Friday 29 June 2007

Pic of the day: Space age construction, from the anime Stellvia, a series about a girl who becomes an astronaut. I thought it was kind of fitting.

"Women are from Earth"

You may remember President G. W. Bush plans of America returning to the Moon, this time as a preparation for traveling to Mars. Of course, by now most people realize that Bush saying something does not necessarily make it happen. But it shows that the plans of visiting Mars have not simply died and decomposed. Nor is Bush the only person to have thought of this. There is a fairly active interest group (The Mars Society) working toward the goal, and the technology is supposedly already available, though it would take some planning to get it right on the first try.

Now that more people are thinking it through, and more intelligent people (the average IQ has risen by 10 points since last we were on the Moon, after all, see the Flynn Effect), a different problem comes to the fore. The main challenge of going to Mars may not be technological or even economic, but psychological. It is uncertain whether humans can handle the stress of being left in a sea of stars for months at a time with only a big truck to live in and a handful of fellow humans.

Experience from vaguely similar ventures doesn't bode well. Several astronauts and cosmonauts on space stations have acted irrationally and suffered various mental disturbances, although they have not gone entirely crazy so far. Astronauts are screened very thoroughly for mental problems, and the stay in space has generally been much shorter than a Mars trip. Furthermore, space stations are close enough to Earth that its familiar surface is always there for you to see, and you can speak to people on Earth with no more delay than a trans-Atlantic phone call. This will not be so on a trip to Mars. Earth will dwindle to a pale blue dot, and radio signals will use minutes after a while, making an ordinary conversation impossible. For most of the trip, the movement of the space ship will be a matter of faith, as there will be nothing nearby to compare against. The crew will only have each other.

The expression "cabin fever" is probably originally related to long sea voyages. (The rooms on a ship are called cabins.) From the age of discovery to the onset of the age of steam, many ships would cross the oceans without seeing any other human life for weeks or even months. Just the endless sea and sky. This did not always work out well, and mutinies were not unheard of, despite the automatic death sentence. Other examples are polar research stations, especially before the age of portable radio communication. Today when people often have their cell phone with them to bed, it is hard to imagine the isolation of bygone ages.

Even a ship at sea, however, is not quite as removed from ordinary human life as a big tin box floating in space for months. There are no familiar sights at all, no birds or dolphins, not even a fish. There are no waves, no clouds drifting overhead, no wind, no smell of salt, no sounds from outside. Just a tin can in the void. With Earth itself lost to us, what are we holding onto from the human world, except each other? It is a frightening responsibility.

The ideal people for such an expedition would probably be Zen monks, but they would have no interest in such adventures. On the contrary, astronauts tend to have the exact opposite personality type: Proud, egocentric and action-oriented. As the next best thing, some psychologists propose sending an all-female team to Mars, because: "Even if women become irritable, they are less likely to commit suicide or murder each other than men are." I am not sure how well this meshes with the fact that women who live together tend to develop synchronized menstruation cycles. Then again, there are pills to delay or even avoid menstruation. The pills that would prevent testosterone overflow, on the other hand, would probably not be consumed eagerly by a male crew.

There is also the public outcry if the first Mars expedition of a full female crew was blown up by a stray meteorite or died from radiation sickness after a particularly violent solar storm. But if they succeeded, at least we would never again hear the phrase "Men are from Mars, women from Venus"…