One of my pet peeves with Mars enthusiasts is that they ignore the reality that living on Mars is going to truly, truly suck. You will never be outdoors again. You will have the constant whirr of machinery. You will have to plan outings down to the last bottle of O2. You will eat shit food. And you will gaze upon a dim Sun through a dusty porthole.<p>The idea of Mars is spectacular and wondrous and ecstatic and beautiful. Actual Mars sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.
No mention of interest in programming. That would be a lovely way to pass the time and create some useful things. If not for leisure, perhaps to improve the environment (but that could be dangerous, one mistake and they're dead).
hey netflix growth team,<p>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.<p>2) launch a weekly show just talking about what they watched.<p>3) then get audiences to recommend what the folks in the room should watch, through social voting/recommendation<p>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<p>~B
<i>"“I missed the world in general. Seeing things move, seeing cars, dogs, the sun. My colleagues were amazing, and I couldn’t have picked better people to be locked up with, but you start missing meeting new people on nights out, the social variety,” he said. “For me, that was the trickiest part.”"</i><p>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.<p>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.
This is really interesting, particularly because there's no mention of problems. Many isolation experiments haven't ended with everyone happy with each other, so I'm curious if this team had any of the same issues. Does anyone know?<p>If they didn't have issues, I wonder how much could be chalked up to the teamwork they experienced while playing counter strike...
Great Experiment.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Just that knowledge alone could be a remarkably stabilizing influence on someone's Psyche.
So, is murder illegal in space?<p>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.<p>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.
The most important lesson they learned was to never pick up what looks like a used tissue.<p>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.
I'm kind of surprised that they had books and videogames, but then it's not supposed to be a prison. I guess it's feasible to play Counter Strike on Mars after all.
there is an interesting analysis of the changes in their microbiota: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848073/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848073/</a><p>"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. "
They should test for hopelessness. If you put yourself in a simulation, you know that you will get out of it eventually. That gives hope and motivates you to keep going. In real-life scenario, you might be on Mars without possibility of going back.
Reminds me of the first episode of the Twilight Zone:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F</a>
Isn't the survival of our species in the event of a global catastrophe half the reason we want some people living on Mars? Surely five of those people should be women.
if folks have not already read "The Martian" by Andy Wier, take a look. it is pretty cool robinson-crusoe'sque survival thing, easily devoured over a weekend...