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Six Men Endure 105-Day Mars Flight Simulator
drunken_boxer777 writes with this excerpt from an AP report:
"Six men emerged from a metal hatch after 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars. They had no television or Internet and their only link to the outside world was communications with the experiment's controllers — who also monitored them via TV cameras — and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real space flight."
Yeah yeah Mars...anyone can do that. 105 days with no TV or internet?
I, for one, welcome our godlike astronaut overlords.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I would have thought that would be an easy thing to provide them for mental stimulation on a long boring journey. Couple of laptops with few thousand hours of video, games, website snapshots, virtual environments to explore.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
"STOP. FARTING."
Wow, I get to see this in my lifetime. The building blocks of a conspiracy theory.
If they ever do manage to land on Mars the conspiracy theorists will now point to this and say "see they SAY they built it as a simulator but REALLY that's where they faked the entire Mars landing! Why else would they need to build such a simulator!" Very much like the lunar surface simulator they built out in the desert, or the landing simulator MIT built for the moon landings. Oh well...
Living in cramped quarters with a few other people for 105 days is not so big a deal. Reality would likely be far different. See, those 105 people *knew* that just outside the cramped wall was a big, beautiful, receptive planet, with air to breathe, beer to drink, and babes walking around to scope out. They are a day-flight away from home, wherever it be. Something go wrong? Darn, too bad. Simulation over, everybody have a beer and go home!
But an actual, honest-to-god Mars trip is different, and everybody will know it. Just outside the cramped wall is the darkest, blackest, most incomprehensibly complete void mankind can fathom. No air, no beer, no babes. Nothing. And not just some nothing, MILLIONS of miles of nothing. Months of travel at speeds inconceivable to airlines flight. Something go wrong? Everybody's dead!
Sure, just about anybody could live with this kind of stress for a while, but we're not talking about a while, we're talking about MONTHS of this kind of pressure. Many perfectly healthy, strong, capable people would crack under this kind of pressure. And even our best and brightest crack under the pressure of living here on Earth, with lots of air, beer, and pretty babes!
The simulation is more of a publicity stunt, and it's appropriate. People want to try the trip, and that's A-OK. But do not think, even for a moment, that this gives particularly meaningful data on what a real Mars trip would be like!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If you want to know what 365 days in real isolation in a tin can feels like... At least we had: (1) plenty of things to do, (2) the pressure that if we failed bad we'd most likely die. They had: (1) nothing to do, (2) the possibility to open the can if things got bad...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
When I was on a US Navy, FBM submarine, we typically spent 105 days submerged, with no contact from the outside world. It was not fun, but it was not that hard either.
http://www.x2ii.info/
It wouldn't be too difficult to pack a few hard drives or SSDs with a few thousand movies and episodes of TV shows.
Except, as soon as word got out of them flipping the first bit on the drive during the copy operation, the MPAA/RIAA/ABC/CBS/NBC/etc would be down their necks, complaining to their congresspeople about how much more important their anti-piracy efforts are over scientific discovery, cosmic exploration, and our astronauts not going insane during a nearly one-third year flight. And then they'd add a few extra trillion in to the "potential lost sales" figures they flaunt due to the Martians the astronauts would potentially be sharing the movies with who would then not buy the movies.
Then they'd bitch about making sure there's DRM on the spacecraft (jacking up the price and complexity) and make excuses that a 40-minute round-trip communication back to the central servers on earth every X minutes of playback is a perfectly reasonable compromise to make "sure" it doesn't fall into the wrong hands, and would try their damndest to delay the launch until they could convince the entire judicial branch of the United States government to quite cheerfully treat the astronauts like potential criminals.
I mean, other than THAT, it'd be a perfectly reasonable idea.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.