The Sunday Read: ‘Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?’

《星期日泰晤士报》上写道:人类能忍受火星的心理折磨吗?

The Daily

2024-03-10

49 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

That people will travel to Mars, and soon, is a widely accepted conviction within NASA. Rachel McCauley, until recently the acting deputy director of NASA’s Mars campaign, had, as of July, a punch list of 800 problems that must be solved before the first human mission launches. Many of these concern the mechanical difficulties of transporting people to a planet that is never closer than 33.9 million miles away; keeping them alive on poisonous soil in unbreathable air, bombarded by solar radiation and galactic cosmic rays, without access to immediate communication; and returning them safely to Earth, more than a year and half later. But McCauley does not doubt that NASA will overcome these challenges. What NASA does not yet know — what nobody can know — is whether humanity can overcome the psychological torment of Martian life. A mission known as CHAPEA, an experiment in which four ordinary people would enact, as closely as possible, the lives of Martian colonists for 378 days, sets out to answer that question.
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • Craft matters in small ways, like how coffee is made or how a wooden table is built piece by piece, and in not so small ways, like how your money is cared for.

  • At UBS, we elevate investing to a craft.

  • We deliver our services with passion, expertise and meticulous attention to detail.

  • This is what investing means to UBS, not just work, but a craft.

  • Discover more@ubs.com craft.

  • The value of investments may fall as well as rise, and you may not get back the amount originally invested.

  • Imagine volunteering to live on Mars for 378 days.

  • Only you never actually leave planet Earth.

  • You walk through a plain white office door inside of a warehouse in in Houston.

  • The door shuts behind you, and you're locked inside a stage designed to look like a martian habitat.

  • For more than a year, you and three other volunteers are completely isolated from the outside world.

  • Inside this 1700 square foot structure where everything is made from 3d printed imitation martian rock, you eat freeze dried space food.

  • For every meal.

  • You wear virtual reality goggles and walk around a red sandbox to simulate spacewalks.

  • You're under near constant surveillance from mission control and to mimic the actual conditions of communication between Earth and Mars.

  • Any message you send to family or friends back home takes at least 22 minutes to arrive.

  • To the people who applied, mainly NASA superfans who were required to have master's degrees in math or science, this experiment sounded like a dream come true, the chance to make a noble sacrifice for the future of humanity.

  • Being invited to participate felt like winning a tour of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

  • Even though we know through repeated research over many decades the pernicious effects of prolonged, confined isolation on the human psyche.

  • The study is in progress right now, and it's coming to an end this summer.