Six Men Spent 520 Days Locked in a Room to See If We Could Live on Mars
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The idea of Mars is spectacular and wondrous and ecstatic and beautiful. Actual Mars sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.
A small minority - but still plenty of people - would thrive as pioneers on a new planet. We should let them go first, while you and me sit here and watch.
Once you actually get to mars you're basically locked in airtight library/laboratory for the rest of your life.
The only way what pioneers did is comparable to going to Mars is in that it's a huge risk.
The long-term survival of our species is going to require colonizing other planets in other solar systems.
Mars in contrast looks like shit on first sight and I doubt we'll see terraforming equipment on any large scale for a very, very long time.
Anyway I don't necessarily disagree with your point I just don't think the comparison to settlers refutes the idea you were replying to that Mars is very ugly and harsh in every single way (except for the mental notion of doing something unprecedented) for first settlers and likely will be for the entirety of their lives. Quite different from the Americas I think.
There may also be some survivorship bias when it comes to the colonies. First colonies often failed and for quite a while (e.g. Roanoke nearly 100 years after Columbus), so I doubt it was all fun and paradise.
There are many places un-explored on Mars that will indeed provide a beauty unlike anything on Earth. This is an assumed fact, but it is mathematically just as likely to be true as the decision made that Mars sucks, based on current data.
We get there. We explore every bit of it. We find parts of it we can actually live on, quite comfortably - albeit, yes, still in a tank. But there could be parts of Mars we can transform, within a 100 years or so - just like the early settlers of every continent on Earth, ever in the history of mankind - and turn into a habitable place to live.
All it takes is one Martian generation, or two, and maybe there will be Martian-humans who have the conversation "I could never live on Earth, far too strange and unknown .."
We evolved to be interested in the things that keep us alive or can kill us - other flora and fauna and water are the top of that list. We find variations of that endlessly interesting. Rock formations, not so much.
Man wants to conquer Mars but I don't to see the pitiful existence of those poor few fools who sacrifice themselves for our collective egos. Especially the first settlers who can't come back and beg for their lives over the video link constantly.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to jump out of this deep gravity well just to be stuck on another one at our current technology levels. Instead asteroids will be much more inviting and the technology to harvest them will combat the large existential risk from rogue asteroids that is one of main arguments for the colonisation of other planets in the first place.
Mars' atmospheric pressure is 0.6% of Earth's. It's for all practical purposes a vaccum. Liquids boil away. You will die without some kind of suit even if you converted all the gases to nitrogen and oxygen.
Mars has 10% of the mass of Earth. Surface gravity is a third of Earth's. Long-term survival in low-gravity might be possible, but it will not be pleasant and it will mean returning to Earth will be effectively impossible.
Mars will never be habitable unless we assemble a whole new planet.
I can imagine a several large domes to protect people and crops from the atmosphere, but the threat of them being hit by a meteorite seems like a critical issue, unless we also shipped some AA or powerful lasers to combat them.
Compared to Mars, Boston is so hospitable that you could name it Maui instead. I mean, you could practically open your window, look outside, and not freeze-dry to death in seconds.
Mars: for those who want to play basic survival hard-mode.
Differing in situ values have been reported for the average temperature on Mars,[20] with a common value being −55 °C (218 K; −67 °F).[21]
Surface temperatures may reach a high of about 20 °C (293 K; 68 °F) at noon, at the equator, and a low of about −153 °C (120 K; −243 °F) at the poles.[22]
Actual temperature measurements at the Viking landers' site range from −17.2 °C (256.0 K; 1.0 °F) to −107 °C (166 K; −161 °F).
The warmest soil temperature estimated by the Viking Orbiter was 27 °C (300 K; 81 °F).[23]
The Spirit rover recorded a maximum daytime air temperature in the shade of 35 °C (308 K; 95 °F), and regularly recorded temperatures well above 0 °C (273 K; 32 °F), except in winter.[24]
Not necessarily. It should be possible to grow nearly any spice or vegetable, if the greenhouse is complex (and computer controlled) enough.
When you have a couple hundred people or more, living for a year (or more) on a base, it would probably make sense to have great food. There will be so few creature comforts (like you point out), they'll perfect what they can.
That and fancy VR :)
The Biosphere II project suggests otherwise.[1] Running a small-scale closed ecosystem turned out to be far tougher than expected.
People are pretty good at that. Look into native American tribes that lived in the arctic, or ancient peoples who lived in harsh deserts. People would eventually figure out ways of building, living, entertaining, eating, moving, etc. that made the best of what the environment had to offer.
The assumption is that nobody would be interested in making a massive investment of effort and personal hardship to create the potential of a new future.
My hypothesis is actually that the most vocal Mars dreamers are escapists and, as such, have latched on to the idea of Mars vs. the reality of Mars. Go into any forum where living on Mars is discussed, and the focus is on how cool it would be, or how you wouldn't be encumbered by political contingencies, or how much science you could do, or how science-fictiony it would all be. It all revolves around how removed from familiar experience that Mars would be, around how thrilling it is.
As a matter of emphasis, this is just unrealistic. Your bones will be disintegrating and your muscles atrophying. You'll constantly be stuffy. You'll be breathing stale air. There will be toilets, and people's shit will stink. You'll get rejected by girls on Mars, and have the occasional erectile dysfunction. There is no Internet on Mars. Instead of browsing, you'll be unclogging toilets and scrubbing away mold. You are going to pay rent on Mars, and it is going to be really, really high. All for a "future" that belongs to those who will live long after you die.
You live in space right now, and it's a really nice part of space; It has air and food and water and everything. Most of your manufacturing and other work is performed by a local underclass and an overseas underclass at discounted wages.
Mars enthusiasts don't talk about that. They talk about the Dream of Mars. Until the day-to-day realities of living on Mars, and not the romance (which you have even done!), are treated in a realistic manner in the discourse of Mars, I don't think that people are really engaged with the actual endeavor.
Everybody needs a hobby, though. Mine is complaining on the Internet.
... And yes, there are loads of sci fi heads who talk about this stuff without thinking about it deeply. But those are just noisy internet fanboys and fangirls. It doesn't mean everyone interested in this topic is thinking about it in such a shallow way.
I came up with a shorthand description a while back: cross Everest ascent with WWI submarining. Something like that.
If I were younger, with no kids, and had the opportunity to do it, I would seriously consider it. I would want to spend many years training, studying, and doing terrestrial experiments first though. The way to do terribly hard things is not by being reckless; there's already enough unknown unknowns, you want to be as thorough as you can about preparing for the knowns.
We could create large simulated environments here to test things like construction techniques and survival strategies, which would be a very good idea. If the transportation capability materializes, I hope to see teams doing that.
I also think you are underestimating ingenuity, especially very highly motivated ingenuity. The horrible difficulty of life in "stock" habitats would be quite a motivator.
Any long term base on Mars is going to require constant resupply from Earth. So why not leave as much as possible safely in orbit, and make short excursions to the surface when neccessary?
Swap O2 for money and this could describe the life of many city dwellers on Earth. At least you won't have to put up with city traffic!
This is of course false.
You're not suited for life on Mars. That's fine. Don't go.
Other people will, and they'll love it.
It is to those folks that I am guessing his comment is addressed.
I agree with the GP. Most mars-lovers would love a working holiday there, due to the exotic nature of the place. But there's a difference between 'working holiday' and 'rest of your life in a (large) canister'. And you better hope that you get along well with your co-colonists...
Quick server-side interactivity would not work I guess, but there are enough sites without that to keep you busy a lifetime on mars.
6 min ping is acceptable for posting comments.
Well, living in a tin can would suck, but in theory there'd be huge underground caverns with overhead lighting. Maybe even rainforests and lakes in caverns.
Anyway, I'm not sure Mars even makes sense vice the Mercury and Venus ideas floating around.
Coding as relaxation is plausible, but mostly for short projects and nothing serious. It is hard to focus on serious mental activity after laborious work.
Just FYI, RTT to Mars to between 6 minutes and 44 minutes.
The marginal cost in terms of power may be very small (compared to a rocket), but the infrastructure costs are enormous, and as a result you're severely capacity-constrained.
Current link to Mars Odyssey from DSS 35 in Canberra is 14.22 kbps (roughly equivalent to a modem from 1991).
Sounds like a major flaw to me. What if communication back to Earth is disrupted? Having the entire mission rely on a communication link is not a good idea. The people on Mars should be totally capable of conducting all manual repairs and bugfixes on their own. All of the software they use to run the entire base should be open source, available in a local Martian repository, and at least two of the people on the planet should be intimately familiar with the codebase and how all of the equipment works.
Ideally, they should also have physical books documenting all of the mission-critical stuff.
After-all having a working terminal that let's someone code is a hell of a lot more complex and uses a lot more power than a radio.
PS: This ends up getting back to the huge cost benefit of sending rover instead of people. Sure if you ever built up a self sustaining base including the ability to manufacture everything it needs from replacement parts, to CPU's, food, and fuel then sure send people. Until then you don't actually get any redundancy from sending people there.
Secondly, if all of the computers on Earth die we can still go outside and breathe the air, drink water from rivers and lakes, gather plants and hunt wild game for food. None of those options are available on Mars. If the computer controlling life support suddenly fails, what options are there to survive? All of this has to be planned for and taken into account. If there is nobody on Mars capable of repairing the life support system (including its software) then they are utterly dependent on the communication link back to Earth.
If I had access to a couple Computer Science books, all the documentation for my languages and the entirety of Stack Overflow at my fingertips? I think I could do just fine.
If I wanted to take it a step further, I could download common libraries that I thought would be useful. I've been learning Rust lately, and I bet I could write a script to download every git repo of all 2000 libraries in Cargo and it still wouldn't be that big.
I'm one of those people who do their best work when put under serious constraints. I think 520 days devoted to programming and study with no access to the outside internet would be a neat opportunity.
> I bet I could write a script to download every git repo of
> all 2000 libraries in Cargo
That was unnecessary.
I don't know where the line is drawn between 'programmer' and 'cut n paster'; but ams6110 has a point that once you have enough foundational information on a particular stack then anyone calling themselves a programmer should be able to run from there. If you can't problem solve once you have the core information then I'd say ams6110's statement is accurate. Especially if everything you're working with is open source.
man svn
[...]
For more information about the Subversion project, visit http://subversion.tigris.org.
1) you should launch your own contest to select 6 people to volunteer living under similiar conditions - but with unlimited netflix streaming access, vip access.
2) launch a weekly show just talking about what they watched.
3) then get audiences to recommend what the folks in the room should watch, through social voting/recommendation
that said, i'd imagine that most people in their lifetime may end up watching more than what the folks would watch in ~500 days
~B
This seems to be a recurring theme in isolation experiments and have shown up in movies recently. In the movie, "I Am Legend" its clear Will Smith attempts to keep himself sane by using his imagination to create some kind of human interaction. I found it to be a profound theme running through the movie.
I think above all, this is a primary factor with the human condition. It's the need for social interaction. Without it, we don't seem to do very well.
If they didn't have issues, I wonder how much could be chalked up to the teamwork they experienced while playing counter strike...
But they missed a crucial and very big stressor if they want to compare it to a real space stay... that of being out of reach of ANY possible help.
Imagine one of them gets an aliment of somekind that gets life-threatening. Ethics would dictate that here, the person would be evacuated. On Mars? Not so much.
Just that knowledge alone could be a remarkably stabilizing influence on someone's Psyche.
The things we expect here are no longer practical. Forensics experts for alleged crimes, not to mention judges, juries, and lawyers.
I spent a few months sharing quarters with other soldiers when i was in the Army. We got to go outdoors, run about, work and relax. regardless, the urge to kill started to rise up in all of us.
I don't think we're going to go interstellar until we can deal with things like euthenasia (say you break a leg, or are crippled?) is Mars wheel chair friendly. And ageing, low gravity is a killer for bone density.
Sorry, but wtf?
Cabin fever is a thing.
I doubt that this is the first time 6 men wasted a year of their life playing CounterStrike. But it's probably the first time 6 men wasted a year playing CounterStrike and also pretending to be astronauts. Credit to them tho, because I couldn't do it. The last thing I'd want is 5 other fellahs doing their business in close proximity to me 3-4 times a day. I hope they were well paid.
A fun game would a real time military strategy game where the delay for both planets is artificially made the same. Then the command delay becomes part of the game, but the game still runs in real time with information updating as soon as it is available.
"it can be concluded that the powerful stressful condition of prolonged containment in an isolated module had no “dramatic” effect on the state of the intestinal microbiota and did not lead to significant negative consequences for the health of the participants of the experiment. "
A ( space themed ) DnD would be better in every way. Imagination, teamwork, combat, discourse, story, ...
Someone has to be born on Mars while we're there, don't they? The first Martian.