Danger! This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death! PDF

ANCHOR TEXT | NEWS ARTICLE...

ANCHOR TEXT | NEWS ARTICLE Danger! This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death! Maggie Koerth-Baker BACKGROUND This article mentions Ernest Shackleton, who led several expeditions to the South Pole in the early 1900s. While these icy voyages took a huge toll on the crew’s bodies, crew members also struggled with the mental Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. stress of being isolated from society for months on end. On a mission to Mars, astronauts would also have to endure long periods of isolation and boredom. 1 R ight now, six people are living in a nearly windowless, white geodesic dome1 on the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. They sleep in tiny rooms, use no more than eight minutes NOTES of shower time a week and subsist on a diet of freeze-dried, canned or preserved food. When they go outside, they exit through a mock air lock, clad head to toe in simulated spacesuits. The dome’s occupants are playing a serious version of the game of pretend—what if we lived on Mars? 1. geodesic dome round building that is inexpensive to build and is known for its structural strength, efficiency, and durability. Danger! This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death! 153  2 Research at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and NOTES Simulation (HI-SEAS) project, funded in part by NASA, is a continuation of a long history of attempts to understand what will happen to people who travel through outer space for long periods of time. It’s more than a technical problem. Besides multistage rockets to propel a spacecraft out of Earth’s atmosphere, years of planning and precise calculations and massive amounts of fuel, traveling the tens of millions of miles to Mars will take a tremendous amount of time. With current technology, the journey takes more than eight months each way. 3 Which means that astronauts will get bored. In fact, a number of scientists say that—of all things—boredom is one of the biggest threats to a manned Mars mission, despite the thrill inherent in visiting another planet. And so, attention is being paid to the effects of boredom at HI-SEAS, and on the International Space chronic (KRON ihk) adj. Station. But because of the causes of chronic boredom, scientists lasting a long time or say, research facilities in Antarctica might actually provide a better recurring often simulation of the stress of a journey to Mars. CLOSE READ 4 Most living things constantly seek out sensory stimulation— ANNOTATE: Mark new smells, tastes, sights, sounds or experiences. Even descriptive details you find single-celled amoebas will move to investigate new sources of in paragraph 4. light or heat, says Sheryl Bishop, who studies human performance QUESTION: What point in extreme environments at the University of Texas Medical is the author making by Branch. Animals deprived of naturalistic environments and the listing such details? mental stimulation that comes with them can fall into repetitive, CONCLUDE: Do the details harmful patterns of behavior. Anybody of a certain age will effectively support the remember zoos full of manically pacing tigers, bears gnawing on topic sentence of the their metal cages and birds that groomed themselves bald—all a paragraph? result, we now know, of their rather unstimulating lifestyles. 5 Human boredom isn’t quite as well understood, says James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He’s currently working on what he says may be the Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. first study of how our brain activity changes when we’re bored. Danckert is hoping to find out whether boredom is connected to a phenomenon called the “default network”—a background hum of brain activity that seems to remain on even when you aren’t directly focused on something. There’s a lot of observable activity in the brains of people who are staring at a blank screen—way more than anybody expected, Danckert says. The default network maps closely to the brain-activity patterns scientists see when someone’s mind is wandering. It suggests that what we call a restless mind is just that—a mind desperate for something to stimulus (STIHM yuh luhs) n. amuse it, searching frantically for stimulus. something that causes 6 Boredom, it turns out, is a form of stress. Psychologically, it’s action or reaction the mirror image of having too much work to do, says Jason Kring, president of the Society of Human Performance in Extreme 154 UNIT 2 A STARRY HOME  Environments, an organization that studies how people live and work in space, underwater, on mountaintops and other high-risk NOTES places. If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do—it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks CLOSE READ about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind’s ANNOTATE: Mark facts in paragraph 7 that show normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression the challenges with which and attention deficits. astronauts are faced. 7 Astronaut candidates go through two years of training before they’re even approved to fly. And before they are chosen QUESTION: Why did the author include to be candidates, they have to compete against thousands of these facts? other applicants. The 2013 class, for instance, had more than 6,000 applicants and only 8 were chosen. Astronauts are rigorously CONCLUDE: How do these facts help you to better tested for psychological as well as physical fitness. But no mission understand the reason in NASA’s history has raised the specter of chronic boredom to that chronic boredom is the degree that a Mars mission does, because none have involved especially problematic for such a long journey through nothingness. a Mars mission? 8 What if, millions of miles from home, a chronically bored astronaut forgets a certain safety procedure? What if he gets befuddled while reading an oxygen gauge? More important, Danckert and Kring say, bored people are also prone to taking risks, subconsciously seeking out stimulation when their subconsciously (suhb KON environment bores them. shuhs lee) adv. occurring in the mind without one’s full 9 The cognitive and social psychologist Peter Suedfeld says awareness that people will sometimes do reckless, stupid things when they suffer from chronic boredom. In Antarctica, where winter can cut scientists and crew off from the rest of the world for as long as nine months, the isolation can lead to strange behavior. Suedfeld told me he has heard about Antarctic researchers venturing outside in 40-below weather without proper clothing and without telling anyone else they were going out. 10 The diaries of early polar explorers are full of tales of extreme boredom, depression and desperate attempts at entertainment Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. reminiscent of prisoners’ stories from solitary confinement. An important lesson that Antarctica can impart on a Mars expedition is this: even scientists on important missions can get excruciatingly bored. excruciatingly (ehk SKROO 11 One effective way astronauts combat boredom is by staying shee ay tihng lee) adv. painfully; miserably busy with work. That’s a strategy at HI-SEAS, where the crew member Kate Greene told me that her schedule is packed—every hour planned and accounted for, from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed at night. Life on the International Space Station is similar. (In fact, historically, NASA’s problem has been overworking people: in 1973, the exhausted crew of Skylab 42 actually staged a relaxation rebellion and took an unscheduled day off.) But Antarctica is different from HI-SEAS or the 2. Skylab 4 mission aboard United States space station Skylab. Danger! This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death! 155  International Space Station. Communications are limited. There’s NOTES nobody outside the base directing your day. Spectacular views vanish in a haze of white. It’s just you, the people you came in monotony (muh NOT uh with, no way out and little to break up the monotony. nee) n. sameness; boredom 12 And so some researchers there have learned to actively fend off boredom by creating what you might call a unique office culture. They celebrate a ridiculous number of holidays, both traditional and invented. You need something to look forward to, Suedfeld says, and planning the events helps change the routine. Even Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic crew found ways to put on skits and concerts. On one expedition, Shackleton brought a small printing press. At McMurdo Station,3 the 1983 winter crew created costumes, learned lines and acted out scenes from the movie Escape From New York. It’s possible that we may, someday, watch recordings of Mars-bound astronauts acting out other John Carpenter films. (It’s not so far-fetched. Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, made a tribute to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that racked up more than 16 million views on YouTube.) 13 It might sound absurd, but many scientists say strategies like this are necessary because, without proper mental stimulus, we risk making a physically and technologically challenging endeavor into a psychologically grueling one. It would be catastrophic (kat uh STROF catastrophic if humanity’s greatest voyage were brought low by ihk) adj. disastrous the mind’s tendency to wander when left to its own devices. ❧ 3. McMurdo Station Antarctic research station. From The New York Times, July 21, 2013 © 2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. 156 UNIT 2 A STARRY HOME