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.
> 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 doesnât 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 havenât 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 doesnât mean anything. These mental illnesses have biochemical underpinnings and they arenât 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 donât want to think about solutions, think itâs impossible to escape the end of the world and tend to want to turn to some kind of spiritual/naturalistic repentance even though it wouldnât fix anything when you run the numbers. Same thing with Mars. People fetishize the impossibility of it. You canât possibly go there without going insane. The radiation will be impossible to deal with. The gravity canât possibly sustain human life.
Itâs all hyperbole. Thereâs 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 1845â1848. 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.
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 Belgicaâs first mate, a fellow Norwegian named Roald Amundsen".
I too noticed that the author didnât 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...
Itâs 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!"
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