
What I’ve learned so far from living in a Mars simulation dome - elorant
https://aeon.co/essays/what-i-ve-learned-so-far-from-living-in-a-mars-simulation?src=longreads
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stickfigure
One thing I find consistently missing from these sorts of discussions: Sex.

I get that we have a social taboo against talking about it. But really, can we
isolate small groups of humans in faraway places and not expect that this will
become a major issue? Do we only send couples? What happens when couples split
or one member dies? Or does NASA think they can find a perfectly asexual team
to send to Mars? Or is this subject simply being ignored completely?

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skriticos2
They might send some porn and maybe give the crew some privacy.. but really,
if they are focused on how _not to die in the next 72 hours_ for the duration
of the mission, this might not be as big a problem as you think.

~~~
mdcox
I can't help but feel we're all underestimating boredom in this scenario.
Yeah, you have to survive, but eventually things will be stable enough for
there to be SOME downtime, with very few options for entertainment. When
sanity is involved, boredom is a massive problem and sex might be one of the
easiest forms of entertainment to arrange depending on what constraints were
involved when planning the mission.

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autopov
The psychological challenges are interesting.

Psychiatrists and psychologists often need to vent to a peer to deal with
being the person who counsels others.

I imagine or hope that some cross training is performed in the sMARS mission
so that one person who is incapacitated doesn't create a cascade of other
problems (e.g., the French biologist can't attend to the life-sustaining
Cyanobacteria).

A crew member suffering a mental breakdown could doom the mission. Is her
medical kit stocked with sedatives? Does increased radiation exposure alter
brain structure?

So many risks that we know of and some that we don't.

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fennecfoxen
You know, among the religious, there are still a few people out there who
swear vows of chastity and go their whole life without sex. It's not really an
irresistibly powerful human need like, say, _oxygen_. If there's a real good
reason like SPACE I'm sure we could find a few qualified people who would be
willing to abstain for the rest of their life; it's not a deal-breaker on the
scales that the earliest space colonies will be recruiting from.

Granted, long-term colonization with a permanent population is obviously going
to need some (and it will probably be small-town awkward for a while, and
having your family life be everyone's business because of population and
resource planning may be an interesting step backwards for today's liberated
culture) but we can worry about that _after_ we have nonzero population on
Mars.

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stickfigure
_Oxygen_ is a rather high bar to compare against; by that standard you can do
without food and water too.

You may indeed be able to find a dozen people that claim to be willing to
abstain from sex for the rest of their lives. You might even find a dozen
fervent believers whose religions are sufficiently compatible that they don't
kill each other before the end of the mission. But if you put them in a box
for the rest of their lives, I would not bet that these vows of chastity will
hold. And what then? Punishment? Voted off the space station for having sex?
This sounds like a recipe for repression on a level that would impress the
Saudis.

The Catholic Church can't even reliably enforce chastity among its
professional clergy. I don't think this issue can be waved away.

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fennecfoxen
> The Catholic Church can't even reliably enforce chastity among its
> professional clergy

Many of the Catholic Church's problems stem from the fact that members of the
clergy are in positions of authority and trust which can be abused to gain
access to small children, one key reason that these positions were abused in a
way that would never happen to, say, a company full of _actuaries_. A Mars
mission wouldn't have this problem. It also has much smaller staffing needs,
at least for the time being.

~~~
qb45
It's not only about children, even if those particular cases are most widely
reported due to their illegality.

