Volunteers Wanted For Simulated 520-Day Mars Trip 356
anglico writes 'Starting in 2010, an international crew of six will simulate a 520-day round-trip to Mars, including a 30-day stay on the martian surface. In reality, they will live and work in a sealed facility in Moscow, Russia, to investigate the psychological and medical aspects of a long-duration space mission. ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.'
In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
Mars goes to you!
Okay, now that's out of the way, only intelligent discussion from here on out. Come on Slashdot, I know you can do it.
Make a porno (Score:5, Funny)
I say they should make a porno, actually. Who doesn't want to do what sex on other planets will be like?
Granted, many of us here on /. don't even know what sex on this planet is like... :)
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Of course we know what sex is like.
It involves a high-speed internet connection and a hand, right?
Re:Make a porno (Score:4, Funny)
And thank goodness for broadband.
Remember the days of 300/1200 baud dialup? That Pamela Anderson download would be halfway thru her chest and you would already be done.
And I know I'm dating myself (besides in *that* sense). Not because of the 300 baud reference, but by referring to Pam Anderson as fap-worthy material.
Re:Make a porno (Score:4, Funny)
If the Martian were underage it could bring a new meaning to "illegal alien"
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Psst. Wanna know a secret?
If you get a sufficiently sized group with at least one person of each sex, and they are confined in a space long enough (like a simulated spaceship), there will be sex going on soon enough.
Hell, they've made all kinds of laws about sex in the workplace. Anyone who's ever worked in an office should be able to recount their sexual harassment training. Regardless of the training, office romances start, and some of them never leave the o
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Insightful)
only intelligent discussion from here on out.
Yeah, like that's going to happen...
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It needs an element of reality, such as a vacuum chamber around the compartments/rooms these pseudo-astro/cosmo/euronauts will use, and if a leak is detected, the area along with the -nauts all get blown up...
Europeans only? (Score:5, Funny)
ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.
WTF!?
If I were going on a trip to Mars, the last thing I'd take along would be some techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest. Hell, with their thin figures and tight jeans, some Eurotrashtronaut might get sucked out of the spacecraft through some any ol' tiny tear in the outer wall.
Don't they need any good old corn-fed Midwestern American boys on this mission? Sign me up.
Re:Europeans only? (Score:5, Funny)
They don't have storage room for the sheep :-(
Re:Europeans only? (Score:5, Funny)
ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part.
WTF!?
If I were going on a trip to Mars, the last thing I'd take along would be some techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest.
Yeah, but if we shut the worst of them in a small room together, then the world becomes a better place for the next year and a half.
Re:Europeans only? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I didn't mean this as flamebait OR insightful... just funny.
I guess looking for humor on Slashdot is like looking for life on Mars ;-)
Re:Europeans only? (Score:5, Informative)
Since 'funny' mods don't give karma, the person who modded you insightful was probably just restoring your karma after the flamebait mod.
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Is there any way we can combine this into an interdisciplinary role with the marijuane reviewer job?
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/10/21/1535217/Colorado-Newspaper-Looking-for-Marijuana-Reviewer
I mean WOW
"Hey what did you do this year?"
"Oh systems analysis, architecture, etc. How about you?"
"I WAS STONED ON MARS"
This is not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not new (Score:4, Funny)
See: Biodome. The failed movie or the failed experiment.
Biodome was a different kind of experiment. There, they were trying to create a self-sustaining Martian colony. The Russians are conducting a much simpler experiment...stick a bunch of people into a metal tube for year and a half and see if they go looney or not. From the article, it doesn't mention if the mission has to live on the same water or not, or a slowly dwindling food supply. But, that is probably secondary to the just-as-dangerous mental effects isolation being targeted for study.
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ahem. not that i have watched the show, or something.
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All they have to do is check last century's Gulag records.
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Interesting)
The Soviets were no Nazi's when it came to record keeping. In fact it was so bad people would disappear from photographs!
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is not new (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck pretending about Earth. I would rather have the masturbation pod. Some sort of self-sustaining lubricant producing plant, mood lighting, and all the latest porn transmitted from Earth. Give the women a Sybian or some equivalent shit too.
I guarantee you an hour a day in one of THOSE pods and I just might not mind looking at bunch of plastic walls and algae tanks. Or to put it another way... without the masturbation pods I guarantee you they will be sending up a 2nd mission to find out what went wrong with the 1st mission.
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Funny)
Only on Slashdot would someone trying to use sex to stave off boredom, in a mixed gender pool, suggest everyone be given masterbatory aides.
And only on Slashdot would it be modded insightful.
So the band America anticipated the Biodome? (Score:3, Funny)
rock pools and stuff
From "Horse With No Name
There were plants and birds and rocks and things...
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They already did this, read the logs of all the Mir space station missions....
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Insightful)
An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
Re:This is not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Biosphere 2 was designed by ecological mystics with a minimum of engineering and scientific support to meet specific environmental, ecological, philosophical, and quasi-religious goals. This lead them to make many costly errors;
Etc... etc... etc..
In short, Biosphere 2 isn't a valid standard to judge such experiments by. Sadly, it was such a highly visible flop and so few people are aware of the reasons why, they've poisoned the well for decades and rendered it difficult for actual scientists and engineers to gain funding and acceptance for such work. As shown by your comment...
Let them play WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
I figure it this way. They need to pass a lot of downtime. Let them play a MMORPG. Then if your really creative you can let them farm gold and pay for the trip by selling the gold and characters they create.
Well I am kind of serious about the first part. Its going to take something highly addictive to keep them occupied during the trip there and back. Certain types of games would do it just fine. If you could find a way of combining learning into them all the better, but in some ways mindless entertainment may be key.
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Informative)
It should be noted that NASA has long had a problem with the reality of space flight vs. their selection process. Their astronaut selection process tends to weed out all but the most motivated adventurous go-getters who tend to go crazy when asked to do basically nothing for 6 months.
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Amen! As I understand it the first astronauts were test pilots, familiar with confined cockpits, long periods of total boredom, and incredible risk of a human roasting giant fireball. Why they ever went away from those men with way too much bravado, I'll never know.
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Funny)
"We're going to lock you in this metal box, blast it into outer space on a giant pile of explosives, and then you'll drink your own urine for 6 months and crash-land in the ocean."
I think that kind of requires an adventurous go-getter attitude.
-- 77IM
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Funny)
This is Slashdot. If sitting on my ass for 6 months is an adventure, then I'm Buzz Lightyear.
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Re:Let them play WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are they going to do nothing? Do people on the ISS sit around and do nothing while they are there?
They would most certainly be running experiments for the duration of the trip, both directions. It would waste a lot of time if they just sit there, and all the energy expended to get the thing up there and moving on its way could at least be useful to some experiments.
Don't think of it as sending a ship to Mars. Think of it as sending the ISS to Mars. There would likely be plenty to do.
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kinda hard to play real-time interactive games when you're dealing with round-trip signal times of up to 40 minutes... I think that would knock out MMO games. Now something like split-screen Halo, on the other hand, doesn't require that, but is more likely to forment anger amongst the crew.
On the gripping hand, the old naval solution would probably work best. That is, keep the crew occupied with enough busywork that they don't have time to piss each other off. This was the standard practice on old sailing men of war; you needed large crews for combat/damage repair and for certain shipkeeping tasks, but otherwise they sat around with little to do. Hence, rituals of inspection, holystoning the deck, etc. This is also why modern crew-reduction initiatives on ships can backfire; smaller crews have a harder time performing damage control than larger ones.
Anyways, for a Mars mission you need a lot of crew for the surface exploration in order to get as much data as possible; the cruise phases (for the most part) have little for them to do. They'd likely be occoupied running different experiments and performing regular maintenance, and exercising (a lot) rather than just being couch kudzu.
Let them play slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Posting to slashdot would still work well enough, although you'd cop more -1 redundants than normal. Otherwise I guess you could play single player games. Like System Shock, or Doom for example. What could possibly go wrong?
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They couldn't play normal WoW, because of the lag.
I am assuming that this 'trip' will correctly simulate speed-of-light delay, right? And bandwidth issues?
From what I can tell, they're not simulating the technical aspects of the trip, just 'locked up for 17 months', just the social ones, but hopefully they're doing that. (And even stuff like 'Okay, today we made it to Mars, so you're going to have to run around like madmen for a few hours pushing whatever button we light up to simulate the stress and work
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A lot of the social issues are well studied already, or at least should be. For example, submarine service in the various navies of the world.
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking from experience as a submariner, I must disagree.
Among other differences are the rather large size of the boat's crew (comparatively speaking) and the mission duration.
For a submarine, four months is a long voyage.
And there aren't enough ways to divvy up six guys so that you can rearrange things so that two guys getting on each other's nerves can be kept apart.
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, with one third of its crew female, the USS Acadia acquired the sobriquet "the love boat". In a single deployment to the Persian Gulf in late 1990, 36 members of its crew got pregnant.
Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Funny)
The freaky part is that only 28 members of the crew were female.
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that's only impressive if you'd let us know how many people were on the boat.
Is using google really too difficult for you?
From the Washington Times:
"During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the press branded the destroyer tender USS Acadia the "Love Boat" after 36 sailors -- 10 percent of the women aboard -- became pregnant while deployed in support of Operation Desert Storm."
From the New York Times:
"Lieut. Comdr. Jeff Smallwood, said there were no indications of improper fraternization between men and women on the ship. 'These women have a right to get pregnant,' Commander Smallw
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Mindlessly addictive games seem like exactly the wrong approach to pass the time. You might as well just put them in a light coma instead. On the other hand, I would pay for 520-day sabbatical from the world during which I could write and illustrate a graphic novel, or some other creative pursuit that's otherwise frustrated by the distractions of Life On Earth. Also give me some ebooks to read, and maybe a limited quantity of mindless passive entertainment for seasoning, and I'd be happy.
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Ebooks would be the only choice on such trip. During 520 days I could read more paper books than I weigh.
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At least with the lag time to Mars, they'd get a chance to read it before the DRM server wipes it from their Kindles.
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But how would you measure that in freefall? :)
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Or maybe include another computer as a dedicated server for MW2.
I saw what you did there.
Relativity (Score:3, Funny)
An astronaut playing WoW during a 520 days trip to Mars while moving near the speed of light could barely get his character to level 40, while in the same time-span on earth his identical twin will easily have maxed the gear of 3 different characters.
(of course, one might argue that the astronaut simply is a n00b)
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Re:Let them play WOW (Score:5, Funny)
What's the current world record for the longest game of Monopoly?
Microsoft? no wait... US Steal??? damnit.. I'm no good at pop quiz's...
Day 4 (Score:5, Funny)
Mars needs women!
just make sure they stock up on birth control (Score:2, Funny)
so there aren't any extra unplanned astronauts to arrive on "mars"
Volunteers (Score:3, Interesting)
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Okay, this might sound a little naive, but why can't they use people who have long prison sentences but are not severely criminal? The data gained concerning space travel could allow these people to contribute to society when otherwise they would just be rotting in a cell.
Two things. First, what information would these prisoners provide? I'm reminded of a novel I read where secret US agencies engaged in medical experiments to develop yet another supersoldier. They were excited at getting a real doctor as a test subject. The reason was because they got someone who could contribute and understand what was going on with his own body rather than "It hurts, Doc."
Second, prisoners aren't the people that would be sent to Mars for a real mission. One of the things that will be te
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There are plenty of examples of small groups making do in an isolated environment for years at a time
The Amish ? Scientologists ?
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I hear Bernie Madoff isn't too busy for the foreseeable future ...
By the time they get to Mars, they won't have any shirts ... if he hasn't already sold the spacecraft to someone in Washington.
One can only hope (Score:5, Funny)
that one of the volunteers spends each of those 520 days asking, "Are we there yet?!" over and over...
Submarine crews (Score:2)
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That's a good point.
Of course I have to wonder about the validity of the psychological effects. In a simulation you _know_ when it is over, "Earth" is just an "exit door" away. On Mars, you are putting your life on the line and don't have your support system (friends, family) "next door" so to speak.
I volunteer one group of idle people... (Score:3, Insightful)
The United States Congress.
We won't miss them, really. How many more new laws do we need? Seriously.
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More like 39 days just to get to Mars.. (Score:3, Informative)
Communications lag (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if the monitoring the psychological effects of the experiment would include adding an increasing the amount of lag between when the isolated crew send a message to Mission Control, and when they get a response back. After all, instant response would make the crew feel like mission control were just a phone call away. Also, wouldn't the atmosphere of the environment be different, because you would always know you could be brought out if something went wrong. To run a real simulation, wouldn't the crew need to really think they were millions of miles away with no chance of rescue?
Been There, done that. (Score:5, Insightful)
People act like sticking these people in an isolated chamber for a few hundred days is a new problem, it isn't. Sailors have been doing it for centuries.
If you want to study the effects further, give these people all a free 600 day cruise around the open sea. They're going to get horny, they're going to get angry, and they're going to get bored. That is what will happen.
Put a server on board with some quake and a few other video games. Give them all a bunch of contraceptives.
It will be fine. Trust me.
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And discipline had to be enforced with physical brutality, while those doing the disciplining sought solace in alcohol. To put it mildly, neither is an acceptable course nowadays. (Not to mention that routinely being isolated for hundreds of days vanished well over a century ago with the rise of steam power.)
Irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't the psychological effects of knowing that you're taking part in a (mostly meaningless) test negate any actual behavioral data collected?
If I was given the opportunity to walk on Mars, I'd consent to outright torture for 6 months.
If I was placed in isolation, and told that at the end, I'd have gobs of paperwork and medical exams to complete, my psychological perspective would be rather different. I'd get very bored very quickly.
On the flipside, if I became severely ill in space, I'd (rightfully) panic, while I'd be more comfortable in an isolated trial, knowing that the full facilities of Moscow's health system were at my disposal, a few blocks away.
Also don't forget the physiological effects of zero-gravity and increased radiation in space that you wouldn't experience on earth.
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I reckon if people can't handle it in a safe, controlled, Earth bound experiment than we learn something important.
Would be easy to make it more relevant... (Score:3, Insightful)
They should really perform this experiment in Antarctica, in the winter, somewhere near the South Pole (or at least, several hours from the nearest base). Make them eat pre-packaged food and recycled water, and breathe recycled air, for a year and a half, with only the habitat walls standing between themselves and a rapid death from hypothermia, and you'd have something that begins to approach the experience of traveling to Mars.
If we can't keep a crew alive for the required time period in a hostile environ
Oh, Come On! No Basement Jokes? (Score:2)
/., you disappoint me.
I heard.. (Score:2)
I heard that VASIMR plasma engine cuts the trip time to 40 days. Those poor volunteers :-)
Vacation Days (Score:2, Insightful)
"ESA is looking for European volunteers to take part."
oh wait! how about: ...because everyone knows that Europeans already live in a bubble, so the transition should be no problem for them.
Don't tell me, I've heard this one before! (Score:5, Funny)
Russians respecting woman? (Score:5, Interesting)
Less than a month into her run, Lapierre suddenly encountered serious problems. She was twice forcibly French-kissed by the Russian team commander, and soon afterwards witnessed a 10-minute-long fight between two Russians that left blood spattered on the walls.
She insisted that the controversial kisses were not merely “friendly celebrations” and that she had vigorously told the Russian to back off. She quoted him as saying, "We should try kissing, I haven't been smoking for six months. Then we can kiss after the mission and compare it. Let's do the experiment now."
Lapierre dismissed the notion that the Russian thought his actions were normal and acceptable. "Why did he try to pull me out of sight of the camera?" she asked.
When Lapierre's team first entered the modules, Dr. Valery Gushin, the scientific coordinator of the project, voiced attitude that in hindsight could have been seen as warnings about the problem. "Men, they have some expectations from women," he told a Canadian television team. "They want them to be more like women, not just partners. At least Russians do."
Following the incident, Gushin blamed Lapierre. His official report, which Lapierre has seen, saud she had "ruined the mission, the atmosphere, by refusing to be kissed." She should have been taken out, he wrote, and he also insisted that the foreigners had caused the fight.
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Re:520 people, that's a big ship (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously you're reading this from the perspective of a project manager.
"If it takes 520 days for 6 people to get to Mars, we'll get 520 people and make it in 6 days!"
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Lame joke, I know, but on a serious note I bet the more people they add to the experiment, the less likely everyone is to go batshit insane.
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IIRC one time they tried this, there wás a female on board, and it caused problems. But last time it consisted of 6 males, http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE52U4PT20090331 [reuters.com] . And I would not bet on having females in this crew either.
Re:520 people, that's a big ship (Score:4, Informative)
Russia has conducted shorter simulations in the past and has seen firsthand the issues that arise, including sexual harassment. In an eight-month IMBP simulation in 2000, a Russian man twice tried to kiss a Canadian female researcher after two other Russians had gotten into a bloody brawl.
Re:520 people, that's a big ship (Score:5, Funny)
So what you're saying is that past research has found that Russians shouldn't go to Mars?
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Send six lesbians and install webcams. Might as well make some profit off it right?
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I would guess the optimal male:female ratio to be best expressed by the term "divide by zero". In other words, all male or all female.
Actually, that doesn't express the problem sufficiently, because if you have an all-one-gender crew and discover you have three homosexuals on board, Houston, we have a problem. Love triangle alert.
The best way to express it would be six people, none of whom are sexually attracted to any one of the others, or three very stable couples, or some other dynamic that does not al
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so close
yet so very far.
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true on too many levels.
By the way, shouldn't that quote be attributed to 1?
Re:I hear Pauly Shore's available (Score:4, Funny)
For a one-way mission?
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Re:why 520 days?! (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't know where you live, but here months have much less than 65 days.
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The headline says "simulated 520 day Mars trip", not "1040 days".
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That is part of the experiment:
"Today we measure the effects on the crew as they watch a ship zoom by, launched after their ship and reaching Mars many months before they do".
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Re:It will start with only 6 people... (Score:5, Funny)
Lesbian crews. More specifically, HOT lesbian crews.
Video cameras everywhere, the trip would pay for itself.
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Unless it is realistic with a real chance of death should an air leak occur, or a system fails, such as Apollo 13, it will be almost meaningless. Of course, if the participants think there is a chance of death, even if a rescue is allowed that they don't know about, it might be OK and not taint the results.
Not only that, but they also know that they are not really going to mars. I would think the psychological effects would be much harder to endure if you knew that you were just stuck in a bunker on earth and could feasibly go back to your normal life at any point.
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