Techstuff Classic: Mars Simulation Takes to the HI-SEAS

that took place in Hawaii. This was a simulated Martian habitat, something that we would build on the surface of Mars if we were to go there. The whole purpose of this experiment was to see if the technology would work and if people could, you know, hold themselves together for the year of isolation that would take place if you

were to actually travel to the Red planet. Now, this episode originally published on September two thousand sixteen, and The Anman had just ended at that point, So we're going to revisit this topic and talk all about what it takes to do a simulation like this, and I hope you guys enjoy today. We're doing an episode that is

from a listener request. Listener Jeremiah Right sent me a message on Twitter and asked that I cover a recent experiment aimed at testing what it might be like to send human explorers to Mars as a project conducted by the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation and the acronym is High Seas HI DASH S E A S. So expect lots of pirate voices yar as we talk about going to the Martian landscape. I'll try and limit that

as much as possible. I know a lot of you find that cringe worthy, rightly so, but hey, we should be in September now, and let's talk like a pirate days in September, so we have that to look forward to. But yeah, I'm gonna concentrate on that. Talk about the project, what went into it, some of the tech that was involved, why it was happening in the first place, what they were expecting to get out of it, and how it

all turned out. So let's uh set the ground first by talking about what Mars is like and why it's important for us to simulate as many different scenarios as we possibly can before going to Mars. If you've seen or read The Martian, you probably have some ideas of what Mars must be like, and uh, for those who have not, seen the movie or read the book, I highly recommend it. It is not a scientifically accurate There are some major liberties taken in both the novel and

the movie. I'd say more so in the movie than the novel, but both of them have major liberties. But it is very entertaining and the science in it in general is pretty good. So if you have not seen the movie or read the book, check it out. It's my recommendation. Anyway, you know that Mars does not have a breathable atmosphere, has very low air pressure, has very extreme temperatures. But here are some of the liberties that both the film and the novel took, and these are

not spoilers really. One is that, uh, there are some major wind storms dust storms that play an important role in both versions of the story, and the density of the Martian atmosphere is way too low to have that devastating dust storm happen. The air is literally too thin to hold larger particulates, So you could have dust blowing around, but it wouldn't be blowing around in huge amounts and not at such enormous force because there's just not enough

air there. That's it's not dense enough and uh, so that is problematic, but hey, there had to be an emergency in the story in order to get to the the the plot point of a stranded astronaut left behind on Mars. You had to have something happen so that you could have the central uh conflict set up. And so I give it a pass. It's not a huge deal breaker, but it wouldn't actually happen that way on Mars. Also, the gravity on Mars is just thirty eight percent that

of Earth's gravity. Mars is less massive than Earth, and so it's gravitational pull is less than that of Earth. It's greater than the Moon's. The Moon is about one six and Mars is a little more than one third. But that means it would also be easier to pick up heavier stuff. So if you're an astronaut and you have to pick up something that weighs more than you typically could carry, you would probably be able to lift

it without too much trouble. It might still be very bulky and cumbersome, but you could lift it, lift it. But it also means as you move around, you'd be a lot more bouncy. You wouldn't just walk across. UH. The other big big issue is that the service of Mars receives way more radiation than the surface of Earth. Now, this is due to a couple of things. One of those is that it has that thin atmosphere, which does not allow much protection. Earth's atmosphere is one of the

reasons we are so uh so able to survive. Is trying to find a better word for it, but really, the atmosphere provides a great deal of protection for us, not just the fact that we breathe the oxygen in the atmosphere, but it slows down a lot of radiation or blocks radiation from getting to us. Another is that Mars does not have a strong magnetic field like Earth does. Our magnetic field also protects us from other types of radiation,

and Mars lacks that. So if you were on the surface of Mars, you would be subjected to way more radiation than you would encounter here on Earth. And uh we humans don't deal with that too well. All right, So a little bit more about Mars. Besides those issues I had with the Martian, uh, Mars's atmosphere being so thin means that liquid water doesn't tend to exist on

its surface for very long. There may be liquid water underneath the surface of the soil, especially since it mixes with some other stuff that lowers the freezing point of water. But most water is going to end up freezing. Um, it's not going to stay in liquid form for very long. The atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide and bike primarily I'm talking of the atmosphere is c O two, which is not great for us. UH. Nitrogen makes up less than

two percent of the atmosphere on Mars. Here. On Earth, nitrogen is the most plentiful element in our atmosphere accounts for seventy of our atmosphere, and oxygen, which on Earth is like of our atmosphere, is only found in trace amounts in the Martian atmosphere, So you would not be able to breathe. Even if the atmosphere were more thick than it is, you wouldn't be able to breathe there because there's not enough oxygen to support life UH from

Earth on Mars, at least not life like us. There's some life forms that would do all right in that environment if you ignored other factors like the radiation. Now not not everyone says that carbon carbon dioxide rich atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Some scientists have actually suggested we might use the CEO two in the atmosphere to help generate rocket fuel for a return trip to Earth, which would be an enormous help because that means we would only have to carry half as much fuel as

we would need for a round trip. Right, we would just take the fuel we need to get to Mars and then create the fuel we need to get back to Earth while we're on Mars. And weight in space launches is a deal breaker. If you get too much weight,

it becomes too difficult and too expensive. So you want to limit the amount of weight as much as you can when you're sending stuff out into space so that you don't hit that critical point where it's just too difficult and too expensive to do so, if we were able to make our full on Mars for then turn trip home, that would be enormous. Of course, you could also plan a trip to Mars where there is no

return trip home. It's a one way ticket, and in fact, there are some uh some projects that have been proposed that essentially would be that it would be a one way trip to Mars and that's where you would live out the rest of your life, which possibly would not be that much longer because Mars is a very hostile environment. But assuming you want to get back, being able to make rocket fuel on the surface of Mars is a

pretty good deal. Now, I said that temperatures on Mars have a pretty wide range, and it is incredibly wide. It goes from about seventy degrees fahrenheit, which is twenty degrees celsius, down to negative two hundred twenty five degrees fahrenheit or negative one fifty three degrees celsius. So a

Martian winter at night gets awfull chili. Obviously, we would want to locate any habitats that we would put on Mars in and a probably a belt closest to the most stable temperature on the planet um, and if we were to go there, we'd have to be there for a really long time. I didn't really put this in

my notes, but I can talk about it. The orbits of Earth and Mars are such that at certain points they are fairly close together, or at least as close as they get, and then as they continue their orbits they start to spread apart. So if you think of Earth as a circle, you know that is the orbit of Earth that's one circle and then a slightly larger circle on the outside is Mars. And then you just imagine how they're both traveling at different speeds, so they

start to spread apart. Eventually you get to a point where Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun from each other, and then if you go long enough, they line up again. Well, when you are launching stuff to get from Earth to Mars, you want to travel the least amount of distance possible. It's just like I was talking about with the weight. The weight is going to be an issue and the distance is an issue.

So you to fire your rockets so that the pathway that the rocket takes is the least amount of distance. And that doesn't mean waiting until Earth and Mars are closest, because it's an eight month journey to get from around eight months to get from Earth to two Mars, so you actually have to shoot ahead of time. It's it's that idea you're not shooting where Mars is, You're shooting

where Mars is going to be. And this involves a lot of complicated math, knowing about the planetary orbits and just the geometry involved and making sure that you are conserving as much fuel as possible. Same thing on the return trip. So if you were to land on Mars, by the time you landed on Mars, Earth and Mars would no longer be ideally situated. You would have to wait for them to line up again, and that can take a long time, like about two years, essentially more

than a year and um. And that means that if you're gonna land on Mars, you're gonna be there for a while, assuming that you are being very careful with your fuel. If somehow fuel is no longer an issue, like we've magically created cold fusion or something, uh, then that would not be You wouldn't have to worry about

it as much. You would have more time in space itself, because you would still have to travel a long distance from Mars back to Earth, but you wouldn't have to worry about waiting for the opportune time, that window when the distance is going to be at the smallest amount. All right, getting back to Mars. The regulus on Mars, which is the soil on Mars, could be very problematic to the Phoenix Lander discovered traces of perclorate in the regulars UH. This is a salt derived from perchloric acid.

On the plus side, that stuff can be used as a propellant, like an oxidizing agent within rocket fuel, So again, you could use this stuff to help create rocket fuel on the surface of Mars along with the carbon dioxide that you're taking from the atmosphere. So that's kind of cool.

But on the downside, Perkler, it can have a toxic effect on humans, particularly when it comes to the thyroid gland, so you'd have to be careful, Like if you if you've been keeping count, the radiation will kill you, the atmosphere will kill you, the uh temperatures could kill you, and the soil will kill you on Mars. Mars is trying to kill you really hard, so it's another thing you have to take into account if you're going to

send human beings there. However, all that being said, the Martian soil also seems to contain nutrients that are necessary to grow plants, and in fact, NASA has conducted several experiments using simulated Martian soil because we've never we've never taken a sample from Mars and brought it back to Earth, right, so we've simulated Martian soil using soil primarily from places like Hawaii around volcanic planes, which is again that's gonna go back to the simulated habitat we're gonna talk about

in just a minute. So they've taken that soil and they tried to grow stuff in it, and they've been successful with those experiments. Both NASA and other facilities have grown crops, and so it looks like we would be

able to do the same on Mars. Now, if we were to do that, we would have to have the plants inside a habitat because you would have to have the air pressure there to allow liquid water to exist, and we would need to leach the purcolorate out of the soil in order to make sure that it's not going to affect the plants. But that's something we could do. It's not it's not impossible. It's not even really that difficult.

We could do it. It It would take some effort, but we could do it, and you would probably have to add some fertilizer to the soil to make sure it has plentiful nutrients for plant life. Because Mars has not had any life on it. If it ever has had life on it, it's been a really, really long time, So you would have to you know, you don't have that cycle, that nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, all that stuff that allow for plant life to flourish here on Earth.

That hasn't been going on on Mars in a very long time, if in fact, it ever has happened. So we would have to add fertilizer to the soil, but it would probably work. So that's super cool. All right, let's get into the experiment. Simulating life on Mars here on Earth is problematic, very tricky, right because for one thing, all of the elements I just mentioned we cannot really replicate here on Earth, nor would we want to. It

would actually put people in serious danger. We would want to engineer as many solutions to problems as we possibly could here on Earth without actually subjecting people to really dangerous conditions until we got to a point where we were really confident that the solutions we had created would protect people from those conditions. You know, once you get to that that that level, you will find people willing

to take on that risk. I mean, if we didn't have people like that, then test flight engineers would never happen, right, We would never to get test pilots who are some of the craziest people on the planet. And I say that with respect the you know, they take enormous risks in experimental aircraft and push it to the limit in order to advance our engineering and scientific knowledge, which is amazing to me. The same thing is true for astronauts, same thing is true for people who are testing the

equipment that are ventrally. Astronauts will rely upon to keep them alive. But we don't have to worry about radiation the way we would on mars Um. The atmosphere is perfectly fine here on Earth. It's not like we've got a some place. There's not like a region on the planet where the atmosphere is really dangerous, or we don't have the potentially toxic soil. I mean, in some extreme environments, you could have toxic soil and dangerous atmospheric conditions, especially

around really polluted areas. But typically on Earth we're we're pretty okay in those realms. Uh. And it would be pretty unethical to subject in you one to staying in a really dangerous zone just for the sake of experimentation. But the goal of high seas isn't to create a perfect representation of what it would be like to live on Mars. It's not meant to subject people to the extremes of the environment. It's really to discover the best ways to keep a crew healthy and happy as they

live in isolation. So yeah, the crew had to behave as if they were on Mars, you know, they had to behave as if all of those conditions were in play. But more importantly, they had to figure out how to design a habitat and a series of missions to make sure the crew could coexist and cooperate throughout the duration of the mission, over months and months of time. So how do you keep people from succumbing to loneliness or irritability? How do you make sure they get the nutrition they

need to stay healthy and active. That was the real experiment, not so much the technology side, but the PSYE collegey side, And it all began as a collaboration between a whole bunch of different companies and research organizations and colleges. So

here's the full list, and it's pretty long. You got the University of Hawaii, You've got Cornell, You've got Michigan State University, Arizona State University, University of South Florida, the University of Maryland, the Institutes for Behavior Resources, Smart Information Flow Technologies, Blue Planet Foundation, Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, and NASA, and the result was that High Seas organization, and they had plotted out exactly where they

wanted to put this experimental habitat in a place that would closely resemble the surface of Mars and essentially abandoned people for months at a time, not really abandoned people, I'll get more into that, but really limit the interaction people could have with anyone outside of the habitat itself. So the experiment site is on the volcano of mounta

Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. And I'm being obnoxious the way I pronounced these things, largely because the Big Island of Hawaii is my favorite place to visit. I have been there multiple occasions, and it is probably the slowest island in the chain as far as like all the ones that people go to for tourists purposes. Oah, who is where Honolulu is? That's where the major airport is,

That's where the major city is. Uh. You've got Kawaii, which is gorgeous, uh and tiny and and they shot a lot of lost on Kawaii and Uh it's beautiful, but a little touristy. It's a little small touristy section. And then you've got Maui, which is like the resort island. I've been to Oaho, I've been to those islands, and Big Island. Big Island to me is my favorite. It is a little more laid back and it has a lot of different ecosystems, from rocky beaches to rainforest to grassland.

Two snow on top of the volcanic peaks, including mounta Loa. Mounta Loa gets snow at the top of it at the higher elevations. It is not the tallest of the volcanoes on the Big Island. The tallest would be Mount a chia Um And also it can be confused with Kilauea. Kilauea is the the volcano you would really be looking at if you went to the Volcanic National Park and you were looking at the lava flows uh that are either coming from event or going out or rift into

the ocean. That's Kilauea on on one side of the island. But the biggest of all the volcanoes, the largest in in just sheer size, is mounta Loa and it is an active volcano, so this experiment is located on an active volcano. Now that being said, eruption are rarely violent. They do happen, but the eruptions are more like lava flowing out of the volcano, or almost like it's leaking out of the volcano, not being propelled up in a big flume like you would think in a traditional volcanic eruption.

It tends to flow from the summit down towards the edges of the island and what is often called the curtain of fire. There are these rifts in the earth and they act almost like channels where the lava will flow through. Uh. While the eruption itself can be relatively nonviolent, they're still pretty destructive, right, Like you can have a slow moving lava flow that will cause real damage to property. It's rare that anyone gets hurt in these things because

the lava moves at a walking pace. It's not going super fast. I think it hasn't been since the nineteen thirties since someone was injured by an eruption. Everyone tends to be able to get all the way in time and if avacuated, but it does cause damage because you know, homes don't move, and a lava flow encounters a house, then you know you've just got a fire on your hands. But it's generally a pretty safe place you get you aren't expected to have an a like sudden eruption that's

going to put you into danger. The site of the simulated Martian habitat is located at about eight thousand feet elevation on Mauna Loa. The summit of the volcano, if you were to go at the very top, is thirteen thousand, six d seventy nine feet, so this is a little more than halfway up the full height of the volcano, and it's on a slope um that keeps it fairly level. For comparison sake, the primary observing side of the Mantala Observatory is at eleven thousand one hunt one feet of elevation,

so the Manta Loa Observatory is higher up. But don't confuse that with the Mantichia observatories. Those are astronomical ref search facilities on the taller peak of Monachia to the north of mountal Iowa's summit. Mantaloa's observatory is an atmospheric Observatory, primarily keeping an eye on CEO two levels in our atmosphere. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this classic episode of tech stuff. We're gonna take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The habitat itself is in an abandoned quarry

on the northern slope of Mountaloa. The team picked that site because it has very little vegetation. It looks like the surface of Mars. It's this rocky, barren kind of of area. Uh, there are no rare or an endangered species that make it a home, so there was no chance of having a negative impact on an endangered species, and so you would also have a fairly accurate representation of Mars, and you would not be bringing harm to

any threatened species. Also, there are no cultural or archaeological sites in that area, so the team wouldn't be causing any harm to something of cultural or historical value, which I think is incredibly intelligent. Um. The Hawaiian people have a very rich history. Their culture is phenomenal, and of course, uh, the the European explorers who came in had a huge impact on that culture. So trying to not make it trying not to endanger that rich history. More is really

important from a sociological standpoint. If you ever get a chance to look into their culture, really you should do it because it is It is a beautiful and incredibly fascinating culture. So the habitat itself was designed by V. Paul Point of the Envisioned Design and it was built by the Blue Planet Foundation of Honolulu, and it's super duper cool, you guys. So it's a geodesic dome. That's the main habitat. Geodesic dome. That's thirty six ft in

diameter and it has two stories. The volume inside the dome is thirteen thousand, five hundred seventy cubic feet. Now, not all of that is accessible. Uh, there's a very tall ceiling, like like the second floor is only half a half floor, so half of it looks out into the lower level. So you have this nice tall ceiling over half of the lower level. And since it's a dome,

the walls curve inward. So because they curve in word, you don't have full use of the space that's right along the edge of the walls, right, You couldn't You couldn't stand up like a table or chair right up against the wall because the way the walls curve inside. On the ground floor, there are eight hundred seventy eight square feet that are that's considered to be usable space.

The ground floor has a kitchen, dining room, bathroom with shower, a lab and exercise room, and some common working spaces. The upper floor is aloft, with about four square feet available. UH. It has six state rooms and one half bath. That ceiling is pretty high, and the reason why they have that high ceiling in the first places, studies have shown that the longer time, the amount of time you spend in a place, the more it seems to shrink to you.

So you want the space to already be pretty lofty, pretty tall, and and open because you're gonna have that shrinking effect, and you don't want people to start feel like they're they're penned up or they're trapped. It's very important from a psychological point of view. UH. There are actually some pictures on the High Seas website where you can take a look at the rooms and the layout and some of the equipment inside this habitat, and I

recommend you do it because they're pretty cool. They only have a few that are actually of the interior of the habitat. Most of their pictures are of the exterior or of UH. The various participants dressed up in simulated space suits as they go outside, because in order to simulate and an experience on Mars, you are not allowed to leave the habitat without first going through a simulated airlock experience, including getting all geared up inside a simulated

space suit. AH, very important if you want to make as as accurate as possible as the experience on Mars would be. UH. Disregarding the other stuff we already talked about, like the fact that you're not going to be able to simulate of Earth's gravity here on Earth. The picture of the kitchen makes it look really nifty and modern. It has a stove and oven, it's got a microwave, a breadmaker, and a crock pot. UM. They've thought that by giving the participants different abilities to prepare food, it

would also help morale. Towards the end of the first mission, Commander Angelo Vermulin talked about the foods that were a big hit versus the ones that did not go over so well to kind of, you know, help with the future experiments. There have been four missions so far in the high seas habitat the first one lasted four months, and that's the one I'm talking about right here that

Commander Vermullin was working on. He said that the foods available to the crew were limited to ones that could be easy to carry in a spacecraft, whether it would be carried in the spacecraft that the astronauts going to Mars would use, or a spacecraft sent ahead of time, or resupply mission sent later on to send more cargo

and supplies to people already on Mars Um. In any case, you have to make sure that you you are packing stuff that is uh space efficient, right, meaning that you can pack a lot of it into a small area and that it's not too heavy so uh. He said that the favorites in the pre prepared category, so these are ones that were ready to go, you just had to heat them up in some way, included creamy wild rice, soup,

mashed potatoes, raspberry crumble, and apple sauce, among others. The least favorite of the pre prepared foods was one called kung foo chicken, which the entire group described as being mostly tasteless and slimy in texture. The team also prepared meals for themselves and for each other using ingredients that were sent along, and those met with a lot of success. Those meals included everything from a seafood cholder to Russian borshed to Moroccan tangen uh and others. They also like

to use tortillas a lot to make various raps. Apparently this is also a big hit aboard the International Space Station. Tortillas are easy to pack and you can put a lot of different stuff in them, So they talked about experimenting with all sorts of things from breakfast foods to fish and everything else, and apparently those were a huge hit. But in general, pre prepared meals were actually favored, not because they tasted better, but because they didn't require a

lot of work and thought to prepare them. If you're working all day trying to complete mission objectives, and every single day they had mission objectives they were supposed to meet, then you are putting a lot of thought and energy into cooking, and uh, it's exhausting, it's overwhelming. So instead, if you were to go the pre prepared route, where you don't really have to think very much and cooking is easy and clean up as a breeze. That is

an easy choice. You could see that also if you were to go with the preparation mode, like the full on cook a meal mode, it means using more water then you would with pre prepared stuff, and water conservation is incredibly important. Water would be a very precious resource for astronauts on Mars. You would need to have a very careful way of managing your water supply. Now, assuming we do send people to Mars, we will likely create

means to get water from Mars itself. There is for us and water on Mars, and there are probably different ways that we could harvest water from Mars. But even so, you would want to be very judicious with your use of it, and you would want to conserve as much as you could and reuse as much as you could. And more on that in just a minute. The commander also said he figured future missions should have more comfort

foods for particularly stressful days. Um He said that there should be a lot more spices, herbs, and hot sauces to add a kick to foods and give them more flavor, and there needed to be more foods with fiber in them. Apparently, the fiber content of a lot of the foods they had was fairly low, which you know, you don't want to have a regular problem with a lack of fiber.

But so some of the ingredients included in that first mission, and this is just a small list of some of the ones that jumped out at me that I thought were kind of interesting. Anchovies, awesome pre cooked bacon, freeze dried meats, which the crew said, We're really only good if you use the as an ingredient within a bigger dish. You wouldn't want to eat one of the freeze dried meats on their own because they had very little aroma and less taste, so you essentially just got a meat

consistency with no flavor to it. They had a lot of different freeze dried vegetables and fruits. They had nuts and seeds. They had pastas and other starches. They had baking ingredients like flour and yeast. Uh. They had powdered dairy products. They had tea, coffee, and other drinks, including tang. They had seasonings and condiments. Some of my favorite ingredients listed included canned eel popping corn masa, which I really do like to cook with, powdered eggs POI. That's very

Hawaiian velveta cheese. And of course tang you gotta have tang on there on your space trip. And uh. The High Seas experiment assumed the residents on Mars would receive regular supplies from Earth, So that was they would actually hire a company to bring shipments of food and water at certain intervals during the experiments to represent a resupply

mission sent from Earth to keep the astronauts supplied. UM, because you wouldn't want to pack a full year's worth of food and water onto the habitat all at once. It would be prohibitively large. You would have to have a much larger space and that would not be very efficient. Remember, the larger the habitat, the more you have to pack in in order to maintain the proper air pressure. Uh, you need more oxygen and it just it makes everything

more complicated. So you want to find that perfect balance where it's efficient but not so small that it's going to make habitats the habitants go space crazy. You don't want space madness. That's bad. As for that exercise area, the astronauts used it a lot, in particular during the first mission. UH, there were some projects that NASA was

conducting some some experiments they were using. They were studying how well different types of materials hold up to prolonged activity and where and they were looking at two things. We're looking at how much does the material stand up to wear and tear, like, does it does it maintain its integrity? And also how long can someone go wearing the same clothing before they stank up the joint? And that's serious. They really did do that because again, you

want to conserve your water. You're not going to be taking a shower that frequently, and so they wanted to find micro bacterial type fibers that are anti microbial I should say, fibers that would limit the effect of bacteria on a person's skin from creating a stink and stinking up the joint. When you have six people working in close proximity, you don't want to have a lot of bo filling up that habitat. So that was one of

the experiments on that first mission. Just imagine going out there and exercising your heart out and hoping that you're anti microbial under things can keep the job going. According to one former participant, most folks would exercise along with exercise videos like Insanity or P niney X that's pretty hardcore. Obviously, on the service of Mars, things would be different because again you would have that lower gravity, so you'd have to figure out a lot of different resistance training type

experience type of approaches to allow for appropriate amounts of exercise. Uh, we're not just bouncing all over the habitat now. The staterooms were basically big enough for a bed, a stool and a small computer desk, and of course there's no view outside. The dome was made out of flexible material. The rooms have like a plywood kind of roof to them, so there's a fabric shell on the outside. On the

inside you have this like plywood roof. It's solid. You don't have a view, um and I think the only porthole they have is near the entrance of the actual habitat, where you would go through the whole airlock system. Otherwise you don't Oh, you're just looking at the interior of the habitat. Now, the pictures of the rooms are kind of cool. I think Harry Potter would have felt right at home moving from his cupboard under the Dursley stairs to the high Seas facility, it would have seemed like

pretty much a one to one comparison. Uh. You would store all of your belongings, like your clothing and stuff under the bed. There's no closet or anything. In fact,

the bedroom looks like a closet. The beds themselves are positioned so that the one of the long edges is against the outer side of the wall, right, so that way, when you open the door, you're looking at the side of the bed essentially, and you could take maybe two steps and then sit down on your bed, and then you have your little bit desk and your stool there too.

Uh so that that computer desk I mentioned the team did have access to computers and the Internet, but in order to simulate the isolation someone would feel on ours, all communications between the participants and the outside world were delayed by around twenty minutes. That simulates the amount of time it would take data to make its way from

Mars to Earth at the speed of light. Now, like I said before, the distance between Mars and Earth varies throughout their respective orbits around the Sun, but a rough average is a twenty minute twenty light minute gap, meaning it takes light twenty minutes to pass between Mars and Earth, so that means there was no way to chat in

real time. It was all asynchronous communication, and all the websites they could access were cashed images, so they couldn't have access to a dynamic website and they're not going to look at a website that is changing in real time. They would look at a cashed version of it. This was all to simulate the limitations they would face if they were actually on Mars. Power for the habitat came

from solar panels and batteries solar power. Obviously, if you don't use the electricity generator from the solar panel right away, you waste it, so you have to either use it or store it. So you would use the solar power to power the stuff inside the habitat and store any

excess electricity in batteries. They also had a hydrogen fuel cell to provide backup power if the batteries ever fell below five capacity, so that way you wouldn't have an interruption in power obviously that would be devastating on Mars itself. Inside the habitat, they also had a three D printer which allowed the crew to print out replacement parts. For equipment.

If something had broken, let's say like a leg on a on a small table is wobbly, you could actually print out a little three D stop gap so that you stop it from wobbling. Or it might be something way more serious, or it could even be something simple like a comb, so you didn't have to pack a comb. You just print one when you get there. I thought that was kind of cool. The two bathrooms in the habitat had, or have, because the habitat still exists, have

composting toilets. Poop is important, y'all. If you were on ours, you might want to use poop as fertilizer for the soil you are using to grow plants, and you would actually have to process the poop. You know, you'd have to process a little bit. It's not like you would just dump the poo into a a field of you know, whatever it was you're growing radishes or potatoes in the case of the Martian, but um, you would, you know, want to save that. So they were trying to keep

that similar. Also, they had to learn how to repair composting toilets because sometimes stuff breaks. As for water, the habitat had a water tank or has a water tank. I keep using the past tense, but I should stress they still plan to do two more missions with the High Seas habitats, so it's not like it's gone away. Has a water tank that can store about one thousand gallons. The project hired people to bring water and refill the tank at regular intervals, but it was important that it

wasn't so frequent. To make it easy. The team inside the habitat had to plan out their water usage so that they and not run out of water. It was a really tough challenge. Uh. Now on Earth we would be able to send water supplies up occasionally, but not that frequently because again, once the Mars and Earth orbits are out of alignment, it takes way more energy for us to get to Mars, and that means more fuel, and that means more expense and a bigger technological challenge.

So you really don't want to have to send more

water if you really can avoid it. Uh. They didn't go to the extremes of water conservation that you would find a board like the International Space Station, where scientists have attempted to recapture as much water as possible, including water people breathe out just the water you would lose the respiration UH that kind of water on the I s S. They tried to reclaim as much as that as possible, filter it, and then reuse it in various ways, but they did look at different ways to pay attention

to conservation and recycling. During the year long mission that just concluded him, the team actually had to respond to a water emergency. They had planned out how much water consumption they would go through UH through the month of July, and they worked it out to like the millimeter of how far down the water tank they would go. But then the water supplier, the company that actually would come up and refill the water tank, suffered a mechanical failure

and it had nothing to do with the habitat. It wasn't their fault at all, but it meant that the water that would come in and resupply them wasn't coming. And this is a simulation. They can't just get a different company to come out and deliver water. Something like this might happen on a real Martian mission. So the crew had to figure out what they wanted to do. Now. They had an emergency backup water tank, but it hadn't

been touched in years. This emergency water tank had existed since the very first mission, but no one had had to use it, so they weren't sure about the quality of the water. They had no idea if it would be drinkable, if be safe to drink, and they lacked the equipment to test it because that would take up even more space, and if you don't absolutely need something, you're not gonna take it in a habitat that has

very limited space to it. So they had to figure out a way to make the water usable and be and and be sure that it was safe without having the ability to test it. So what they did because then an old fashioned method of distilling the water. They put uh They put containers or pots of water inside a big plastic tote essentially, and they had an electric heater element. An electric heater element would heat up the pot of water so that the water would boil. On

top of the tote. They put a plastic sheet and they clamped it down along the sides. They had just regular old clamps that they used. Boy Bush Joe McCormick were here because he loves clamps. But they put clamps all along the edges and kept it nice and tight. They put a spoon over the center of the plastic sheet to create an indentation, a dip in the sheet, kind of like if you were to imagine a bowling ball on a trampoline, it makes the material dip down.

I honestly didn't remember talking about a bowling ball on a trampoline, but I'm so glad I did. We're gonna get back into this episode in just a minute, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So steam from the boiling water would rise up, it would condense against the plastic. The drops of water would slowly slide down to the lowest point where the spoon was, and eventually dripped down into the container itself. The water

that would drip down was safe to drink. It had been distilled, and so they were able to make drinking water this way. They just had to constantly checking on the water make sure that there was at the right level, uh, and replace the water in the pots so that they added that to their daily activities. But otherwise it didn't impact the mission. So they were able to continue their mission and respond to this water emergency in a way

that was realistic. You know, it didn't require them to step outside of the simulation in order to keep it going, so it was really cool. Now, next to the habitat itself is a steel shipping container that serves as a workshop for the habitat. It's actually attached to the habitat, so the participants can pass back and forth between the shipping container and the habitat itself in order to do more work. But they wouldn't necessarily have to down a

full space suit in order to do that. And like I mentioned, they have completed four simulated mission so far. The first took place in two thousand thirteen it lasted four months long. The second mission took place in two thousand fourteen the early part of two thousand fourteen and

lasted another four months. The third began in the fall of two thousand and fourteen and lasted six months, and the fourth mission began on August twenty nine, two thou fifteen, and ended a year later, So it was just a few days before I recorded this. Obviously, for the experiment to be meaningful, everyone has to behave as if they are in fact on Mars. Again, they don't have to pretend like they're in low gravity situations. That would be ridiculous.

It would be it would require you to exert way too much energy, but going outside the habitat mint, putting on a space suit, going through that simulated airlock UH scenario before you could go out. And because the project was simulating an actual visit to Mars, they would receive mission objectives that would require the participants to do this

on a fairly frequent basis. Every single mission they've done has had several Mars walks included where they were sent off to specific locations to take information down, make observations, explore things like lava tubes and vent um, which was really cool. I mean it allowed them to actually do real work. They were actually doing real research. It's just the research in this case was Earth research. They were just simulating the experience of it as if they were

on Mars. So the information they gathered is useful to us. It's just useful to us as people on Earth, which is kind of cool. There was like a two for one in a way. Now, it also meant that the team had to show discipline when entering or leaving that that habitat um, and sometimes they would actually plan out a Mars walk when they didn't have one on the schedule simply to occupy their minds, because boredom is a real problem when you're in that that type of isolation,

especially if you're in there for a whole year. And keep in mind that a habitat on Mars would have a much higher internal air pressure than the planet would, so the air pressure inside the habitat would be very very high compared to the Martian atmosphere. And that means if you opened up the habitat without using an airlock the air and said the habitat would rush out. It would blow out of the habitat and go out into the atmosphere and dissipate, and that would be no bueno.

That's end of end of habitat. You would you would lose air pressure and you would have a catastrophic emergency, which also happens in the Martian No spoiler there either. It's a big part of the story and you would imagine that would have to happen in order to up the stakes on the drama. The when the stakes start with being abandoned on Mars, there are only so many things you can do to increase the stakes at that point, and you have to do that in order to have

a compelling story. All right, let's talk about the participants of this most recent experiment, the people who spent an entire year in isolation with one another, the six strangers. As I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast. First of all, the the High Seas Project always seeks out participants who are astronaut like, meaning they have the qualifications that NASA would look for when choosing astronauts for their

various space faring missions. So you already have to be a pretty remarkable person to be considered to take part in this experiment. Uh. They have to be physically fit, they have to be mentally fit, and they have to have at least one degree in science or engineering, and most of them have multiple degrees. We're talking mega super smart people. As I was looking through the various accomplishments and degrees that a lot of these participants have, I

started to feel very badly about myself. I consider myself to be a fairly smart person, but these folks leave me in the dust. So each team member has assigned duties that they must complete day to day. Sometimes it's mundane stuff like cleaning up the habitat or cooking or something along those lines. Sometimes it's mission oriented stuff like going out on a Mars walk or conducting experiments within the habitat itself, but they can also pursue personal research

projects during the course of the experiment. So a lot of the people who apply to be part of High Seas are also graduate students. Typically uh and a year long commitment's a big deal. I mean, you can do some really serious research within the course of a year, but that's a full year of your life. So here's the mission team from Mission for You had Commander Carmel Johnston. She's a soil scientist from Montana and her primary focus was to study how a Martian crew might grow food

on a real mission. Um you had Christian Heinek, a physicist and engineer from Germany. She had worked on projects ranging from electro magnetic phenomena like the polar lights two simulations of the Earth's mantle before she joined High Seas. Super smart like her degrees are crazy because they focus on so many different different disciplines of science. She clearly is very intelligent and very curious, which is awesome. Then

there was Shana Gifford. She also has a ton of academic credentials, including degrees and clinical laboratory science, biotechnology, journalism, and neuroscience. And she's also a science communicator, so as a fellow science communicator again, I am humbled by her accomplishments. I should get her on the show if I can, uh yet. Andre Stewart an aerospace engineer and flight engineer for NASA. He's also he was working for Lockheed Martin

before this this project. And there's also a picture of him in the habitat wearing a Jane hat from Firefly, so that's kind of awesome. H Then you have Cyprien Versus, an astrobiologist expert. One of his goals is to pioneer are ways that future Martian colonists will produce various resources using biological processes, which would mean you'd use you know,

like bacteria to produce stuff you would need. You would genetically modify the bacteria so that waste products that otherwise would just be thrown out could be converted into useful stuff. That could be everything from helping generate food or oxygen or rocket fuel even And the goal is to make Martian colonies, future Martian colonies more independent from Earth, not as like some sort of utopian society, but rather you

don't have to rely on so many resupplies. You can support yourself independently, which would really increase the success probabilities of such a colony be really important. So that was really what he was focused on. And then you had Tristan basin th Weight, who's an architect, and he was studying human habitation extreme environments. So kind of a person who's living through this experience making note of it, making

suggestions for what future habitats should incorporate. Maybe maybe elements they should get rid of, or elements they should add. Stuff that will again improve the success rate of any future Martian colony. So what was the outcome, Well, they spent a full year in that habitat, so that part was a success. They did not have to end the

experiment early. No one got severely injured. One of the bright spots they said, is that when you are six people that are completely separated from everyone else, no one gets sick because viruses and can't just spontaneously pop up. You could get uh, some food poisoning or something. And in fact, one of the participants did get hit by like a stomach bug of some sort or just maybe something they just did not agree with them for one

reason or another. But apart from that, they couldn't pass anything along to each other because they were all healthy when they went into the habitat, so I said that was kind of cool, But keeping people happy when isolated for a really long time is very difficult. According to members of the crew, one of the best ways to improve morale is through emergencies. Really, because an emergency requires the crew to work together and focus on a particular task.

You cannot act as a lone wolf or else everybody dies the mission is in jeopardy. So when the emergency is over, everyone feels satisfied and they feel closer to each other. But being in those close quarters for that long doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be the best of buddies with everyone when it's over. The participants have been pretty diplomatic about this, but it's clear that some folks are gonna be in touch with each other for a

very long time and other folks maybe not so much. Um, So it's not like everyone becomes in separable at the end of this, so that's kind of interesting. There's very little privacy in the habitat. I mean, everyone has their

own private bedroom. But that bedroom, like I says, a closet um, and there's no real space to kind of get away unless you go to that bedroom, assuming that you have the time to do so, because you also have duties to perform, and most of the stuff the the actual possessions in the habitat were pretty much considered communal property. You could have private possessions, but you also understood that those private possessions might end up getting pulled

into a solution to a problem. So it may mean the thing you were thinking of as yours becomes important to solve an engineering issue. It sounds very kind of mcgeiver ishu, but it's true. And it's also a challenge to learn how each person is going to respond to and manage the stress of being in this isolated environment. Some management strategies like being passive aggressive don't work in a small, enclosed environment where people can't get away from

each other. And also you had the challenge of cultural differences being involved. This was an international series of missions, meaning that there were people from all different parts of the world who could potentially be part of this. Now that meant a couple of different things. That cultural differences could rear up and cause friction. But it also meant that people got to try different cuisines from other parts of the world, and apparently that was one of the

big things. People really like the idea of trying stuff like home cooked meals from other cultures, and it was an interesting way to broaden your horizons. But yeah, that cultural difference could also pose an issue with communication. So, like I said, basic for Weight himself was saying, sometimes they would just plan an impromptu e V, a extra vehicular activity, essentially a Mars walk, just to alleviate boredom.

That you would go through the whole process of suiting up and going through the airlock, which could take around an hour to do. Uh, that's a lot of work just to avoid tedium. Now, this particular mission, Mission four of High Seas is over. It's not the only time we've ever seen people try to simulate the isolation people would feel if they were to go to Mars. Actually, in Russia, there have been a series of three experiments

where people were living in a simulated spacecraft. The three experiments collectively totaled sixty days, and the last of the three experiments was five hundred twenty days, so like a year and a half of isolation. The mission included a simulated landing on Mars that long one did, as well as three e v A s on the Martian surface. According to the Russians at the time, everything turned out swimmingly.

There have been some other reports that said that there were you know, there were issues, not nothing that would stop the mission, but that not everything was absolutely perfect as you might have been led to believe. Um, so there could be some propaganda stuff going on in there. I would imagine any group, even if you have very disciplined people, would suffer setbacks now and again just because

of the various different personalities and the stress involved. But what's next, Well, the next High Seas experiment is already in the planning stages. If you wanted to apply, oops, because this episode is going to come out too late for you to do that. I'm recording this on September two, two sixteen, but applications are due on September five, and this episode goes up after that, And as far as I know, the applications are for both of the last

two missions that are scheduled. One schedule for two seventeen, one schedule for two thousand and eighteen. They're both going to last eight months long each, so I apologize if you wanted to apply, it's too late. Those are supposed to be the two final experiments for high seas, though you never know, there may be another high seas experiment,

perhaps a redesigned habitat um. I don't know how that's going to turn out after these last two missions, or if the whole thing will just say all right, here's all the data we gathered and now this branch of experimentation is over. That's a possibility, And then of course we have the long term goal of actually going to Mars. A Martian habitat might be at least partially underground in a future Mars colony. The reason to put a Martian colony underground is to protect against that radiation I was

talking about. You would want protection from cosmic radiation as well as X rays, ultraviolet rays, that kind of stuff,

and the Martian soil could do that for you. Since there's no magnetosphere or not a strong one anyway to protect you, you could protect yourself by burying your habitats under the ground, So you would probably have a few surface level buildings with tunnels that lead down into underground habitats where people were actually living, and you would do the same process of getting into a space suit if you want to emerge out on the Martian surface. One of the different proposals I have seen a lot of

different UH proposed missions to Mars involved. This would include sending robots ahead of time to go and excavate an area where then they could assemble at least some of the habitats and then piled dirt regulus on top of them to bury them. And that way astronauts when they arrive at Mars would already have a place to go to. They wouldn't have to set it up themselves. That seems

pretty intelligent to me. They would also involve sending cargo ahead of time so that when the mark the the the Martian UH colonists or the explorers more likely explorers than colonists. First off, when they land, they would already

have some of their stuff there. They wouldn't have to take everything with them, and thus again you could spread out the weight of all of that stuff across multiple launches instead of trying to pack it all into a single one, and they could then take those that cargo storied in the proper space and start their mission uh, probably for a couple of years, and then try a

return trip to Earth. We're talking about probably a full like three to three and a half years for a full Martian mission, when you include the trips out to Mars back from Mars, and the time spent on Mars. Uh. I think it's really exciting, and I love that we have been working very seriously on designing a habitat that meets both the technical requirements we would have on Mars

and the psychological requirements we would have. Because if you've ever really used any technology developed entirely just by engineers, you may notice will it works, but it doesn't work in a way that seems natural or intuitive. Sometimes that happens, and it may be that it makes perfect sense. It just requires you to think in a very specific way. You have to adjust your behavior and your thinking so that you get the most out of that piece of technology.

But when you're talking about people living on another planet, you want that to be effortless. You don't want to have to adjust your thinking and your behavior to your destination, or at least not entirely. Some of that is absolutely necessary. Because of the differences between Mars and Earth. But you want the the habitat two be as much benefit to you as possible. So anyway, thank you so much Jeremiah for the suggestion. I really appreciate it. This was a

lot of fun to look into. Um I'm sad that I was not able to see this habitat the last time I was in Hawaii, which was not that long ago. When I was less in Hawaii, this experiment was underway. They were inside the habitat, but it's not exactly on an easily accessible part of Manta Loah, which is part of the point, right. You wouldn't want it to be

easily accessible. Then you could put the whole experiment at risk with tourists just walking up and standing on the surface of Mars in the background of the pictures as astronauts are trying to do missions. That would be a little silly. So I totally understand. But still it's kind of a bummer because I would love to see this place. I mean, I really really would love to see this place, and I got to Hawaii a lot. So if anyone at High Seas is like, hey, when we're not doing

a mission, we're not doing an experiment. UH, and you want to see this space, come on over. Please let me know, because I will do it in a heartbeat. I will book a trip to Hawaii so I can see it. First of all, I love Hawaii, UH and

I would love to go back again. And second of all, I think it would be the experience of a lifetime even just to walk around this habitat and see the condition of the space and how what it must feel like to be in that space, even just for a few like a half hour, as opposed to a full year, It would be phenomenal. But I hold out very little hope that anyone that high sees is listening to this um if they are passed along, I'd love to check it out. Guys, this has been a fantastic time for me.

I hope you've enjoyed it. I didn't go into too much pirate voice, so I hope that helps, and didn't make too many high seas funds. I really look forward to tackling a lot more UH topics that you guys choose. Just send me messages, send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or send it to me on Twitter or Facebook. At both of those the handles text stuff hs W. You can also fall allow my personal Twitter account that's John Strickland, j O N S t R I C K L A

N D and UM. I post all the time from there, often about my dog, So if you don't want to see that, it's I don't blame you, but he is adorable and you should look at him because he's the cutest. You guys, have a great day. I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has staff works dot com