"Meet the Martians," Psychology Today
It's an interesting conjunction: shrinks and spacemen. Writing in the July/August issue of Psychology Today, Faye Flam looks into the Mars One project to examine just what kind of person signs up to live and most certainly die on a distant planet.
Mars One, if you aren't keeping up with your interplanetary exploration projects, is the Netherlands-based nonprofit group that plans to create a human colony on the Red Planet by launching four volunteers by 2027 and adding four more every two years. Colonists would grow their own food, create their own energy and breathe oxygen extracted from deposits of Martian water. Key point: There would be no return flights. Once the colonists get there, they stay there.
More than 200,000 people responded to the program's initial call for volunteers, and Flam describes the criteria that whittled the group to 100 finalists. Mars One hired Norbert Craft, a cardiologist who has studied the physical and psychological challenges of long-duration space travel, and he took advantage of NASA's several studies of what kind of people are least likely to become depressed, unstable or even violent in close-quarter isolation.
One example is a mock mission called Mars 500, in which six men were isolated in a faux spaceship in Moscow for 520 days. One developed severe insomnia, another began to exhibit "impulsive behavior" and another became depressed. "One of the six," she writes, "did survive quite well."
Flam also introduces us to a couple of Mars One finalists. George Hatcher, a 35-year-old aerospace engineer, was rejected twice by NASA's astronaut program and is choosing this route to the stars. A convert to the Baha'i faith, Hatcher says he sees the mission as an inspiration to unify humanity in support of a magnificent goal, and notes that he would not have applied if his faith didn't include a belief in an infinite afterlife.
Then there's Washington physician Leila Zucker, 46, who says that dying on Mars would give her a kind of immortality, because her name would live in history. She also sees this as a way to possibly save humankind from extinction. "We can't stay on this planet forever," she says. "I would argue, 'Let's go now.' "
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