I'm An Astronaut, Get Me Out Of Here
As if weekend television couldn't get any worse, 'I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here' has started up again. What can we learn from watching a group of celebrities, or otherwise, performing 'terrifying' tasks in an isolated environment? The 'contestants' will be pushed to their extremes, both by the loneliness and conversely by the fact that they will never by able to escape the company of the others. The tasks will demand concentration, commitment and the facing of fears. Tensions will inevitably run high and conflict will occur. This makes for some excellent TV, or so I am told.
The last decade of 'reality TV' probably hasn't told us much about being human, but perhaps it has inspired scientists to start questioning how we will ever travel beyond our own 'Pale Blue Dot'. If we were to send a manned space mission to Mars, the minimum distance that would need to be covered is around 50 million kilometres. It takes light 4 minutes to cover this distance. Since communications with home are achieved using light waves and considering this is the minimum distance between the Earth and Mars, the crew of such a mission to Mars would expect to have between a 4 and a 20 minute delay in communicating with home. Add a flight time of 500 days and the constant fear of a crisis, and it's very easy to see how drained these pioneering explorers will become.
Scientists want to know how humans react under such intense confinement. Do the group of people end up falling out, or do the majority of the members pick on the weakest person? Can we design a space mission to avoid these conflicts? After analysis of data from a slightly wacky experiment in Russia, answers to these questions are being answered.
The Mars 500 experiment was the mission to Mars, that never left Earth. Six 'astronauts' were locked in a shed for 520 days in order to simulate some of the psychological and physiological challenges of deep space travel. The simulation was so realistic that there was even a chance to 'walk on the surface of Mars'. In the mid-section of the journey the only way of communicating with 'mission control' was through recorded, video updates or email; this would have felt like communicating with someone via youtube and simulated the delay in communication a real Mars crew would experience.
Creativity blossomed. Quite unexpectantly, the researchers discovered that the test subjects would find new, interesting ways of entertaining themselves. The multicultural crew members tried to learn each others' languages, took to practicing with musical instruments and even made their own Christmas decorations. The conclusion that seemed to come out of this observation was that objects must be planted in the space ship that encourage creativity.
Surprises were buried in the space ship by 'mission control' in order to break the monotony of space travel. This got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if the spaceship designers built in a riddle to the space ship. Something along the lines of notpron or a puzzle game to match the 'glyph puzzles' in Assassins Creed! Imagine embedding objects in a spaceship, knowing they will be found like apple cores in an ape enclosure. These objects could then be used to keep the crew entertained in new and interesting ways. An adult lego system? Or a huge, 3D puzzle that grows as each piece of the puzzle is uncovered? The voyage to Mars just got cooler!
So how can reality TV be useful? Well, since the TV shows are made 'for entertainment' we can be sure that the environment is made such that conflict is almost inevitable. Surely we can ask the same set designers to do the opposite, to create an environment that encourages cohesion between 'inmates' and ensuring that conflict is largely avoided.
The last decade of 'reality TV' probably hasn't told us much about being human, but perhaps it has inspired scientists to start questioning how we will ever travel beyond our own 'Pale Blue Dot'. If we were to send a manned space mission to Mars, the minimum distance that would need to be covered is around 50 million kilometres. It takes light 4 minutes to cover this distance. Since communications with home are achieved using light waves and considering this is the minimum distance between the Earth and Mars, the crew of such a mission to Mars would expect to have between a 4 and a 20 minute delay in communicating with home. Add a flight time of 500 days and the constant fear of a crisis, and it's very easy to see how drained these pioneering explorers will become.
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| Mars! Only 200 days away, |
The Mars 500 experiment was the mission to Mars, that never left Earth. Six 'astronauts' were locked in a shed for 520 days in order to simulate some of the psychological and physiological challenges of deep space travel. The simulation was so realistic that there was even a chance to 'walk on the surface of Mars'. In the mid-section of the journey the only way of communicating with 'mission control' was through recorded, video updates or email; this would have felt like communicating with someone via youtube and simulated the delay in communication a real Mars crew would experience.
Creativity blossomed. Quite unexpectantly, the researchers discovered that the test subjects would find new, interesting ways of entertaining themselves. The multicultural crew members tried to learn each others' languages, took to practicing with musical instruments and even made their own Christmas decorations. The conclusion that seemed to come out of this observation was that objects must be planted in the space ship that encourage creativity.
Surprises were buried in the space ship by 'mission control' in order to break the monotony of space travel. This got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if the spaceship designers built in a riddle to the space ship. Something along the lines of notpron or a puzzle game to match the 'glyph puzzles' in Assassins Creed! Imagine embedding objects in a spaceship, knowing they will be found like apple cores in an ape enclosure. These objects could then be used to keep the crew entertained in new and interesting ways. An adult lego system? Or a huge, 3D puzzle that grows as each piece of the puzzle is uncovered? The voyage to Mars just got cooler!
So how can reality TV be useful? Well, since the TV shows are made 'for entertainment' we can be sure that the environment is made such that conflict is almost inevitable. Surely we can ask the same set designers to do the opposite, to create an environment that encourages cohesion between 'inmates' and ensuring that conflict is largely avoided.
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