April 01, 2009
I suspect this is a bit silly...
Crew in Moscow to Simulate Part of a Flight to Mars - NYTimes.com:
...In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.
"It is really like a real space flight without the weightlessness and the danger to our lives," said Sergei N. Ryazansky, a cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission. "On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it’s the science of sensory deprivation."...
... On a mission to Mars, astronauts will have to contend with communication gaps of as long as 20 minutes.
"Working in such conditions requires that a person be able to check himself, evaluate his condition in relation to the crew and in relation to mission control and be able to correct himself," said Boris V. Marukov, the experiment’s director and a former crew member on the International Space Station. "He will be a psychotherapist for himself."...
I'm pretty sure there are no technical reasons why a Mars crew could not have high-bandwidth communications with Earth. Un-manned flights don't have them now because there is no need to add the extra weight and power-requirement.
So a Mars mission could communicate with all the Internet tools we have today, except for the delays. Those would be frustrating, but I don't think we are talking "sensory deprivation" here. And anyone who has children nowadays learns that Internet communications can provide a lot of our human needs for closeness and conversation. If my daughter is bored and discontented I'll suggest she invite some of her friends over. "Whatever happened to Susie?" I'll say. "You two used to be such good friends." And the answer is likely to be, "We still are; I see her on Facebook.." And they do--they even post little videos (probably mostly giggles and words-not-in-complete-sentences).
You could run a small business while flying to Mars. Or "meet" people of the opposite sex. Or be active in political debates. You could upload the latest movies and music. Read the NYT.
Even being physically present with people can be different these days. Charlene and I will sometimes sit on the sofa, each of us active on our laptops. Even sending each other e-mails, because that's a fast way to send a link to an interesting web page! Last year we were sitting together, and I read an interesting product review, clicked to Amazon.com, and ordered her birthday present with "One-Click." And she didn't even know.
I have Internet friends I've never met in person. Some of them are commenters on this very blog. And aren't blogging and commenting themselves just a sort of time-delay conversation?
Posted by John Weidner at April 1, 2009 06:25 AMIt wouldn't add much weight to provide a high speed download (to space craft) link because most of the work could be done on Earth - just a bigger antenna and more transmission power. We don't do that for space probes because there's extremely little data we ever want to send.
I would say, in support of your point, that the InterTubes are probably the invention of the last few decades that does the most to make inter-planetary exploration more endurable because it no longer means nearly as much separation from the community as it would have in the 1980s, especially for people who are of an age to be selected for such a mission.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at April 1, 2009 10:27 AMI read an interesting SF variant on these questions. I think it was in the SF novel A Woman of the Iron People, by Eleanor Arneson.
A near-light-speed exploration ship is on its way to a nearby star. Time dilation means the crew has only aged a few years, while maybe 50 years have passed on earth. Transmission of news and info from Earth begin to seem philosophically strange, even creepy and meaningless to the crew, sort of like we feel reading post-modern literary criticism.
A lesson for life-extension enthusiasts...
Posted by: John Weidner at April 1, 2009 10:44 AM"A lesson for life-extension enthusiasts..."
Not so fast, John. You're probably right enough about the near-light-speed voyagers, but not about those who choose to extend their lives here on Earth.
In a short story by Spider Robinson (I think it was "The Time Traveler" from his "Callahan's Place" series), a character returns to America in the late '70s after being stuck in some Central American hell-hole of a jail for 15 or 20 years, only to find the country changed seemingly beyond all recognition, and becomes unhinged. In desperation, the man wanders into Callahan's Place intent on robbing the bar, only to be calmed down and straightened out by Mike and the patrons. He learns that America is still America, once you look past the window-dressing that is the style-of-the-day: as one of the patrons puts it, "Yes, things do look weird to you because you've been away for so long, as if things have turned upside down. And maybe they have turned upside down, but we don't notice because we've being turning upside down along with them."
Ditto for those who choose to extend their lives. Maybe in a century or two, things will become more than a little strange by the standards of the early 21st Century, but so what? It will seem perfectly normal to those alive in those far-off days, because that's the world they will be living in, having gotten there the same way we've gotten to where we are-- one day at a time.
Posted by: Hale Adams at April 1, 2009 08:48 PMI may be wrong about this, but I think that bandwidth limitation has nothing to do with the possible 20 minute delay in communications. The speed of light (and thus the speed of radio waves) is the limit here. Since it takes approximately 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to Earth and since Mar's orbital radius is approximately the same as the earth's, it could take 16 minutes for communications to travel from Earth to Mars if they were positioned on opposite sides of the Sun from each other. This 16 minutes would be the time for a 1-way signal. To receive a reply would take another 16 minutes.
Posted by: Hangtown Bob at April 2, 2009 08:09 AMI was talking with a Vietnam vet last week, talking about my upcoming deployment, and how I'll get to talk with my wife pretty much every day; and he said when he did his tours, he got to speak with his wife once - in twelve months! And that was via a radio connection, where he'd speak, then say "over," and wait for that to get to Wisconsin, then she'd speak...I just can't imagine. Once a week for 20 minutes in basic training was hard enough - I can't imagine once in twelve months.
And in WWII you could hardly call home at all.
Could be worse, of course. Soviet citizens in WWII used to join the Communist Party, because then your family was notified when you were killed....
Posted by: John Weidner at April 2, 2009 02:09 PM
