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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

I'm not denying that intoxication leads to more bad decisions.

But sober people also make many bad decisions. A space ship needs to be resilient to bad decisions, and I assume/hope the ISS already is well fortified in that respect.

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Typical bad decisions, especially by a professional crew of trained flight engineers, are quite different from "bad trip" bad decisions. Totally different risk vector and one they should have spent precisely zero seconds thinking about in the ISS's design.

It took only 17 Space Shuttle flights before a crew-member threatened to kill themselves causing them to add additional locks to the hatches. I think a few seconds considering what a malicious actor could do would be worth it.

We're not discussing a malicious actor, we're discussing someone having a bad trip on LSD. It is a completely different thing.

The unpredictability means they might as well be a malicious actor.

Not really. Someone panicking on acid would do different things than a sober person trying to knock the ISS out of orbit. Obviously.

'Not really' - best not bet the lives and a huge amount of money on 'Not really'

I don’t know what argument you’re trying to make. The question is: should the ISS be hardened against someone on LSD. My answer is: that is fucking absurd, and generic hardening against malicious actors is tangential at best.

...we're not talking about force-feeding someone a fifth of whiskey here.

A stable, thoughtful, trained scientist, in the company of supportive and emotionally intelligent colleagues, does not present a significant risk when fed a normal dose of LSD.

They absolutely can present a significant risk when fed a normal dose of LSD. And I'm no prude when it comes to this stuff. Very standard advice for psychedelics is set & setting, and "don't be physically trapped in an environment you might find uncomfortable" is a reasonable derivation.

Don't be in the endless void of space which is already emotionally and psychologically taxing on human beings who are verifiably in peak physical and mental condition

Seems like a pretty fucking bad set and setting honestly. Regular astronauts already deal with powerful feelings in their normal job. Adding a drug to that is a bad plan.

Even airplanes aren't resilient to truly bad decisions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/alaska-airlines-off-du...

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