I wonder if digital entertainment (e.g. thousands of 1080p movies in a 10TB HDD) could make being there "bearable". You don't have to enjoy it alone, you have shipmates. Maybe even internet (satellite connection)?
A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
81–90 of 129 posts
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#82A modern version of this is people losing their minds on Twitter. Consumed by anger, paranoia, hysteria, all day, every day.
And a futuristic version will be Mars. Mars twitter will be the mouth of madness.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#83I have thought for awhile that the best space voyagers, or guys whom are going to be isolated, are individuals who already had minor breakdowns when they were younger. That includes so many of us? Why? Because they know the crazy thoughts will pass. I'm not talking about individuals with serious mental illness like Schizophrenia, or have a genetic lineage of mental illness. I'm talking people that have survived mild…
This is mostly wishful thinking. Advantages tend to accumulate in life. Those who had the easiest time growing up are often the most stable ones emotionally. Life doesn’t care about fairness, just like being and tall and attractive is correlated with intelligence, even though we might not prefer it this way. I’m sure you’ve also seen they type: brillant PhD, liked by everyone, natural leader, accomplished on multiple…
>Advantages tend to accumulate in life. Those who had the easiest time growing up are often the most stable ones emotionally. Life doesn’t care about fairness, just like being and tall and attractive is correlated with intelligence, even though we might not prefer it this way.
Many people who have had too easy of an upbringing may seem emotionally stable while inside the safety of their cushy comfort zone, but when they're put outside their comfort zone and hit with a real challenge or hardship, they often crumble, because they never learned how to deal with real difficulty
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure for this particular circumstance but I am bipolar. As long as my medication is stable, I’m far more resilient to the day to day struggles in life than the average person seems to be. I’ve been forced to build coping mechanisms to survive. Every day is a struggle of some kind, so I’m ready when shit happens, because shit always happens to me.
I don't really see how this can be true. With my medication I'm more steady emotionally than the average person but somewhat often I think about that it would be like to be a person who doesnt need a mix of externally drugs to feel this way. I, like you, know how to cope but is that really better than not needing to know how to cope at all? I wish I shared your optimism.
>I, like you, know how to cope but is that really better than not needing to know how to cope at all? I wish I shared your optimism.
That depends on how bad it gets. Everyone has a breaking point and I'd prefer having experience to deal with it. There's not a single person on this planet that won't go through some sort of catastrophe in their lives.
I think it's naive to assume these people that get selected haven't had to go through difficult emotional challenges.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#85In 1893, Fridtjof Nansen took a ship with a 12 men crew to North of East Siberia, purposefully sailed the ship to get stuck in sea ice, and hoped that the ice movement with ocean currents would take them to the North Pole. The ship spent 3 years stuck in ice, but didn't quite flow over the North Pole. These people didn't go mad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nansen%27s_Fram_expedition
What kind of food did they store and eat that was to last five years? And water? The wiki is light on these details in my skimming of it.
They mention building a shelter with walrus hides so I'd imagine they did a fair amount of hunting rather than trying to bring all their supplies with them from the outset. Shackleton's voyage used a similar approach.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#86I have thought for awhile that the best space voyagers, or guys whom are going to be isolated, are individuals who already had minor breakdowns when they were younger. That includes so many of us? Why? Because they know the crazy thoughts will pass. I'm not talking about individuals with serious mental illness like Schizophrenia, or have a genetic lineage of mental illness. I'm talking people that have survived mild…
> Why? Because they know the crazy thoughts will pass. I am not a psychologist nor anything similar, but wouldn't people who have gone through the same conditions without having the crazy thoughts in the first place be better suited for the job?
>gone through the same conditions without having the crazy thoughts
Not a psychologist either but from my anxiety experiences and what I've researched I've found that everyone gets crazy thoughts but people with anxiety conditions start to worry that their thoughts are wrong and no on else deals with them. My anxiety dwindled when I realized they're just thoughts and the crazy ones cause anxiety because my brain is trying to "protect" me.
So, people that don't have issues are really just able to dismiss the thoughts because they know they're only thoughts and nothing else.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was thinking the same thing. 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…
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" se…
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.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#88Future of expeditions to Mars?
On a single usb stick we have interactive games and all human knowledge available, I think mars explorers will be just fine.
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.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure for this particular circumstance but I am bipolar. As long as my medication is stable, I’m far more resilient to the day to day struggles in life than the average person seems to be. I’ve been forced to build coping mechanisms to survive. Every day is a struggle of some kind, so I’m ready when shit happens, because shit always happens to me.
I don't really see how this can be true. With my medication I'm more steady emotionally than the average person but somewhat often I think about that it would be like to be a person who doesnt need a mix of externally drugs to feel this way. I, like you, know how to cope but is that really better than not needing to know how to cope at all? I wish I shared your optimism.
I've been impulsive, suicidal, paranoid, and hypersexual since I was nine. On top of this, I had multiple chronic health conditions and an abusive childhood.
It's been a very long, very hard road and I wasn't expecting to life past 30. Somehow, I managed to hang on long enough to get diagnosed at 32.
Medication and therapy have lifted so any burdens, which was more I ever could have asked for. I was a creative person robbed of the ability to create. Medication has given that back to me. My dream of writing stories has become a reality. I've managed to get a short story accepted, which makes me an author as well as a writer.
I guess I'm just thankful. I don't dwell too much on what I don't have, because there is so much I do have.
Re: A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica
#90First >A current theory among social scientists suggests that pibloktoq [a temporary madness found in Inuhuit peoples] was not a congenital malady peculiar to the Inuhuit but rather a severe stress reaction arising from early contact with Western outsiders. Could someone explain this theory to me? secondly, I sincerely doubt that the early expeditions had anything remotely resembling adequate nutrition, besides enoug…
> a very restricted diet combined with not seeing the sun for 6 months That's not an expedition. That's Russia. Now you know why majority of Russians are terminally funny in the head.
[deleted]