A Space Odyssey of the Mind

Posted by Oliver Robinson on 1 June 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: space simulation

On the BBC website today there is a story about a 520 day experiment, starting this week, that will mimick a journey to Mars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8711216.stm

6 individuals will, for the duration of the experiment, live and work within a simulator of an inter-planetary spacecraft, as realistically constructed as possible. They are going into astonishing detail to recreate the experience of the travel, even including a 20 minute delay on communications with mission control, to replicate the effects of the vast distances, and using an air-recycling device instead of fresh air.

In the 1960s, role-play simulations were attempted in a variety of ways as psychology experiments, to see how a change of role, physical environment and social context could affect an individual's behaviour.  The most famous of these was the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of individuals were put into a mock-prison as guards and prison. The experiment had to be abandoned after just 6 days, largely because people seemed to forget they were in a simulation, and started behaving in ways that were immoral or unpleasant. The simulation became real-life for those in it, within just 6 days!  Imagine what it would be like, living for a year and a half in a deep-space mission simulation, with as little contact with the world as you would have in the real thing. I look forward to seeing the results of the psychological studies done when the crew emerge from the simulator in late 2011. How many of them will find that over the course of their confinement, the fictitious nature of the mission starts to blur, and they come to think, temporarily, that they really are on a mission to Mars? It may sound far-fetched, but no-one has yet tried total immersion in a simulation for this long. Just an hour of sensory deprivation and most people hallucinate.  Reality is more tenuous than we like think.

The importance of conducting a study such as this, designed to assess the psychological challenges of space travel, reinforces the fact that the technology involved in conquering space requires us to understand the mind at a correspondingly sophisticated level. And that no matter how advanced our physical technology becomes, it is useless and dangerous without minds that are up to task.

Olly Robinson