Danger! This mission to Mars will bore you to death!
Right now, on the slopes of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa, six people live in a white geodesic dome with almost no windows. They sleep in small rooms, use a shower for no more than eight minutes a week, and are on a ration of canned, pre-cooked, or dehydrated food. When they go outside, they exit through an imitation airlock, dress in carefully reproduced space suits. The inhabitants of the dome play a difficult version of the game, imitating the situation - and what if we lived on Mars?
The study of the Hawaiian Space Exploration Modeling and Simulation Project (HI-SEAS), partly funded by NASA, is a continuation of a long history of trying to understand what will happen to people traveling through space over a long time period. This is much more than a technical issue. In addition to multi-stage rockets, which take spacecraft out of the Earth’s atmosphere, multi-year planning and accurate calculations, and a huge amount of fuel, traveling to Mars tens of millions of miles will require an incredible amount of time. With current technology, the journey will take more than eight months at each end.
Which means that astronauts will be bored. In general, a number of scientists argue that of all the factors boredom is one of the greatest threats to a manned mission to Mars, despite the inevitable thrill when visiting another planet. And so, in the HI-SEAS project and on the International Space Station, attention is paid to the effects of boredom. But scientists say that research bases in Antarctica may be the best stress modeling when traveling to Mars, due to the causes of chronic boredom.
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Most living beings are constantly in search of sensory stimulation - new smells, tastes, visual images, sounds or experiences. Even single-celled amoebas will move to explore new sources of light or heat, says Cheryl Bishop, who studies human abilities in an extreme environment in the medical department of the University of Texas. The behavior of animals devoid of the natural environment and the mental impact caused by them can become repetitive and dangerous. From a certain age, any person will remember zoos filled with manic tigers, gnawing their metal cages, and birds cleaning themselves to baldness - as we know, all this is the result of their rather uninteresting lifestyle.
Human boredom is not well understood at all, says James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. Now he is working on what, he claims, may be the first study of how our brain activity changes when we are bored. Dankert hopes to find out if boredom is associated with a phenomenon called the “passive mode network” - background noise of brain activity, which seems to be even when you are not concentrated on something directly. In the brain of people staring at a blank screen, there is a lot of activity — much more than anyone expected, says Dankert. Maps of the passive mode network are similar to the models of brain activity observed by scientists when someone's mind is in the clouds. This suggests that what we call a restless mind is just a mind craving for something that can amuse it, a mind feverishly seeking an incentive.
As it turns out, boredom is a form of stress. Psychologically, she is a mirror image of the large amount of work that needs to be done, says Jason Kring, president of the Society for the Study of Human Behavior in Extreme Conditions, an organization that studies how people live and work in space, under water, on mountain peaks and other high risk places. If your brain does not receive enough stimulation, it can find something else to do - it is dreaming, it is in the clouds, it thinks of itself. If it lasts too long, it can affect your normal mind work. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficit.
Candidates for astronauts undergo two years of training before their flight is simply approved. And before they are selected as candidates, they must compete with thousands of other applicants. For example, in the 2013 group, there were over 6,000 applicants, and only 8 were selected. Astronauts are thoroughly tested, both psychologically and for physical development. But no mission in the history of NASA has threatened chronic boredom as the mission to Mars, since no one has participated in such a long journey through non-existence.
What if, for millions of miles from home, an astronaut with chronic boredom forgets a certain safety procedure? What if he is confused while looking at the readings of the oxygen meter? As Dankert and Kring say, even more important is that bored people also tend to take risks, subconsciously looking for incentives when their surroundings make them bored.
Specialist in cognitive and social psychology, Peter Suedfeld (Peter Suedfeld), argues that people sometimes commit reckless, stupid acts when they suffer from chronic boredom. In Antarctica, where winter can cut off scientists and crew from the rest of the world for up to nine months, isolation can lead to strange behavior. Suedfield told me that he had heard stories about Antarctic researchers, walking in a 40-degree frost without appropriate clothing, and who did not tell anyone that they were going outside.
The diaries of the first polar explorers are full of stories about the terrible boredom, depression and desperate attempts to have fun, reminiscent of the stories of prisoners from solitary cells. An important lesson that Antarctica can give to expeditions to Mars - even scientists on important missions can be painfully bored.
One of the successful ways in which astronauts struggle with boredom is to be busy working. This is a strategy at HI-SEAS, where crew member Kate Green (Kate Greene) told me that her schedule is very tight - every hour is scheduled and taken into account from the time she wakes up to the night hour when she goes to bed. Life on the International Space Station is similar to this. (In general, historically, the problem of NASA is the processing of people: in 1973, the exhausted Skylab 4 crew organized a rest riot, and took an unplanned time off for the day). But Antarctica is different from HI-SEAS, or the International Space Station. Communication is limited. No one outside the base rules your day. Spectacular views disappear in white fog. There are only you, the people with whom you came, there is no way out, and little that breaks the monotony.
And, as some researchers have learned, in order to keep boredom at a distance, you need to create what you can call a unique office culture. They celebrate an incredible number of holidays, both generally accepted and invented. You need something to look forward to, says Sudefield, and planning for such events helps to change the routine. Even the crew of the Antarctic expedition, Ernst Shackleton, found ways to play scenes and organize concerts. In one of the expeditions Shackleton took a small printing press. At McMurdo Station, in the winter of 1983, the crew created costumes, learned the words and played out scenes from the movie “Escape from New York”. One fine day, we may watch the recordings of how astronauts going to Mars will play other John Carpenter films. (This is not so contrived. Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, made a tribute to David Bowie's song “Space Oddity", which scored over 16 million views on YouTube.)
This may sound absurd, but many scientists say that behaviors like these are necessary because without proper stimulation for the mind, we risk turning an attempt, difficult both physically and technologically, into an attempt, exhausting psychologically. It will be a disaster if the greatest journey of humanity is undermined by the tendency of the mind to soar in the clouds when it is left alone with itself.
The study of the Hawaiian Space Exploration Modeling and Simulation Project (HI-SEAS), partly funded by NASA, is a continuation of a long history of trying to understand what will happen to people traveling through space over a long time period. This is much more than a technical issue. In addition to multi-stage rockets, which take spacecraft out of the Earth’s atmosphere, multi-year planning and accurate calculations, and a huge amount of fuel, traveling to Mars tens of millions of miles will require an incredible amount of time. With current technology, the journey will take more than eight months at each end.
Which means that astronauts will be bored. In general, a number of scientists argue that of all the factors boredom is one of the greatest threats to a manned mission to Mars, despite the inevitable thrill when visiting another planet. And so, in the HI-SEAS project and on the International Space Station, attention is paid to the effects of boredom. But scientists say that research bases in Antarctica may be the best stress modeling when traveling to Mars, due to the causes of chronic boredom.
')
Most living beings are constantly in search of sensory stimulation - new smells, tastes, visual images, sounds or experiences. Even single-celled amoebas will move to explore new sources of light or heat, says Cheryl Bishop, who studies human abilities in an extreme environment in the medical department of the University of Texas. The behavior of animals devoid of the natural environment and the mental impact caused by them can become repetitive and dangerous. From a certain age, any person will remember zoos filled with manic tigers, gnawing their metal cages, and birds cleaning themselves to baldness - as we know, all this is the result of their rather uninteresting lifestyle.
Human boredom is not well understood at all, says James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. Now he is working on what, he claims, may be the first study of how our brain activity changes when we are bored. Dankert hopes to find out if boredom is associated with a phenomenon called the “passive mode network” - background noise of brain activity, which seems to be even when you are not concentrated on something directly. In the brain of people staring at a blank screen, there is a lot of activity — much more than anyone expected, says Dankert. Maps of the passive mode network are similar to the models of brain activity observed by scientists when someone's mind is in the clouds. This suggests that what we call a restless mind is just a mind craving for something that can amuse it, a mind feverishly seeking an incentive.
As it turns out, boredom is a form of stress. Psychologically, she is a mirror image of the large amount of work that needs to be done, says Jason Kring, president of the Society for the Study of Human Behavior in Extreme Conditions, an organization that studies how people live and work in space, under water, on mountain peaks and other high risk places. If your brain does not receive enough stimulation, it can find something else to do - it is dreaming, it is in the clouds, it thinks of itself. If it lasts too long, it can affect your normal mind work. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficit.
Candidates for astronauts undergo two years of training before their flight is simply approved. And before they are selected as candidates, they must compete with thousands of other applicants. For example, in the 2013 group, there were over 6,000 applicants, and only 8 were selected. Astronauts are thoroughly tested, both psychologically and for physical development. But no mission in the history of NASA has threatened chronic boredom as the mission to Mars, since no one has participated in such a long journey through non-existence.
What if, for millions of miles from home, an astronaut with chronic boredom forgets a certain safety procedure? What if he is confused while looking at the readings of the oxygen meter? As Dankert and Kring say, even more important is that bored people also tend to take risks, subconsciously looking for incentives when their surroundings make them bored.
Specialist in cognitive and social psychology, Peter Suedfeld (Peter Suedfeld), argues that people sometimes commit reckless, stupid acts when they suffer from chronic boredom. In Antarctica, where winter can cut off scientists and crew from the rest of the world for up to nine months, isolation can lead to strange behavior. Suedfield told me that he had heard stories about Antarctic researchers, walking in a 40-degree frost without appropriate clothing, and who did not tell anyone that they were going outside.
The diaries of the first polar explorers are full of stories about the terrible boredom, depression and desperate attempts to have fun, reminiscent of the stories of prisoners from solitary cells. An important lesson that Antarctica can give to expeditions to Mars - even scientists on important missions can be painfully bored.
One of the successful ways in which astronauts struggle with boredom is to be busy working. This is a strategy at HI-SEAS, where crew member Kate Green (Kate Greene) told me that her schedule is very tight - every hour is scheduled and taken into account from the time she wakes up to the night hour when she goes to bed. Life on the International Space Station is similar to this. (In general, historically, the problem of NASA is the processing of people: in 1973, the exhausted Skylab 4 crew organized a rest riot, and took an unplanned time off for the day). But Antarctica is different from HI-SEAS, or the International Space Station. Communication is limited. No one outside the base rules your day. Spectacular views disappear in white fog. There are only you, the people with whom you came, there is no way out, and little that breaks the monotony.
And, as some researchers have learned, in order to keep boredom at a distance, you need to create what you can call a unique office culture. They celebrate an incredible number of holidays, both generally accepted and invented. You need something to look forward to, says Sudefield, and planning for such events helps to change the routine. Even the crew of the Antarctic expedition, Ernst Shackleton, found ways to play scenes and organize concerts. In one of the expeditions Shackleton took a small printing press. At McMurdo Station, in the winter of 1983, the crew created costumes, learned the words and played out scenes from the movie “Escape from New York”. One fine day, we may watch the recordings of how astronauts going to Mars will play other John Carpenter films. (This is not so contrived. Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, made a tribute to David Bowie's song “Space Oddity", which scored over 16 million views on YouTube.)
This may sound absurd, but many scientists say that behaviors like these are necessary because without proper stimulation for the mind, we risk turning an attempt, difficult both physically and technologically, into an attempt, exhausting psychologically. It will be a disaster if the greatest journey of humanity is undermined by the tendency of the mind to soar in the clouds when it is left alone with itself.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/187274/
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