Volunteers Simulate Mission To Mars 237
Hugh Pickens writes "Six volunteers have climbed into a small metal capsule in Moscow as part of a three-month experiment meant to simulate a voyage to Mars. The crew — a German engineer, a French airline pilot, and four Russians — will spend the next 105 days living in a minimally furnished facility erected in a hangar on the outskirts of the Russian capital. The German said, 'I think we are going to learn a lot about each other.' A cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission was quoted: 'On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it's the science of sensory deprivation.' A similar experiment in Moscow virtually collapsed when a multinational team of men and women were allowed to drink alcohol on the eve of the millennium, and simmering tensions between Russian and non-Russian volunteers exploded in a fight for the affections of a female Canadian scientist. Only men are involved this time, and no alcohol. Scientists will keep a constant vigil on the team via cameras erected in each of the facility's three modules. Those who survive more than 100 days will earn a $20,000 reward. The current project is a warm-up for a much more ambitious experiment, scheduled for December, which will see another group of volunteers spending over 500 days in the same conditions. With current technology it is estimated that a return trip to Mars will take at least 18 months." The amazing thing is that 5,600 people applied to be part of the experiment.
Adequate Reward? Please... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better than a lot of people are doing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you looked at unemployment numbers lately? Having a guaranteed steady job for over 3 months, making $8.33 per hour even while you're sleeping... Not so bad.
Re:Adequate Reward? Please... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They forgot about gravity... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm quite certain they didn't forget about it so much as they were wanting to examine the social aspects for cheaper than actually putting them in space.
Re:Adequate Reward? Please... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sleep is not work whether you are lying in a king size bed or in a hypermarketed king size coffin.
Limited information? (Score:5, Insightful)
They should be able to have communications -- just with ever-increasing latency simulating speed-of-light propagation delays on an actual voyage. At some point, bandwidth may fall off, and there will be the occasional bit of "space weather" to liven things up. It's not like a trip to Mars means instant cutoff from the world, but realtime communications would become problematic fairly quickly, and impractical not long after. Their communications should start looking more and more like e-mail every day.
In an actual Mars mission, their communications will degrade in a fairly predictable manner (aside from space weather). Why not factor that into the experiment?
Mal-2
And this is why. (Score:5, Insightful)
With a summary like that, who needs to RTFA?
Re:How dare you Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They forgot about gravity... (Score:3, Insightful)
Women Only (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a radical idea, why not do three experiments: men only, mixed and women only. Find out which group handles the isolation best. My guess is that it would be the women only group followed by the men only group.
I think the women only group would handle it best because women are generally less aggressive and better communicators. Handling that sort of isolation will require people that can talk to each other for extended periods of time.
No Alcohol For 3 Months?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:100 days, $20k !? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The best cosmonauts for extended missions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your research is a bit lacking; perhaps I should have fed it to you after all. The VMPC provides the emotional input to decision-making and reason. Do you honestly think emotions have any place in ethical reasoning? It's been demonstrated that people such as I described are able to make more ethical decisions than neurotypical people. It's not "empathy" period that is lacking, but more specifically interpersonal bonding. It doesn't mean such people don't feel emotions, but it does mean emotions don't, or are less likely, to affect their decision-making.
Let me translate that for you: a disaster befalls our Martian explorers, one that threatens the entire crew; only one cosmonaut is in a position to take action, but he cannot save the entire crew: he can either save one crew member with whom he has a deep emotional bond, or he can save the rest of the crew. Since that crew member is neurotypical, he's is likely to forsake the rest of the crew and try to save that other cherished crew member first, and possibly to the exclusion of the rest of the crew. He may allow his emotional bond with another to influence his choice of who to save. The correct ethical choice would be to save as many of the crew as possible, not the one that matters most to him personally.
That would be a poor ethical and irrational decision, of the sort that has tragic consequences. We need cosmonauts who can employ cold hard logic, not ones prone to such emotional irrationality. I dare say selecting for the latter and excluding the former is already a deliberate part of the cosmonaut training and selection process; I was suggesting we select for it a bit more explicitly by getting to the neurological root of the problem.