
Six Men Spent 520 Days Locked in a Room to See If We Could Live on Mars - Errorcod3
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/six-men-spent-520-days-locked-in-a-room-to-see-if-we-could-live-on-mars
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theothermkn
One of my pet peeves with Mars enthusiasts is that they ignore the reality
that living on Mars is going to truly, truly suck. You will never be outdoors
again. You will have the constant whirr of machinery. You will have to plan
outings down to the last bottle of O2. You will eat shit food. And you will
gaze upon a dim Sun through a dusty porthole.

The idea of Mars is spectacular and wondrous and ecstatic and beautiful.
Actual Mars sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.

~~~
BurningFrog
Not everyone values comfort so highly.

A small minority - but still plenty of people - would thrive as pioneers on a
new planet. We should let them go first, while you and me sit here and watch.

~~~
return0
What is it that humans can do there , that robots cannot do for us?

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lmm
Force us to develop the technologies we're going to need to settle other
worlds.

The long-term survival of our species is going to require colonizing other
planets in other solar systems.

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gtirloni
No mention of interest in programming. That would be a lovely way to pass the
time and create some useful things. If not for leisure, perhaps to improve the
environment (but that could be dangerous, one mistake and they're dead).

~~~
dvdfvo
It is awesome to think that martians would code on their own machines, but
information is one of the only things that is free to transport over planets
and almost without delay. In reality, due to their scarcity, first settlers
will perform exclusively physical tasks, software will be updated and fixed
remotely, and repairs will be performed following strict instructions or
advice from Earth.

Coding as relaxation is plausible, but mostly for short projects and nothing
serious. It is hard to focus on serious mental activity after laborious work.

~~~
rgbrenner
_but information is one of the only things that is free to transport over
planets and almost without delay._

Just FYI, RTT to Mars to between 6 minutes and 44 minutes.

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dvdfvo
Yes. A difference of 4 orders of magnitude.

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burnte
It's actually less than one order of magnitude. If it were variable from 6 to
60 then it'd be a full order of magnitude, but never four.

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sfilipov
I believe he meant transporting information compared to transporting physical
goods to Mars. The first takes minutes, the other - hundreds of days.

~~~
dvdfvo
Yes. I though it was obvious from the context of my parent comment.

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bosky101
hey netflix growth team,

1) you should launch your own contest to select 6 people to volunteer living
under similiar conditions - but with unlimited netflix streaming access, vip
access.

2) launch a weekly show just talking about what they watched.

3) then get audiences to recommend what the folks in the room should watch,
through social voting/recommendation

that said, i'd imagine that most people in their lifetime may end up watching
more than what the folks would watch in ~500 days

~B

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Mahn
Yes, because that experiment would be about as helpful, if not more, as
studying the logistics of sending a group of people to Mars.

~~~
joshuapants
I was unaware that entertainment providers were responsible for "helpful"
studies with nothing of lesser importance permitted. Thank you for setting the
record straight.

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at-fates-hands
_" “I missed the world in general. Seeing things move, seeing cars, dogs, the
sun. My colleagues were amazing, and I couldn’t have picked better people to
be locked up with, but you start missing meeting new people on nights out, the
social variety,” he said. “For me, that was the trickiest part.”"_

This seems to be a recurring theme in isolation experiments and have shown up
in movies recently. In the movie, "I Am Legend" its clear Will Smith attempts
to keep himself sane by using his imagination to create some kind of human
interaction. I found it to be a profound theme running through the movie.

I think above all, this is a primary factor with the human condition. It's the
need for social interaction. Without it, we don't seem to do very well.

~~~
doragcoder
This makes prefect sense. The worst thing you can do to punish a person in
prison (which is a pretty bad punishment to begin with) is solitary
confinement.

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gambiter
This is really interesting, particularly because there's no mention of
problems. Many isolation experiments haven't ended with everyone happy with
each other, so I'm curious if this team had any of the same issues. Does
anyone know?

If they didn't have issues, I wonder how much could be chalked up to the
teamwork they experienced while playing counter strike...

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suprgeek
Great Experiment.

But they missed a crucial and very big stressor if they want to compare it to
a real space stay... that of being out of reach of ANY possible help.

Imagine one of them gets an aliment of somekind that gets life-threatening.
Ethics would dictate that here, the person would be evacuated. On Mars? Not so
much.

Just that knowledge alone could be a remarkably stabilizing influence on
someone's Psyche.

~~~
Consultant32452
I think a lot of contemporary ethics have to be questioned in this scenario.
At what point, if any, do we sacrifice someone in order to prevent the
potential spread of disease to the others? How do we feel about the death
penalty? Euthanasia without explicit consent?

The things we expect here are no longer practical. Forensics experts for
alleged crimes, not to mention judges, juries, and lawyers.

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gonzo41
So, is murder illegal in space?

I spent a few months sharing quarters with other soldiers when i was in the
Army. We got to go outdoors, run about, work and relax. regardless, the urge
to kill started to rise up in all of us.

I don't think we're going to go interstellar until we can deal with things
like euthenasia (say you break a leg, or are crippled?) is Mars wheel chair
friendly. And ageing, low gravity is a killer for bone density.

~~~
Kiro
> the urge to kill started to rise up in all of us

Sorry, but wtf?

~~~
gonzo41
I should clarify, not kill others, kill each other. Its tricky living together
for months and months, isolated away.

Cabin fever is a thing.

~~~
palmer_eldritch
The article say they spent a fair amount of time playing counter-strike. So
you could say that a sizable portion of their time was dedicated to killing
each other.

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grizzles
The most important lesson they learned was to never pick up what looks like a
used tissue.

I doubt that this is the first time 6 men wasted a year of their life playing
CounterStrike. But it's probably the first time 6 men wasted a year playing
CounterStrike and also pretending to be astronauts. Credit to them tho,
because I couldn't do it. The last thing I'd want is 5 other fellahs doing
their business in close proximity to me 3-4 times a day. I hope they were well
paid.

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Mahn
I'm kind of surprised that they had books and videogames, but then it's not
supposed to be a prison. I guess it's feasible to play Counter Strike on Mars
after all.

~~~
dvdfvo
You could play any kind of turn based games over planets. In the future even
non-turn based games are going to be played, although indirectly.

A fun game would a real time military strategy game where the delay for both
planets is artificially made the same. Then the command delay becomes part of
the game, but the game still runs in real time with information updating as
soon as it is available.

~~~
Apocryphon
People aren't going to stop playing chess or go, after all.

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bra-ket
there is an interesting analysis of the changes in their microbiota:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848073/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848073/)

"it can be concluded that the powerful stressful condition of prolonged
containment in an isolated module had no “dramatic” effect on the state of the
intestinal microbiota and did not lead to significant negative consequences
for the health of the participants of the experiment. "

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ekianjo
So how did they deal with conflict/fights between people ? Is the answer
really Counter Strike ? :)

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dvdfvo
It was probably just the lowest common denominator of "fun". Personally I was
fed up with it after a couple of days in a lan.

A ( space themed ) DnD would be better in every way. Imagination, teamwork,
combat, discourse, story, ...

~~~
morbius
Something like this I presume?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Roleplaying_Game_%28W...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Roleplaying_Game_%28Wizards_of_the_Coast%29)

~~~
dvdfvo
No. Why use licensed worlds when you can invent your own.

~~~
morbius
Exactly! Which is why I said something LIKE. :) There's literally nothing more
fun than creating your DnD campaigns; it would be so cool to construct worlds
involving interplanetary trade -- which incidentally, is one of that Star Wars
RPG's strengths and also why I mentioned it.

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Handwash
They should test for hopelessness. If you put yourself in a simulation, you
know that you will get out of it eventually. That gives hope and motivates you
to keep going. In real-life scenario, you might be on Mars without possibility
of going back.

~~~
gtirloni
I think that is a certainty for the first generations. Simulating that on
Earth would be a legal nightmare though.

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aceperry
The next step would be to include women and see what would be the dynamics of
integrating them into the mission.

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Iazel
Pff... Some hikkikomori hasn't leave is room for 5+ years!

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jlarocco
Reminds me of the first episode of the Twilight Zone:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Is_Everybody%3F)

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thret
Isn't the survival of our species in the event of a global catastrophe half
the reason we want some people living on Mars? Surely five of those people
should be women.

~~~
kbart
And where would you put all these newborns in a apartment size colony..? Not
to mention other resources.

~~~
thret
I figured the settlement would gradually expand.

Someone has to be born on Mars while we're there, don't they? The first
Martian.

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return0
I do not see the need to send humans to mars other than for vanity. It would
be more cost effective to plan terraforming mars with robots.

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ohitsdom
I think there's great value in building a Mars base as a intermediate step to
terraforming. We're still a long ways away from terraforming technology, and
there is a lot we could learn with a permanent base on Mars.

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signa11
if folks have not already read "The Martian" by Andy Wier, take a look. it is
pretty cool robinson-crusoe'sque survival thing, easily devoured over a
weekend...

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Zigurd
Tl;dr: The two survivors plan to marry.

