This week the ESA announced that it is seeking candidates for a simulated mission to Mars which will investigate the human factors (going insane, becoming suicidally depressed, firing people out of airlocks; that sort of thing, see Sunshine for more) that might affect any future exploration attempts.
This involves being locked up in a special facility outside of Moscow for 520 days and generally pretending that you’re on the real mission – you’ll eat only astronaut food, perform whatever role has been assigned to you… apparently there’ll even be an exploration phase on a mocked up Martian surface.
At first I wondered how many people could possibly want to give up so much of their lives to be locked up in an isolated, closely monitored environment with a bunch of strangers picked on the basis of how ‘interesting’ they are, psychologically speaking. Then… yeah, you see where I’m going with this.
I checked out the application form (luckily physical fitness isn’t a dealbreaker) and was a bit disappointed – many years ago I filled out an application to work at KFC (it was, er, right after the dotcom bust) and the questions were pretty much exactly the same ones as the ESA are asking. Maybe there’s a secret space code hidden in the Word document – take the first letter of each question, it spells out a phone number, say the codeword and you’re in….
Snarky comments aside it’s a worthy experiment, of course, something that has to be done sooner or later. I’m interested to see who gets picked and why they do it – as a selfless act for the good of science or for personal reasons? How many more of the latter than the former are there?
Ah! One can only lament the decline of medieval monasticism. The silence, the discipline, the fortitude in the face of what less enlightened souls would no doubt view as crushing tedium, inflexible routine and very limited menu choices. If it weren’t for Henry VIII we’d have reached Saturn by now.
Ah, but I think our imagery of other planets might not be as plentiful if we had to wait for illuminated manuscripts.
In my first year of psychology a lecturer challenged us to think about whether or not we’d live in isolation in a remote location for a year, and why.
I would have done it 10 years ago, but I wouldn’t now. I wonder what the age/maturity factor in there for this experiment looks like – because people who might hack this now, wouldn’t necessarily be happy to go to Mars a few years from now.
And I agree – the ‘why’ is the interesting bit.