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NASA's Spirit Rover Crew Are 'Slaves To Mars'
Quirk writes "The Telegraph has a bit on the challenge faced by the 280 team members who have had to leave Earth time behind and attune their circadian clock to the Mars solar day or 'sol'. '...the team's wake-up times and meal times two weeks after the landing will have shifted by nine hours.'"
Well yeah, strictly speaking it's off topic but I think it's also insightful. I believe scientific pursuit has to address whatever it feels interesting and is, in perspective, useful for the advancement of technic and pure knowledge. On the other hand, obtuse media coverage that is to scientific information like a circus show compared to a naturalistic report betrays profound callousness. I don't think anyone would be as excited driving through a desert road yet overnight everyone has become an eso-geologist... I'd prefer mass media to cover without pietism how the global community is/should fight to grab Africa out of the middle ages (and leave the Mars Explorations to good scientific journals, Nature, SciAm or Nat Geo for the beautiful imagery)... Now mod me down to -1
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Yours is a common argument amongst us westerners... it also has some logic within but our own success as a society debunks it. You see, here in Italy higher education and research are kept in very low consideration; many young people prefer to drop out of school to work in the "Made in Italy" industry. Apparently they seem to have a good deal with the wages earned they can afford uber cell phones, ridiculously aftermarketed cars, D. Beckham sportswear and sat TV football and disco club... They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value. We don't cultivate a competitive advantage, the whole world is catching up and will sooner or later leave us in the cold. What point am I trying to make? Well, while we are more or less conciously forfeigting our chances to keep the pace these kids sweating their lives in ratholes aren't getting their fair chance. There's no chance a country will improve if it coerces it's human resources into poor margin jobs; we are the living proof. So while those illiterate kids are pretty happy not to starve (but then wouldn't they be much happier if they had a school to attend or a childhood to play) they also suffer because their condition will likely never change in their lifetime and won't have enough income to bootstrap their descendancy's emancipation. For all practical purpouses they are medieval serfs... that's not nice and is cruel on our part to benefit from it.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Further, I can't be "hungry," "tired," "sad," or "lonely"... think of the famine victims, the sufferes of sleep-deprivation torture, the survivors of the Iran earthquake, and the bubble-boys of the world. I can't be "tall," or "strong, or "smart," because of Shaq, Mister Universe and Stephen Hawking (also sometimes known as Mister Universe).
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It seems to me that the last thing we should be doing is erasing the other meanings of a word like slave... look how your post has illustrated the difference between metaphorical slavery and real slavery, thus bringing attention to slavery that might otherwise have been missed. In a sense, The Telegraph and you have conspired in community service. Bully for you. Without metaphorical slaves, it could never have happened.
Last I checked, there was no Local 427 of the Allied Brotherhood of Rocket Scientists and Affiliated Pointy-Heads at CalTech.
I suppose the folks doing this are doing it because they want to, of course... it's very likely that they view this as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 90 days of messed up sleep is nothing if you're doing what you love.