What follows is an account of an instance where I, a person of relatively sound mind and body, could not believe the evidence before my own eyes. It might not have been a hallucination that I experienced, but it was surely a great jolt of consciousness. The scene: I’m in my closet-sized cabin, inside a white dome built to house a crew of six for four months as part of an isolation experiment. As a crew, we are working and living as ‘explorers’ stationed on the surface of ‘Mars’. Our colony is lifelike and NASA-funded, but it is situated in a place quite a bit closer to home, on a remote slope of a Hawai’ian volcano.
I was expecting a little more from the article. There was a point at which the author began discussing possible means of mitigating boredom on a long flight, and I wanted her to elaborate on that, maybe talk about ways that the lessons learned during the course of the research could be used in schools, or in industry to increase attention spans. That said, I enjoyed it. I recognised some of the situations described - the listlessness that comes with low-level chronic boredom, being driven to try new things just to have something to do - and I was duly horrified at the notion that you might completely fail to recognise someone you'd spent 4 months in close quarters with. And I came to realise that were I given the opportunity to go to Mars, I probably wouldn't have the temperament to survive the trip with my sanity intact. I do think that the human element is going to be one of the toughest things to solve on any long-range space trip undertaken in the next decade. Sure there are technical challenges, but humanity has a long history of taking on technical challenges and coming up with innovative solutions. Humanity has a less-stellar track record of changing behaviour patterns, though. Will be interesting to see.