As part of our regular weekly feature, New Atlas asked two of the mission participants what their biggest positive and negative surprises were from living in close quarters with other people for a full year.
The first to respond was Tristan Bassingthwaighte, the mission's architect who would like to one day design a real habitat for life on Mars.
I would say the biggest positive is that when you remove social media, TV and commuting, and even the need to have a job – because you can't go to a job when you're in there – you had a lot of time to do stuff for yourself. For example, I learned how to salsa dance, trained for and ran a marathon, lost 20 pounds (9 kg) and got back in shape, learned how to cook, got 150 pages of my doctorate written, and did a lot of funky t-shirt designs.
There's so much time to really work on yourself that if you have another person who might be excited and keep you on task, you just kind of go for it. You'd be amazed at the amount of stuff you could get done. I came out a much more talented and experienced person in a way, because I had the time to develop myself that daily life rarely gives us.
And then this:
Probably the biggest negative surprise was how difficult it can be working with people. That can be taken as a general statement, or maybe applied to certain kinds of people.
I suspect for many of us this is partly what has us looking "outside the lines".
Nice comparison!
However, one of the many things I am really looking forward to after quitting the work force is to study and gain new knowledge on scientific topics - and my method will be by using moocs and access to online scientific jounals. Thus, without internet access (or at least access to a huge university library) this will a disappointment. Learning salsa is maybe fun if there is a good salsa teacher around, but it is not on my wish list nor is running marathon or loosing weight.