When it comes to building a sustainable settlement on Mars, the technological and engineering challenges are steep. But they take a back seat to the Human Resources department. Forget sophisticated vehicles or sensitive instrumentation—the most temperamental, fragile things we send to the Red Planet will be humans.
After all, NASA’s Opportunity rover roamed Mars for 14 years, separated from Earth by a half-hour communications delay, scoured by dust storms and irradiated by cosmic rays, and never complained or got into a fight with a colleague.
Humans, though, will be sequestered “in a confined space about the size of a small RV for three years,” James Driskell, a research psychologist at the Florida Maxima Corporation, says of most plausible NASA Mars mission scenarios. Driskell and his company have consulted with the space agency and the US military on the psychological issues of crews in isolated and stressful situations. In tight quarters, “people get angry at each other.”
Tl;dr: “I’m making broad, sweeping generalizations that condemn everyone who thinks differently than I do, while at the same time accusing everyone I disagree with of making broad, sweeping generalizations about me. People with different lifestyles than my own scare me, and instead of trying to learn or develop empathy, I’m going to complain that the rest of the world doesn’t loath trans and poor people as much as I do and daydream about a society where they don’t exist.”
The greatest trick the far right ever pulled was convincing the country that “activist” is a bad word.