PhysOrg has pointed out the obvious in their article ‘Only human — the biggest risk factor in long-term space missions’.
What’s the biggest hurdle to setting up a colony on the Moon or getting mankind to Mars and beyond? Aliens? Asteroids? Money? Try: humans themselves. Experts poring over plans to return to the Moon by 2018 and later stride to Mars believe the greatest-ever gamble in the history of space may ultimately depend on keeping the mind and body sound.
Anxiety, loneliness and tensions with crewmates, a daily battle to maintain fitness and avoid accidents, DNA-shredding radiation from solar flares or cosmic rays — all these make mental and physical health the key to whether a long-term mission will succeed or fail catastrophically.
Benny Elmann-Larsen, coordinator of physiology in human space flight at the European Space Agency (ESA), says psychological stress could be the biggest problem of all.
“The human factor is the most uncertain factor,” Elmann-Larsen said in an interview with AFP.
A trip to the Moon, as with the Apollo missions, would last only a few days, which is sufficiently short to be bearable.
But life in a lunar colony — presumably several interconnected container-sized structures — would present months of confinement, boredom and monotony.
Boredom and monotony indeed. Being in Low Earth Orbit with an Internet connection and the latest VR gear might not be so boring. All the culture, correspondence, and charisma of the Mother Planet would still be with you. With teledildonics and a webcam, you could even have some semblance of sexual relations with a guy or girl on the surface with their head in the clouds. That could lower the probability of awkward, sci-fi-esque love triangles onboard leading to everyone getting murdered horribly. Essentially, Internet = Good, No Internet = Bad. Look what happened when the people onboard a Russian isolation experiment had a few sips of champagne at New Years:
A 110-day experiment in isolation that was carried out in a mock space station in Moscow in 1999 showed how things can badly go wrong. One module housed four Russian men; the other, three international test subjects, from Austria, Canada and Japan.
Reports within the space community say that during a New Year’s celebration two of the Russian men engaged in a 10-minute fist-fight that left blood on the walls before they were restrained by the other men.
The mission commander hauled the only female, Judith Lapierre, a Canadian, out of sight of the experiment’s cameras and twice gave her a French kiss that she fought in vain to resist.
The Japanese participant was so traumatised by this episode that he quit the experiment altogether. The Canadian and Austrian, a male scientist, continued with the mission — but insisted on having locks fitted to their module door.
The recent media hubbub about the diaper-wearing astronaut driving cross-country to use pepper spray on a rival’s car window really underlines the point that astronauts can just as easily be obsessive nutjobs as much as anyone else.
How can humans travel into space without going crazy? Well, one line of investigation would be to play around with people’s brains to make them less-conflict prone, and more asexual. We love to think that our brains are so complex in every way and we have no control over anything, but there’d be one simple way to greatly lower the probability of disaster, at least with respect to the more violent gender - lower the amount of testosterone reaching the brain. I’m sure this could be achieved through a more equitable means than castration. For the time window in which this issue will matter (from a decade or so from now up until the Singularity, assuming the Singularity doesn’t happen within the decade), more advanced neuroprostheses should be available to regulate hormones and even possibly emotions.
In the future, like with anything unfamiliar with our ancestral environment, we’ll need to take precautions before sending unsupervised human beings off into space. When you go to the Arctic, you bring canned food, an airplane, and plenty of warm coats. When you go into a mine, you wear a hardhat with a light on it, and carry a gas mask in case of an emergency. When you go into space, you subject yourself to hormonal and neural reengineering to lower your aggressiveness and conflict propensity. More exotic locales call for more exotic precautions.
Most of the time, it’s good to let people decide for themselves what is best for them and their family. But sometimes, if there aren’t rules, people predictably get hurt or killed. That’s just the way reality works. We can’t take responsibility for our actions if we are killed by them. Space travel beyond the Earth-Luna system may well be one of those issues.
Beyond the crazy factor, there may be a security risk in people wandering about the Solar System willy-nilly. Check out “Space: a Moral Vacuum?” by Lifeboat Foundation colleague Jeff Krukin, Executive Director of the Space Frontier Foundation. Basically the idea is that space could turn into something like the Wild West, where the strong prey on the weak with no restrictions. This sounds all fun and romantic until your family is vaporized and you are left floating, running out of oxygen.
Furthermore, advanced molecular manufacturing will eventually allow people to convert raw materials into top-grade military hardware at a rate of a meter per hour or more. Using non-planar nanofactory designs could speed up the extrusion speed many times over. At the risk of bringing contemporary politics into the discussion, consider a space-based Al Qaeda cell that disappears into the asteroid belt for a few months, then comes back hauling dozens of space rocks that it plans to rain down on targets of strategic importance. Phased Array Optics technology would let them cloak with respect to almost every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where is your asteroid shield now?
With all the talk of colonizing the Moon, Mars, and even Titan, you’d think we’d be sipping Lunar Margaritas tomorrow. Little problem - the gravity on all of these bodies is so low, it would kill someone who grew up there attempting a return to, say, his parents’ hometown on Earth. Out of the two obvious solutions - cyborg bodies, and spinning habitats, spinning habitats look closer, so people are more likely to come to terms with the gravity issue by reference to artificial gravity than fullerene endoskeletons.
There is one foreseeable use for space in the next 10-20 years. And that is backing up human civilization with the most advanced Ark we can possibly build. Outside of the Lifeboat Foundation, there are really no serious plans for this, but, opinions can change quickly. Remember that the fallout from even a small nuclear confrontation could lead to widespread crop failure. The problem with sending up an Ark now would be that the astronauts would lack the technology to replace things when they broke. With even pre-MNT 3D printers and a reserve of raw materials, that could change, giving a space station enough oomph to stay around while it assesses exactly what has happened on Earth after a disaster and whether or not a return to the surface is a good idea. It’s important to remember that even if a Space Ark is a very difficult project, it’s worth encouraging, because 1) people already have the knowledge to consider the details, 2) the political will to do it could emerge nearly overnight, 3) we’ll never develop the necessary technological prerequisites unless we start specifically focusing on it.
I personally doubt that space has much of a future beyond the next few decades. The simple reason is that mind uploading is inevitable. Even if we had to “upload” into a biological meat matrix, it would radically upgrade our freedom, quality of life, and ability to express our creativity. There are about 8.87 x 1049 atoms that make up this planet, and look at the complex virtual worlds and experiences we’ve already been able to create with a tiny, intsy wintsy, itty bitty piece of it (WoW’s servers, for example). It could take us subjective quadrillions of years to chew up every last bit of matter on this planet and convert it into qualiabearing information structures.
IEET Blog