After people conquered the moon, uttered a heap of historical phrases, and astronaut Alan Shepard played moon golf, Mars became the next challenge to humanity. While the space powers are competing for the right to be the first to plant their flag on the surface of the Red Planet, real people are preparing to fly.
What stressful situations will they face? Or maybe they will go crazy? And will they remain people in the full sense of the word?
THE COSMONAUT WAITS SYMBOLIC DEATH
But why did people suddenly need to fly to Mars at all? If the lunar race between the USA and the USSR, with all due respect to scientific experiments, was more of a political nature, then taming the God of War may have a completely practical goal. Scientists who are studying the fourth planet come to the conclusion that it once had the same atmosphere as on Earth. There were rivers, seas, lakes, vegetation on Mars, but this disappeared without a trace. Maybe Mars is the future of the Earth? A series of groundbreaking experiments that can only be carried out on this planet should answer this question.
Scientists are also looking towards Mars, fearing asteroids that threaten the Earth. Who knows, maybe someday fear will cause the apple trees to bloom in this red ice dust?
According to the famous Petersburg psychoanalyst Dmitry Olshansky, the colonization of Mars poses a number of insurmountable psychological problems to man. “If the ultimate goal of the project is to colonize the Red Planet, then such trips will be a one-way trip. That is, the first settlers will have to say goodbye forever not only to their loved ones and relatives, but also to the Earth and to the way of life that people lead on it.
This is a kind of "symbolic death" that the cosmonauts will have to survive. With all means of communication and mechanical simulators, they will never see earthlings again and will not be able to feel earthly life. On the one hand, they cease to be a part of humanity, on the other hand, they transfer the human form of being to another planet,”Dmitry Olshansky believes.
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QUESTION PRICE
With the advent of private capital in space exploration, a manned flight to Mars is becoming more and more realistic in the foreseeable future. American billionaire and first space tourist Dennis Tito is determined to sponsor an expedition to Mars. The flight is scheduled to take place on January 5, 2018. The spacecraft will reach Mars on August 20 of the same year. The experiment itself will end on May 21, 2019.
According to preliminary data, the cost of the mission will be five hundred million dollars. And the embodiment will be a single-use launch vehicle of the RN Falcon family of SpaceX. The first manned flight to Mars does not involve walking on the planet's surface. The crew of the ship will only fly around the Red Planet and will observe it from a distance of one hundred kilometers.
At this stage of development, humanity has all the scientific, technical and financial capabilities to carry out the expedition to Ares. All those problems with which the Martian voyage is associated: equipment breakdowns, ionizing radiation, one way or another will be resolved, but time is a player who is not on the side of people.
500 AND 1 DAY OF ZERO GOVERNANCE
The rush to fly to Mars is justified. It is connected not only with the desire to deliver a person to the Red Planet as quickly as possible. The thing is that 2018 is the year of the so-called Great Confrontation. It is at this time that Mars will be extremely close to Earth. Next time this militant world will "confront" us only in 2031.
The flight to Mars and back will take 501 days. The previous record for the longest space flight belongs to the Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov - 437 days. But prolonged isolation plus a half-hour delay in communication with the Earth can put pressure on the psyche of even the toughest of space "nuts".
Sociopsychologist Yevgeny Yakushev believes that psychological problems will inevitably arise before the ship's crew members. The point is that astronauts learn how to effectively resolve them within the spacecraft. “Psychological problems can arise for a variety of reasons, but the main one is internal discord, when, for example, one of the crew members suddenly raises their personal desires above group desires. Therefore, it is very important that such things are immediately resolved - this is a complete relationship and complement to each other in terms of mental and physical properties,”the specialist is sure.
Dmitry Olshansky, however, is convinced that the crew members should not have problems with communication: “Psychologists have been working with the problems of isolated groups for quite a long time, including on various expeditions, and in correctional facilities, and in special psychological projects for cosmonauts who have been working since 1967 more than twelve years were held in our country.
Phenomena such as psychological overload, assimilation of new information and new rules of behavior, internal dynamics, aggression, conflicts, struggle for leadership, etc. have long been studied, predictable and solvable as far as they can be solved remotely."
The psychoanalyst believes that the main difficulty of the Martian expedition is associated with problems that here - on Earth - cannot even be foreseen. So it becomes unclear for what, in fact, to prepare the "Columbus of space".
Another specialist, Evgeny Yakushev, is sure that the success of the mission largely depends on the quality of the crew selection: “The most difficult and at the same time important task is to select the crew members so that they are arranged like organs in a single body. Where each individual crew member would perform purely his function not only as a specialist, but also had innate mental properties that would be complementary to other crew members, or rather, their mental properties.
Because such a complex and lengthy expedition as a flight to Mars will require full commitment from all participants. A ship is literally a living organism with its cells, organs, subsystems and a common body. Therefore, the selection of team members must be very careful."
MARSIAN SANITS - A NEW RACE?
The most realistic candidates for the Martian expedition are called a married couple from the United States, Taber McCallum and Jane Poynter. The spouses already have experience of a long stay in a confined space, when in 1991-1993. they took part in the experiment "Biosphere-2".
Whether this is plus or minus for the Martian expedition, psychologists do not undertake to judge unambiguously. On the one hand, people who have known each other for a long time have already learned to coexist together. The other side of the coin can be problems that are typical for all married couples. According to Yakushev, love alone is not enough here. The psychological compatibility of partners is important.
“Spouses should also be ranked according to their innate psychic properties, in order to be complementary to each other, and not just a married couple. Simply put, the eye must see, the legs must walk, the ears must hear. Then no one will annoy each other,”the sociopsychologist believes.
Dmitry Olshansky, in turn, is sure that everything depends on the purpose of the expedition. On a manned flight scheduled for 2018, there is no fundamental difference whether the crew members will be spouses or not. If in the future humanity decides to populate Mars, then the couples created on Earth will be able to find a common language on the Red Planet. “I think that if the goal is to give rise to a new population, then, of course, it is better if already established couples go on a journey,” the psychoanalyst notes.
By the way, if scientific progress goes so far that Mars is indeed colonized, the children born on the Red Planet will be completely different from those on Earth. “Anthropologists will be interested in future generations of immigrants. Children born on Mars will not resemble earthlings either physiologically or mentally, and this raises not only a number of questions of psychology, but also anthropology, philosophy and bioethics. What modifications is it expedient and humane to subject the human body and soul to, and what will be actions against human nature? And what is considered "human"
a form of being, if the body, feelings, and language undergo such transformations? Will Martians become a new human race or a new biological species along with Homo sapiens? , Asks Dmitry Olshansky.
So whether there will be life on Mars or not - this, as they say, is unknown to science. Disputes about this will subside only when another Neil Armstrong makes his "huge step for humanity", but this time through the Martian dust. But sooner or later it will happen. And who knows, maybe the fourth planet from the Sun will become the second refuge for all earthlings?
NAKED SCIENCE April, 2013