Adjusting To a Martian Day More Difficult Than Expected

schwit1 writes: Research and actual experience have found that adjusting to the slightly longer Martian day is not as easy as you would think. "If you're on Mars, or at least work by a Mars clock, you have to figure out how to put up with the exhausting challenge of those extra 40 minutes. To be exact, the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn't coincide with the human body's natural rhythms. Scientists, Mars rover drivers, and everyone else in the space community call the Martian day a "sol" to differentiate it from an Earth day. While it doesn't seem like a big difference, that extra time adds up pretty quickly. It's like heading west by two time zones every three days. Call it 'rocket lag.'"

Comments

So live underground

[Anonymous Coward]

...and keep all the lighting on a 24 hour cycle. All the drawings I see of colonies on the moon or Mars all have buildings on the surface. Don't they both have cave systems? Just seal those off and who cares about the outside climate/seasons?

Re:So live underground

[pr0fessor]

I think the biggest problem would be those on the mars days are here on earth and all the life around them is moving on the regular earth cycle... I can't have lunch at my favorite restaurant, go to the bank, etc... because my days are out of sync. Those people in the Arctic Circle are all on the same clock as businesses and everyone else around them.

Re:So live underground

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no different that what submariners experience - with no natural light, they move to an 18 hour day (6 on 12 off).

That is a forced schedule. There have been a couple of experiments with groups of people isolated in a mountain to see how people adjust when no sunlight and contact with outer world tells them when to sleep. In those experiments the group adjusted to a 20 hour awake, 10 hour sleep schedule.
Clearly neither the submarine crew or the 30 hour day people had a problem. What the operators in the article experienced was trying to use a sleeping pattern that didn't correlate with the world around them.
That means that they probably had problems with sleeping due to light and noise levels they weren't used to. That this causes issues isn't exactly surprising since that has known health impacts and is sometimes used in brainwashing/torture.

Wrong conclusion

[hackertourist]

Living on Mars time is difficult when you're living on Earth and are subject to Earth's day/night cycle.

Sensory deprivation experiments where people live without clocks and daylight for more than a few days show that people tend to lengthen their "day" to much more than a Mars sol (up to 36 hours IIRC), indicating that adjusting to Mars time is feasible when you're actually on Mars.

Re:Wrong conclusion

[epine]

I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.

I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.

Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.

At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.

The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.

A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.

For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.

From French invasion of Russia:

The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire! ... One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. ... Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibl

Extra sleep

[Anonymous Coward]

40 minutes of extra sleep is hard to adjust to? If we can adjust to seasonal variations in sunlight I think we can adjust to 40 minutes. Admit it, you're doing it wrong.

Uh...

[dpidcoe]

These people were trying to adjust to a martian day while still living on earth and seeing the sun still operate on a 24 hour day, so of course they're going to have problems. I'd like to see this tried while keeping the people underground with the lights cycling to actually simulate a martian day.

Sign Me Up

[Warhaven]

40 extra minutes of sleep each morning? Yes, please!

Let's stay focused, people

[puzzled_decoy]

It's not the length of a day that will impact Mars-dwellers the most, it will be their internet speed.

DST

[stafil]

Let's fix it on Earth fist, and stop fucking with our circadian cycles twice a year!

Solution is already in the works

[NEDHead]

When the planet is bombarded with comets as part of the terra forming effort, a judicious selection of impact angles will easily speed the rotation to a nominal 24 hour rate