1. Send a lot of people (15?) and give people some flexibility in who they spend time with. 2. Give people a lot of space. I mean a _lot_ more than you think you need. Inflatable habs could be one approach, but if Starship gets going we might not even need that. 3. Let people escape. Loads of video games, books, creative projects, etc. 4. Help people anticipate the destination. Include remote control (obviously not real time) of robots at the landing site as one of the ongoing training exercises. Regularly simulate missions you'll be undertaking on the surface. 5. Give people lots of space at the destination. Cut and cover enormous living areas, and let people customise them. Give the crew something to look forward to.
People survive worse, and some people are better suited to it than others. We'll start by sending the people who are expected to fare best.
I suppose I am just some random on the internet, but I think a lot of people unjustifiably think "human factors" are insurmountable. Yes, it'll be hard, but the kind of people who plan these missions are used to solving hard problems.
The reason I suggest doing it, is because it might inspire you. When you open the door to the main dome you walk into an overgrown tropical rainforest, complete with waterfalls, insects, exotic plants, and so on. It left me with a feeling that yeah, actually, we could live on other planets and it wouldn’t be half bad.
And even if we could replicate that level of Biosphere 2…well guess what? Everyone still went nuts anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Group_dynamics:_ps...
They went bonkers in a sealed bubble on Earth, with Earth gravity and Earth diurnal cycles. How would that possibly be easier on a planet where you’d have the innate factionalism in human interactions combined with the grinding stress of living on a world that wants to kill you?
> Waterfalls? With what gravity?
Mars has gravity, and any serious space habitat would have a rotating section to simulate gravity.
But within that domain, my point still stands. We have no plausible way to construct such a ship or station that produces significant pseudo-gravity by rotating. Building such a thing is basically impossible with anything we can manufacture—building a “wheel” that can rotate fast enough and be large enough to not cause wild motion sickness and have the structural integrity to hold enough mass to sustain an ecosystem is beyond our materials science, and would be impossible to lift into space.
Why on earth would you try that?
But built from Lunar/asteroid material ? Sure, you can build 8 by 32 km cylinder from steel with dirt for shielding with that has a standard earth gravity just fine. No exotic materials required:
thats an interesting one. Humans can only just about tolerate rotation rates of about 1 rev/min or slower or get dizzy. That means the radius of such a rotating habitat has to be quite large to achieve any meaningful acceleration, which leads to its own challenges.
For example, to achieve 0.5g at rotation rate of 1/60 per second requires an arm length of 0.5 x 9.81 x 60^2 or about 10 miles. If you tentuple the rotation speed, ie 10 revs / min, you still need a radius of 180m
I think a vat-grown culture of highly nutritious fungi (or algae or whatever, I'm no expert and I don't pretend to have even an SF writer's level of understanding of the subject) would be a much more viable solution.
And you are assuming there are no resource constraints on the sizes of those domes; Biosphere II was made by shipping machinery and raw materials across modest distances by truck, as opposed to shipping supplies from Earth by rocket.
I remember reading about Biosphere II in Omni magazine, in the late '70s. We still cannot create a self-sufficient sealed ecosystem here on Earth, 45 years later.
The article quips that only incels will live on mars as a derision towards those that do better in solitude. I think what they meant was many people on the spectrum would be well placed in a place where solitude is the default situation and they can socialize in a well controlled environment via streaming video and audio with a delay. What I felt sad about was the derision, an almost musk like “pedo” comment, by a neurotypical about our neurodiverse.
Your last point, about the possibility of rescue, is really interesting and I wonder if there's any clever ethical way to control for that in a study like the one in the podcast.
This one is my favorite:
The Worst Journey in the World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World
But I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Shackleton's amazing expeditions
Consecutive stay in the ISS has been completed for 355 days (almost year) with less than 10 people onboard at that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Mo...
With a deep space mission, you simply don't have the option. I wonder how that would change the situation - if for better or worse.
You’d be totally reliant on one power source, sealed inside a pressurized tube, with totally disrupted circadian rhythms. But at least on a nuclear sub, you have the chance to escape to the the surface world, and a chance to restock there. On Mars? Step outside, you’re dead, and if you can’t replicate a resource on a world with less gravity & less solar power & not a shred of a biosphere, you’re dead.
Sounds like a fun, low-stress environment to me. Humans do great with living with unrelenting psychological stress in sealed metal tubes.