Even the Moon. ISS visitors are selected very, very carefully to minimise these risks. But as soon as you get a slightly larger colony further from Earth, mental health is going to become a problem.
Which is why Mars is a tougher project than it seems. The ferry part is relatively easy compared to the incredibly difficult challenge of building a self-sustaining stable ecosystem that can survive on a manageably small umbilical to Earth, and the even harder challenge of building a political system that doesn't explode into factional war, regular suicides, and/or mad dictatorship.
Musk is already a little eccentric and doesn't seem like someone with the world's highest EQ. I suspect he's underestimating how hard it's going to be to make a colony work.
I agree. This is what I don't get. We don't have a real permanent colony in space. We don't have a real permanent colony on the moon. Mars is so much further away with less access to resources. It is fine to goal to someday get to Mars but we should have a plan for sustainable living in orbit, then on the Moon, and that will help us know how to get to Mars.
> lack of sunlight, shouldn’t be a huge issue on mars.
Mars only gets 43% as much sunlight as Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars). On top of that, Mars's lack of a magnetic field like Earth's makes cosmic radiation there worse to the point that colonies will likely be underground, or behind heavy shielding aboveground: https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html
That might be more of a problem in the higher latitudes, but on Martian equator, sunlight at noon will be comparable to sunlight at noon somewhere around the Baltic Sea - still perfectly fine. Also, Martian atmosphere is thinner and blocks less light than ours. (Unfortunately it also does not prevent harmful UV rays from reaching the surface.)
One possible problem not discussed would be the giant dust storms that can cover large tracts of the planet for weeks. We don't have this kind of weather on our cradle planet.
True, but a day on Mars is pretty much the same length as on Earth, which is great for the human cycle. Googling says that lux 100k on Earth would be roughly 44k on Mars, so a lot dimmer, but still better than months of darkness on end.
Now the real question is whether colonists can/will live on the surface? But then a secondary addition, due to modern technology we now have much better lighting that can approximate natural lighting, even underground.
In every book I've read on the subject they mentioned going underground to protect against radiation. The lack of a thick magnetosphere apparently means any surface equipment / personel would be subject to unacceptably high quantities of solar radiation. I guess living in a hole on another planet isn't as glorious as giant geodesic glass domes but I sure hope somebody does sign up for it.
But… although I do 100% drink the Elon Koolaid about "us" colonizing Mars, I really doubt that humans, as we know them today, are the creature that is going to be there.
It will instead be some planet-specific tweaked versions of us and other creatures, eventually in a different substrate even, as opposed to bags of meat.
When you think of it that way, the possibilities for mental health are just a sub-problem of the larger problem of aligning AGI.
I said I drink the Koolaid, and the above may sound out of line with what Elon has been saying about making humans multi-planetary.
But if you read between the lines of what he says, I think this is already his view; he just doesn't say it the way I did above because (I think his reason is) the freakout factor is too high. It is consistent with what he does say. Lately he has been saying "make life multi-planetary" and "make consciousness multi-planetary" not just humans. He still says humans too but it may be a loose usage of the word humans, and I don't doubt there will be a transition period with some homo sapiens. Long term, not so much.
OK that kind of got far afield but the point is mental health is going to be a different equation by that point. Maybe harder actually, but different.
Not just mental health, but physical as well. Humans are not well suited for long term high G environments, while I have every expectation that we will someday make it to other planetary systems I doubt the meatbags will be coming along.
It's the solar radiation, not high G's, that is the main problem with colonising Mars given Mars doesn't have a functional magnetosphere. At best Martian colonists will be the modern day equivalent of Morlocks if they want to have a sustainable colony on mars.
Not if you design the habitation appropriately. Something like a 1m layer of water in the roof and thick glass windows would provide pretty decent protection.
I feel like I want to hear more about what you're saying but despite reading it several times, your comment remains pretty opaque to me. Could you elaborate in a more plain English how exactly you think Mars colonisation will actually go? My understanding is that Elon considers this unmistakably as a concrete near-term goal, whereas - certainly to my knowledge - "tweaked versions of us... in a different substrate" seem significantly closer to science-fiction still (despite Neuralink etc.).
So I'm curious what concrete things and time lines you were referring to...
I assume he's talking about loading human consciousness into computers or artificial brains, and running them in a data center on Mars. Meanwhile here in 2021, I can't get 5.1 surround to work on Disney+ or HBO Max over HDMI ARC on a 6 year old TV. I enjoyed watching the first season of "Upload" on Amazon Prime though!
Yeah, someone else said it — transhumanism, basically. Timelines are medium to high single digit decades from now, not one or two decades.
It's already a matter of historical record that the first landings on Mars have been robots.
Robot intelligence is only getting better. The Singularity is projected to happen late in this decade. There will be Mars landings throughout this decade and it will make sense that some of them will send more robots. But we'll also want to send humans, because, well that's just how we roll.
Then at some point we get better and better at making smart robots, and they get smarter and smarter.
And also there are hybrids. I'm not saying which way it will go — robots, hybrids, both — because I have no idea. But any combination seems possible. Humans likely will be in the mix at first as well, just not sure about the long term for our body types.
And Mars is kind of a "safe" (scare quotes because it's not, really) remote place to park embodied AI experiments beyond what we might allow to roam around freely here. Some things we disallow on Earth might be allowed to happen on Mars.
Around the time when the transportation systems are getting robust (a decade or so), we will be heavily feeling the impact of the fact that life support systems could be a lot easier if we just send the non-meat versions of ourselves, or human 2.0, which will be either what today we might call robots, or some hybrid creature with somewhat human-ish sensibilities.
If it's a hybrid, the base body plan will not necessarily start with a human body.
Let's say we are in a decade where the available tech is something like Neuralink. Going to Mars, maybe you want a much smaller body, for whatever reasons. Lower gravity, more space efficient, etc., so maybe it will make sense to start with, say just for example, a Macaque monkey body, enhanced with Neuralink.
The fact that Mars creatures need to be autonomous from Earth also figures in here. The SNL skit scenario with Chad is not going to happen, because of the communication delay. So We can't just send dumb robots forever. Our current robots there have already been autonomous to increasing degrees for several generations, the last few missions over the last couple of decades.
It is science fiction, but we are getting there… it's going to be real, unless something really bad happens before then.
It's not sci fi. Hominids have evolved radiation adaptations here on earth already through natural selection alone: dark skin.
> The evolution of dark skin is believed to have begun around 1.2 million years ago,[9] in light-skinned early hominid species after they moved from the equatorial rainforest to the sunny savannas. In the heat of the savannas, better cooling mechanisms were required, which were achieved through the loss of body hair and development of more efficient perspiration. The loss of body hair led to the development of dark skin pigmentation, which acted as a mechanism of natural selection against folate depletion, and to a lesser extent, DNA damage. The primary factor contributing to the evolution of dark skin pigmentation was the breakdown of folate in reaction to ultraviolet radiation; the relationship between folate breakdown induced by ultraviolet radiation and reduced fitness as a failure of normal embryogenesis and spermatogenesis led to the selection of dark skin pigmentation. By the time modern Homo sapiens evolved, all humans were dark-skinned.
No doubt about that - but I don't think anyone would want to have natural evolution with natural selection as the primary way to achieve humans can live on mars. Because that would not be pleasant.
And genetic engeneering has come a long way, but modifying humans genetically for improved radiation protection is sci-fi at the moment. Maybe it comes already in a couple of years, but currently it is not remotely there - so sci fi.
I suspect, yes - I imagine that a lot of the mental trauma stems from a feeling of helplessness being trapped beyond the furthest boundary fringes of our typical existence.
If technology develops enough and we can have a fleet of starships on stand-by, then the moon might not be so bewilderingly frightening a place to feel trapped as Mars would, with its much longer journey times and periodically grander distances and Delta-Vs from Earth.
I think the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a lot of us that actual physical isolation from others can be much more detrimental to our mental well-being than we thought, even for those of us who were already used to being on our own for prolonged periods of time.
> I think the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a lot of us that actual physical isolation from others can be much more detrimental to our mental well-being than we thought.
Can you site source for this claim, I do not see any detrimental mental health, at least in terms of people are willingness to go back to work from office.
> I do not see any detrimental mental health, at least in terms of people are willingness to go back to work from office.
Mind giving me a source for this? I personally feel much worse during the pandemic and most people I know do as well. If your doing better I’m happy for you but not everyone is the same.
Not everyone's a gamer, and even those that are get bored with games after a while.
There are even fewer readers than gamers, and even those that are get bored with reading after a while.
Many people want to go outside and do something every now and then... but on the way to/from Mars there's nowhere to go, and every moment you're in space you know that on the other side of thin shield of metal lies death.
Sure, people could still entertain/distract themselves and each other.. and they'll have to. But it won't necessarily be easy to do in the long term.. especially if things start going wrong, if tempers flare up, or if serious incompatibilities are discovered among the crew.
> Many people want to go outside and do something every now and then... but on the way to/from Mars there's nowhere to go, and every moment you're in space you know that on the other side of thin shield of metal lies death.
Not much changes when you get there, too. I think at best we will have something like McMurdo Station, for researchers on 2-3 year stints. Maybe less, since the round-trip is long and cosmic rays remain a significant health concern even when you are on Mars itself—no appreciable magnetic field and no ozone layer.
Even when you're there, excursions will be limited and planned well in advance, probably not much different from spacewalks today. The rest of the time you'll be in a tiny underground bunker.
Under current projections, anybody who took a trip to Mars with a ~1 year stay would exceed their lifetime radiation allowance, and would never be able to fly again. (Assuming a solar flare doesn't kill you mid-trip. Unlikely, we think, but possible.) If you're the first astronaut, or even the first dozen, this might be worth it. After that, though...? I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers, but we won't just need bodies, we'll need talented scientists at the top of their game who are physically and mentally healthy enough to make the trip in the first place.
People that sit around playing games and using the internet all day are certainly not healthy mentally or physically. There are multiple studies showing this.
They had usb sticks full of data and games in Antartica in 2018, when the one scientist stabbed the other. The negative effects of isolation and lack of communication with a larger society are too complex to be solved with books or games.
