Road To Mars: Solving the Isolation Problem

An anonymous reader writes: As space technology matures, new missions are being funded and humanity is setting its goals ever further. Space agencies are tackling some of the new problems that crop up when we try to go further away than Earth's moon. This New Yorker article takes a look at research into one of the biggest obstacles: extended isolation. Research consultant Jack Stuster once wrote, "Future space expeditions will resemble sea voyages much more than test flights, which have served as the models for all previous space missions." Long-duration experiments are underway to test the effects of isolation, but it's tough to study. You need many experiments to derive useful conclusions, but you can't just ship 100 groups of a half-dozen people off to remote areas of the globe and monitor all of them. It's also borderline unethical to expose the test subjects to the kind of stress and danger that would be present in a real Mars mission. The data collected so far has been (mostly) promising, but we have a long way to go. The technology and the missions themselves will probably come together long before we know how to deal with isolation. At some point, we'll just have to hope our best guess is good enough.

Comments

Re:Antarctica

[Mal-2]

Not any more isolation than expeditions to Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Less, actually. There were no telegraph lines on the Antarctic expedition, and I don't know how effective radio was (not very in the late 19th century obviously). Aside from when the two planets are on opposite sides of the sun, communication will merely have high latency. We'll be back to sending podcasts and video messages, not chatting on Skype, but it's still quite a bit better than what those early explorers faced without even leaving the planet.

When the two planets are on opposite sides of the sun (which is what, a period of less than a week happening less than once a year?), a third point will have to be used to "go around", reducing bandwidth and adding to latency, but it's still better than nothing.

Setting up a new planet.

[MrKaos]

People will die. It's that simple. It is not safe, it is not known and mars is an environment hostile to human life. For the first people doing this, isolation will be another issue to deal with.

It seems like an unrealistic ambition to attempt a Mars landing without an established space transport infrastructure, in the same way moon landings were attempted. Consequently, IMHO, I think any realistic colonization of Mars will start with humans orbiting it. First in a capsule/ship, then in a space station with repeatable journeys back home. Who knows, it maybe cheaper to just send a space station there in the first place and solve all of the problems of not having a magnetosphere to shield it first.

Once the infrastructure is established isolation will become less of a problem. The biggest problem we have NOW is the will to get human crewed craft out beyond LEO.