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Emotional Bonding with Space Probes
bfwebster writes "Space.com has a story on the scientists and technicians working on the Mars rovers, Spirit and Oppotunity--and how they will react when the rovers finally break down, go silent, or otherwise die. Of course, humans becoming emotionally involved with hardware is high on the list of overused science fiction cliches (see I.14), and humans were naming (and anthropomorphizing) their cars long before they started doing it to their computers. Some argue that anthropomorphic design can ease end-user acceptance [PDF], with some interesting results among toys for children. On the other hand, when software manufacturers try to give our computers some 'personality', we tend to vehemently react against it--witness Microsoft's attempts with the much-loathed Bob and Clippy. And when our personal computers are aged or ailing or simply misbehaving, we usually are more than happy to put them out of our misery. So in the case of Spirit and Opportunity, the issue may be the large investment of time, money, and professional credibility in having two semi-autonomous rovers 100 million miles away function correctly. Best quote from the Space.com story: when Spirit, early into its mission, shut down for reasons then unknown, the Spirit mission manager happened to get a phone call from her husband. He asked her how her day had been, and she said, 'Well...I think I'm personally responsible for the loss of a $400 million national asset.' Doncha hate it when that happens?"
There are many things that are anthropomorphized like this in addition to cars. Ships have been given names for hundreds of years, and in fact it was only relatively recently that a well-respected maritime publication (I think it was Lloyd's of London's insurance books) that ceased to call ships "she", opting instead for the more mundane "it". This move attracted a lot of negative reaction (including from myself) since it flies in the face of longstanding tradition.
... probably to ward off bad luck and just because ships really do seem to have a personality.)
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Only in a few places have ships been called 'he'; those include the Soviet Union, and the German navy had one exception to the 'she rule', the cruiser Bismarck - due to its size and strength - and in many Star Trek novels, Klingon ships are referred to with male pronouns in part because the Klingons originally were meant to be a stand-in for the Soviet Union and in part because the writers believed that a warrior society wouldn't "demean" its ships by giving them feminine names.
Sailors, long a superstitious lot, will say that it's bad luck to change a ship's name, or to launch a ship with no name (German U-boats only had numbers, as did the White Star fleet of Babylon 5; I would bet that German crews unofficially named their ships, as did one White Star captain in the television series
In the Volkswagen enthusiast community, of which I am a part, it is quite common to see people name their cars. While many people follow the common convention and refer to their vehicle as 'she', there are a few cases where the Soviet practice is followed and a masculine name given. I have known people outside the VW community who name their cars, and some non-enthusiasts who do, but in general the naming seems to crop up more often among people who are passionate about the thing they name. Car enthusiasts tend to spend a lot more time with their vehicles, cleaning, repairing, and modifying them with their own hands instead of letting a faceless shop tech do it, so they bond more with the car and the car's personality - they're there, just ask any sailor - will have an influence on the owner.
We also anthropomorphize animals - we name our pets, don't we? And we talk to them as if they could understand (though I would swear that they can, sometimes) and treat them as part of our families. Mergings of humans and animals have been found in folklore for thousands of years (the ancient Egyptian pantheon perhaps being one of the most well-known examples) as have animals that could talk to people or be talked to by people. This is generally accepted and no one thinks much of it.
However, for some reason, more modern interpretations of this practice ("furries" for instance) are generally frowned upon; why I am not certain because past history seems to hint that it's not so unusual to imagine humans with animal qualities, or animals with human qualities. I would be interested in hearing speculation on why this is from some other readers.
So I don't really think it's all that odd that the MER spacecraft have been humanized. They even, to a point, seem to look a bit like us with a 'pair of eyes' and an arm holding out sensors, just like a human can extend its hand to touch something to examine it. After all, history shows that it's
Only human.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Spirit
Opportunity