a matter of historical record that the first landings on Mars have been robots.

Robot intelligence is only getting better. The Singularity is projected to happen late in this decade. There will be Mars landings throughout this decade and it will make sense that some of them will send more robots. But we'll also want to send humans, because, well that's just how we roll.

Then at some point we get better and better at making smart robots, and they get smarter and smarter.

And also there are hybrids. I'm not saying which way it will go — robots, hybrids, both — because I have no idea. But any combination seems possible. Humans likely will be in the mix at first as well, just not sure about the long term for our body types.

And Mars is kind of a "safe" (scare quotes because it's not, really) remote place to park embodied AI experiments beyond what we might allow to roam around freely here. Some things we disallow on Earth might be allowed to happen on Mars.

Around the time when the transportation systems are getting robust (a decade or so), we will be heavily feeling the impact of the fact that life support systems could be a lot easier if we just send the non-meat versions of ourselves, or human 2.0, which will be either what today we might call robots, or some hybrid creature with somewhat human-ish sensibilities.

If it's a hybrid, the base body plan will not necessarily start with a human body.

Let's say we are in a decade where the available tech is something like Neuralink. Going to Mars, maybe you want a much smaller body, for whatever reasons. Lower gravity, more space efficient, etc., so maybe it will make sense to start with, say just for example, a Macaque monkey body, enhanced with Neuralink.

The fact that Mars creatures need to be autonomous from Earth also figures in here. The SNL skit scenario with Chad is not going to happen, because of the communication delay. So We can't just send dumb robots forever. Our current robots there have already been autonomous to increasing degrees for several generations, the last few missions over the last couple of decades.

It is science fiction, but we are getting there… it's going to be real, unless something really bad happens before then.

I think he means transhumanism. Genetically adopted humans/cyborgs, that can survive the radiation etc.

Scie-Fi for sure.

It's not sci fi. Hominids have evolved radiation adaptations here on earth already through natural selection alone: dark skin.

> The evolution of dark skin is believed to have begun around 1.2 million years ago,[9] in light-skinned early hominid species after they moved from the equatorial rainforest to the sunny savannas. In the heat of the savannas, better cooling mechanisms were required, which were achieved through the loss of body hair and development of more efficient perspiration. The loss of body hair led to the development of dark skin pigmentation, which acted as a mechanism of natural selection against folate depletion, and to a lesser extent, DNA damage. The primary factor contributing to the evolution of dark skin pigmentation was the breakdown of folate in reaction to ultraviolet radiation; the relationship between folate breakdown induced by ultraviolet radiation and reduced fitness as a failure of normal embryogenesis and spermatogenesis led to the selection of dark skin pigmentation. By the time modern Homo sapiens evolved, all humans were dark-skinned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_skin

No doubt about that - but I don't think anyone would want to have natural evolution with natural selection as the primary way to achieve humans can live on mars. Because that would not be pleasant.

And genetic engeneering has come a long way, but modifying humans genetically for improved radiation protection is sci-fi at the moment. Maybe it comes already in a couple of years, but currently it is not remotely there - so sci fi.

The movie The Titan bases on that idea. This is not a particularly good movie, but the idea is interesting.

I suspect, yes - I imagine that a lot of the mental trauma stems from a feeling of helplessness being trapped beyond the furthest boundary fringes of our typical existence.

If technology develops enough and we can have a fleet of starships on stand-by, then the moon might not be so bewilderingly frightening a place to feel trapped as Mars would, with its much longer journey times and periodically grander distances and Delta-Vs from Earth.

On a single usb stick we have interactive games and all human knowledge available, I think mars explorers will be just fine.

I think the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a lot of us that actual physical isolation from others can be much more detrimental to our mental well-being than we thought, even for those of us who were already used to being on our own for prolonged periods of time.

> I think the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a lot of us that actual physical isolation from others can be much more detrimental to our mental well-being than we thought.

Can you site source for this claim, I do not see any detrimental mental health, at least in terms of people are willingness to go back to work from office.

> I do not see any detrimental mental health, at least in terms of people are willingness to go back to work from office.

Mind giving me a source for this? I personally feel much worse during the pandemic and most people I know do as well. If your doing better I’m happy for you but not everyone is the same.

Mental health:

1 in 5 adults developed mental disorders -

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science/1-in-5-adu...

1 in 4 young adults suicidal -

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/mental-healt...

Effects of isolation on elderly -

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25697700/

https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/18590724.sedation-manage...

Effects of isolation on the future health of children -

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

https://www.unicef.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Unicef-...

Mental illness in children rising due to lockdowns -

https://newschannel20.com/news/local/hospitals-see-high-rate...

Half of young adults showing signs of depression -

https://fee.org/articles/harvard-researchers-nearly-half-of-...

The mental health of students -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55105044

Suicidal thoughts greater in those under restrictions and unchanged in those without any -

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517812...

Prevalence of depression before and after in the US -

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Cases of depression in the US have tripled -

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/us-cases-of-depres...

US Census shows 48% of Wa adults have depression -

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/hhp/hhp15.html#...

Lockdowns pose great threat to mental health -

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/27/covid-poses-...

Suicides:

https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-duri...

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/dealing-with-a-lot...

Suicides among black people spiked during lockdowns -

https://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-black-suicides-pan...

Suicides up sharply in Toronto -

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-suici...

Trends in suicide during the pandemic -

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352

Canadians in quarantine twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts -

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/quarantine-m...

Military suicides up 20% -

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-09-27/milita...

Suicides up among children -

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/09/24/cook-childrens-alarming-...

Not everyone's a gamer, and even those that are get bored with games after a while.

There are even fewer readers than gamers, and even those that are get bored with reading after a while.

Many people want to go outside and do something every now and then... but on the way to/from Mars there's nowhere to go, and every moment you're in space you know that on the other side of thin shield of metal lies death.

Sure, people could still entertain/distract themselves and each other.. and they'll have to. But it won't necessarily be easy to do in the long term.. especially if things start going wrong, if tempers flare up, or if serious incompatibilities are discovered among the crew.

> Many people want to go outside and do something every now and then... but on the way to/from Mars there's nowhere to go, and every moment you're in space you know that on the other side of thin shield of metal lies death.

Not much changes when you get there, too. I think at best we will have something like McMurdo Station, for researchers on 2-3 year stints. Maybe less, since the round-trip is long and cosmic rays remain a significant health concern even when you are on Mars itself—no appreciable magnetic field and no ozone layer.

Even when you're there, excursions will be limited and planned well in advance, probably not much different from spacewalks today. The rest of the time you'll be in a tiny underground bunker.

Under current projections, anybody who took a trip to Mars with a ~1 year stay would exceed their lifetime radiation allowance, and would never be able to fly again. (Assuming a solar flare doesn't kill you mid-trip. Unlikely, we think, but possible.) If you're the first astronaut, or even the first dozen, this might be worth it. After that, though...? I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers, but we won't just need bodies, we'll need talented scientists at the top of their game who are physically and mentally healthy enough to make the trip in the first place.

"we'll need talented scientists at the top of their game who are physically and mentally healthy enough to make the trip in the first place."

From what I understand, the science can be done better with robots and probes anyway. So I'm not sure scientists are even necessary.

But they will need dedicated, motivated, fit, and mentally stable people willing to risk and possibly give up their lives.

People that sit around playing games and using the internet all day are certainly not healthy mentally or physically. There are multiple studies showing this.

They had usb sticks full of data and games in Antartica in 2018, when the one scientist stabbed the other. The negative effects of isolation and lack of communication with a larger society are too complex to be solved with books or games.

I wintered over in Antarctica in 2016. Drinking definitely increased during the dark months.

I love these old stories of people who really had a pair of balls.

Real women and men show real guts by taking huge chances with their mental state and life in general.

Today we sacrifice the same two things but for so much less. It's sad.

Some of the people profiled in Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World look like they might be suffering at least a little isolation sickness or cabin fever.

A confluence of factors are present in the described episodes of people 'losing their minds'. The highlighted two were the harsh physical environment and relative social isolation/vacuum.

The harsh physical environment is, to my understanding, intractable. However, the social environment is less so. How are those headed to Antarctica trained with respect to mental health and 'working with a team' (e.g. communication) skills?

It doesn't have to be Antartica, although that's a bit of an extreme example. Plenty of people I know have "lost it", albeit to a less extreme degree, after just a few years of culture shock, after moving to a different country.

Life is hard, and few people have what it takes to survive without the social safety net of everything that is familiar to them.

The symptoms remind me a bit of nitrogen narcosis, which affects scuba divers at deep depths. I have heard it makes people paranoid. One dive master told me about a diver who tore out her regulator and swam frantically towards him, signaling she was out of air. She had a nearly full tank.

I found the Wikipedia article for the first mentioned story quite interesting as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Antarctic_Expedition

I wonder if digital entertainment (e.g. thousands of 1080p movies in a 10TB HDD) could make being there "bearable". You don't have to enjoy it alone, you have shipmates. Maybe even internet (satellite connection)?

Some relevant excerpts:

> Still today in Antarctic research stations, as modern amenities dull the ferocity of the environment and digital communications keep year-round personnel in touch with the outside world, madness lurks in the corridors.

> A study of 313 men and women conducted at McMurdo Station in the 1990s revealed that 5.2 percent of those surveyed suffered from a psychiatric disorder. While this rate is slightly lower than among the general population of the United States, it should be noted that all station personnel are rigorously screened for such disorders before arriving. The Antarctic had made them lose their bearings.

Maybe this could work for some. Personally, if I watch more than a few movies in a week I begin to feel like I'm losing my mind. I think variety is key, and not just having a variety of movies. Mix in some books and video games (particularly ones that foster creativity) and I think the odds of success will be much higher.

Related video by Joe Scott: Murder at the South Pole

https://youtu.be/KtYhEaWi4lk

Also related: Scott and Scurvy

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Related video US Army classified film Camp Century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ujx_pND9wg

Obviously it's a cubit error from a cosmic ray from which their brain cannot recover. /jk

severe corona lockdown risks bringing antartical environment to our neighborhoods. these articles (the one about kuru disease due to misbehaving protein think spike protein) seem to covertly suggest that possibility.

I have thought for awhile that the best space voyagers, or guys whom are going to be isolated, are individuals who already had minor breakdowns when they were younger.

That includes so many of us? Why? Because they know the crazy thoughts will pass.

I'm not talking about individuals with serious mental illness like Schizophrenia, or have a genetic lineage of mental illness.

I'm talking people that have survived mild mental illnesses, like dysthymia, and anxiety.

People who know the craziness in their heads will go away, and realize the world is imperfect. Realize they are far from perfect. Realize their way might not be the best way.

I'm usually leary of the "perfect" candidates that get these coveted positions.

Yes--I'm leary of the Ph.D types whom sailed through school. The ones with a big egos that feel they feel like they are the best, and claim they were never sick at sea. I think we have all met the type?

Put a few of those people in real isolation, and danger, with peers just like themselfs-- seems like a horrid recipe for disaster?

(At one time I felt like I controlled my surroundings. A few blown mental gaskets made me a more tolerant person. It did mess with my resume though. I felt the same way right after 911. i felt the FBI should be recruiting intelligent convicts at San Quentin, or wherever, rather than the guy with the 4 year degree who took a good head shot. I changed my tune when I realized the enemy of 911 was nuanced, and not so straight foreward, but I still felt you hire guys whom break societal laws in order to find the bad guys.)

This is mostly wishful thinking. Advantages tend to accumulate in life. Those who had the easiest time growing up are often the most stable ones emotionally. Life doesn’t care about fairness, just like being and tall and attractive is correlated with intelligence, even though we might not prefer it this way.

I’m sure you’ve also seen they type: brillant PhD, liked by everyone, natural leader, accomplished on multiple levels, perfect family and relations. These are the people that have been selected to be astronauts. How often have you seen one have a breakdown during a mission?

> These are the people that have been selected to be astronauts. How often have you seen one have a breakdown during a mission?

I'm not sure about mental breakdowns per se, but there has been some insubordination. I can't recall which at the moment, but one of the Gemini astronauts during an EVA refused to get back into the capsule until he was plead with. Perhaps this could be categorized as a mental breakdown. (Edit: It was Ed White: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_4#Extra-vehicular_activ... )

There was also that well publicized incident in 2007 where an astronaut's life unraveled and their career was destroyed, but that wasn't during a mission.

>Advantages tend to accumulate in life. Those who had the easiest time growing up are often the most stable ones emotionally. Life doesn’t care about fairness, just like being and tall and attractive is correlated with intelligence, even though we might not prefer it this way.

Many people who have had too easy of an upbringing may seem emotionally stable while inside the safety of their cushy comfort zone, but when they're put outside their comfort zone and hit with a real challenge or hardship, they often crumble, because they never learned how to deal with real difficulty

That assumption is as old as time. Whether true of false Bret Devereaux did an analysis on it and it made for an interesting read: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

As far as we can tell, historically your assumption is wrong. Hard times do not really breed hard people it's a myth that comes from the antiquity and was used by philosophers and elites to link the moral corruption of a people with its inevitable downfall.

That was a weird read.

For instance:

> Under the assumptions of our Fremen Mirage, we ought to expect farming societies to be frequently overtaken and subjugated by their non-farming neighbors

Isn’t it basically the Vikings crushing their neighboors to get fertile territories ? That’s also France’s whole history, getting overrun in waves of invasions, backing up what he calls the “mirage” that is supposed to get debunked.

PS: in economic terms the counterpoint to his theory would be the resource curse, so it’s not a foreign to us concept either

I think this sentence taken out of context gives it a completely different meaning. Farmers were being killed by the Vikings for sure, but France the farming society was never under existential threat from the Vikings.

Sure, yet in the blog's context, arguing wether there are 100% pillaging societies that never had farmers nor developed land under their control is also an argument I feel nobody is making (that's also not the argument made in the parent posts)

Pirates would be the closest thing that comes to my mind, but it's more an economic activity inside a society than a separate culture.

The Vikings were themselves a farming society. So this has nothing to do with the postulate that non-farming societies would overrun farming societies -- I'd look for a different example.

It depends on what you call a 'farming society'. If it's about where their priorities lies, Vikings are not a farming society. They valued fertile lands and resources, and expanded where farming would be better, but that doesn't make them primary farmers until they fully settle and stop invading neighbors.

The same way I do chores, but I'm not a house maid (until perhaps I quit my job)

As far as I know, Scandinavia was absolutely a farming society to the same extent England and France were. It's not like they all up and went a-viking: the people that did were a small percentage of the population, and this is to be viewed as equivalent as Rome sending the army (a small percentage of Rome's population) to conquer Gaul. They aren't suddenly considered less of a farming society when they do this. It's just how farming societies fight each other.

This form of selection bias is extremely common. An ethnic group and their neighbors rarely meet, if they do, then one side is a military force on an expedition which leads to a characterization of the ethnic group being violent.

Examples: Vikings, Barbarians, Huns, ...

The gaining of strength through adversity and its inverse of atrophy can be found in countless places throughout nature, biology, and human history. There's nothing mythical about that.

Take a cat that has lived an easy life indoors its whole life and put it outside.

How long do you think that cat will survive outdoors compared to a cat who has lived outside its whole life?

It’s not about being pampered or shielded from the world. There is a difference between a) being challenged, being put into competitive environments, and having access to a wide range of experiences and b) having negative childhood events or trauma.

You are moving the goalpost. The whole comment thread is about how humans that had a harder upbringing could be more resilient to mental breakdown for long-term interplanetary colonization. A cat would not be a relevant organism to study to answer this question.

Hard times may not make strong men, but it's certain that weak men will make hard times.

> Why? Because they know the crazy thoughts will pass.

I am not a psychologist nor anything similar, but wouldn't people who have gone through the same conditions without having the crazy thoughts in the first place be better suited for the job?

Two schools of thought?

- Those that really try hard to make sure the computer cannot crash.

- Those that see the computer crashing as an inevitability, and want to ensure the appropriate behaviours are in place when it does happen.

When it comes to high risk activities, the preference should be for: those that really try hard to make sure the computer cannot crash and also have plans in place in case it happens.

The two are not mutually exclusive at all.

I think the distinction is more like: those with combat drill practice and those with actual combat experience.

Not sure for this particular circumstance but I am bipolar. As long as my medication is stable, I’m far more resilient to the day to day struggles in life than the average person seems to be.

I’ve been forced to build coping mechanisms to survive. Every day is a struggle of some kind, so I’m ready when shit happens, because shit always happens to me.

I don't really see how this can be true. With my medication I'm more steady emotionally than the average person but somewhat often I think about that it would be like to be a person who doesnt need a mix of externally drugs to feel this way.

I, like you, know how to cope but is that really better than not needing to know how to cope at all? I wish I shared your optimism.

I've been impulsive, suicidal, paranoid, and hypersexual since I was nine. On top of this, I had multiple chronic health conditions and an abusive childhood.

It's been a very long, very hard road and I wasn't expecting to life past 30. Somehow, I managed to hang on long enough to get diagnosed at 32.

Medication and therapy have lifted so any burdens, which was more I ever could have asked for. I was a creative person robbed of the ability to create. Medication has given that back to me. My dream of writing stories has become a reality. I've managed to get a short story accepted, which makes me an author as well as a writer.

I guess I'm just thankful. I don't dwell too much on what I don't have, because there is so much I do have.

>I, like you, know how to cope but is that really better than not needing to know how to cope at all? I wish I shared your optimism.

That depends on how bad it gets. Everyone has a breaking point and I'd prefer having experience to deal with it. There's not a single person on this planet that won't go through some sort of catastrophe in their lives.

I think it's naive to assume these people that get selected haven't had to go through difficult emotional challenges.

>gone through the same conditions without having the crazy thoughts

Not a psychologist either but from my anxiety experiences and what I've researched I've found that everyone gets crazy thoughts but people with anxiety conditions start to worry that their thoughts are wrong and no on else deals with them. My anxiety dwindled when I realized they're just thoughts and the crazy ones cause anxiety because my brain is trying to "protect" me.

So, people that don't have issues are really just able to dismiss the thoughts because they know they're only thoughts and nothing else.

I don't think those are the type that generally get these positions, however. As you say, a big ego is a big liability. The ones who have "the right stuff" are generally very intelligent, very accomplished, and very humble.

>People who know the craziness in their heads will go away,

You're making the assumption that most of these people learned to live with a bad environment and they expect to live in that bad environment for the rest of their life.

What about those whose anxiety stopped because they left the bad environment? You're not going to leave Mars.

If explorers had shrooms, weed and some way to play music, I think they'd be good. Unfortunately there is still a "no fun" camp at the head of decision making.

Freely available hallucinogens at the pole would make things 1000x worse.

Magic mushrooms are now being used to treat anxiety. Just something to consider when dealing with a situation that creates massive amounts of anxiety (being stuck in ice with no way out).

I am really not sure I'd want to be stuck in ice, ON ACID, with no way out :)

…though I think your point is, that while you're stuck in ice with no way out, all the mental stability structures you build to connect yourself to reality are bad and harmful. And being on drugs and disrupting your reality, breaking down your preconceptions etc. would be more along the lines of continually breaking down the BAD mental structures you're inevitably building, due to correct appraisal of your situation.

Still doesn't sound awesome though :)

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