Re:Space anemia
by lapetitejort on Friday January 14, 2022 @03:13PM
(#29939719)
Anemia is just one of a myriad of problems humans would face on a Mars trip. My chief concern, and the one that's probably hardest to tease out, would be the psychological stress. There's no escape pod, no truncated emergency schedule, no one to greet you on the other end, and potentially not enough work to keep you busy. These conditions are hard if not impossible to replicate on earth.
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> These conditions are hard if not impossible to replicate on earth
Really? Where have you been for the last two years?
On the other hand, it does fully supports your hypothesis that the psychological stress will be huge.
Even at the height of Covid, I was still bundling up in PPE and going to the grocery store. Not to mention all the outside things to do.
Even the biosphere-style experiments, there's always the subconscious knowledge that you can make a call and bail at any time.
That's very different than knowing you have no lifeline. Les Stroud from Survivorman talks about how on one of his stints, he tested the emergency walkie/satellite phone or whatever and got nothing. So he's got some idea.
There are people out there who can do it, but it takes a special breed.
So yeah, take Covid stress, and like turn it up to 11.
Re:Space anemia
by RavingGoat on Friday January 14, 2022 @05:54PM
(#29941638)
It seems like death row inmates would be a good comparison group.
Re:Space anemia
by lapetitejort on Friday January 14, 2022 @04:15PM
(#29940545)
The majority of people who had prepared for the 2020 snap study elected to drop out after only a few weeks. Science, and humanity as a whole, are worse off as a result.
If stress is such a problem, then why not just sedate the passenger? Some forms of sedation can be quickly reversed as a last-ditch effort if there's a problem that the computer/mission control absolutely cannot solve.
Re:Space anemia
by 420official on Friday January 14, 2022 @04:47PM
(#29940904)
Astronauts on the space station work out nearly every day for several hours to stave off atrophy and still have issues. Leaving someone sedated for months in a zero G environment would make the atrophy far worse.
Re:Space anemia
by supperburg on Saturday January 15, 2022 @07:14AM
(#29945793)
It’s not a problem at all. Some people are predisposed to turning psychological stress into a psychiatric pathology but there is nothing intrinsic about stress or space travel that causes psychiatric problems.
People on death row meet your criteria and probably endure more stress and a lot of them don’t develop psychiatric disease.