Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Every time they run one of these similations they ignore the common realworld analogue: sailors. All around the world are tiny communities of mostly men living inside metal boxes for months or years at a time. Historic voyages regularly lasted even longer than the proposed mars missions, and where much more dangerous. Astronaughts could learn much from common sailors.

View on HN

You can even take it a step further to the subset of sailors that operate on submarines.

Military is different. Those are much larger crews and dont spend as much time at sea, generally only a few months at a time.

Depends on your military, I guess. I know in the U.K. 9 months isn’t an unusual deployment for a submariner, and a few months underwater isn’t unusual either.

Isolation is pretty much their number one challenge. Machines are easier to keep running than minds.

It doesn't seem like they ignore it. Sailors might be a decent analogue for astronauts while isolated within a space vessel, but that's not what this experiment is. NASA wants to research the environment while on a Martian surface mission, including doing stuff like suiting up in spacesuits to go do work outside, deal with communication delays, and having research responsibilities.

It's somewhat similar to being confined on a sailing ship, but is still different, and the minute details really matter for something like this.

E.g.:

> The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo.

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

"The Makah took the three survivors of the broken ship and held them as slaves for several months before taking them to Fort Vancouver."

^ Their story only got worse! The tribe turned them into slaves.

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

I know there are different gradations of slavery, but I'd take working for food and shelter over fourteen months of rice and water. Especially seeing as eleven of fourteen men outright died on rice and water.

I think it's not about proving that the long isolation is possible, but rather about carrying this experiment in a controlled environment and doing a study.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com