Take the movie, The Shining
, in which a family stayed over the winter in hotel in the mountains. It was an isolated situation and the thing that can happen in such circumstances is that people can lose their minds.I've heard of stories of people doing bizarre things on the open ocean. It is the monotony of the circumstance that makes people crazy. They can start having hallucinations and delusions due to the lack of stimulation. It is a lot like a sensory deprivation tank, where hallucinations can be induced because the lack of sensory stimulation can make people insane.
That's the reason that I get a bit leery of a two year trip to Mars. Unless you have some way of accounting for these kind of problems, you run a great risk of the mission going haywire because that's what can happen to people in those conditions.
1 comment:
There was a show on the Science channel this morning, narrated by William Shatner. The subject was exactly what you just brought up. On a space trip of 1,000 days to Mars, how will we keep the astronauts from going insane? Russians have had a psychologist in their mission control room for years. During one of the near catastrophes Space Station Mir has survived, one of the cosmonauts nearly committed suicide. The solution in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was stasis. It's unclear if that theory would have worked in real life or even the movie, because HAL the computer went insane instead of the astronauts and proceeded to murder the lot. (except for one astronaut, who murdered HAL in revenge). It's just another problem that needs solving before we go back to deep space.
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