You are in the vanguard of humanity, aboard a spaceship to Mars with five other men and women.
For more than 17 months, with the perilous void surrounding your tiny refuge, the six of you will share the work and the heroics, battling emergencies, equipment glitches and other hazards on this pioneering mission.
But you will also share your personal habits and prejudices, your body odors, your petty jealousies and rivalries, your food, which has the consistency of boiled cardboard.
PHOTO: AFP
And all these irritants will be magnified by the fact that you can't walk out of the door and there's no short cut home.
So when your depressive fellow crew member with halitosis picks his toenails as he shows you his family snapshots for the 38th time, a catchline for a 1970s horror movie may well pop up in your mind: In space, no one can hear you scream.
"The biggest risk is not physical, it's psychological, it's being confronted by yourself, of discovering who you are," says French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haignere, who spent 186 days aboard the Russian orbital spaceship Mir in 1993.
Mental endurance for interplanetary trips is now to be put to the test in the biggest space flight simulation ever.
Six people are to be confined for 520 days - and will continue to 700 days if they pass this first milestone successfully - in a mockup Martian spaceship in a research lab in Moscow.
If all goes well, the big experiment will start in late 2008, after one or possibly two 105-day simulations to fine-tune work routines and emergency scenarios.
The cosmos is a deeply hostile place for humans, but the risk multiplies many times when it comes to long-term trips.
Beyond our backyard, voyages expose a body to cosmic radiation that can slice through DNA with the ease of a cordon-bleu chef chopping carrots.
Muscles become flaccid in the absence of gravity and bones lose their density. And that doesn't take into account other hazards such as life-support failure, communications breakdown or an asteroid strike.
But these may be well outstripped by the challenge of keeping focused - and sane.
The six test subjects will be confined to five interconnected modules, comprising a common living area, individual bedrooms, a bathroom, command module and a fitness room, totaling the equivalent volume of nine 60-cubic-meter truck containers.
No contact will be allowed with the outside world except via the fake mission control. Communications, by radio and email, will be delayed by up to 40 minutes, replicating the time it would take for messages to cross the 56 million kilometers between Earth and Mars.
Food will be meal packets of the kind eaten aboard the International Space Station (ISS), supplemented by treats on special days. Alcohol and smoking are out.
For 250 days, the six crew will simulate the outward trip to Mars. Then, for 30 days, three of them will be cloistered in part of the ship to simulate the descent to Mars and the operations there. The trio then "return" to dock with the mother ship for the 240-day trip home.
The door of the ship will remain closed, and no one will be allowed to intervene or leave except in an "absolute, severe emergency," such as a fire, says Marc Heppener of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Science and Application Division.
Even some surgical emergencies, such as appendicitis, could be expected to be dealt with by the crew.
Viktor Baranov of Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP), which is carrying out the simulation, says he has had 150 applications from prospective candidates. On Tuesday at the Paris Air Show, ESA announced it was calling for applications from citizens of its own member states.
The gender lineup has yet to be determined.
Some experts think a single-sex crew may operate more effectively because there is no risk of sexual rivalry if a couple happen to pair up, while others think that the presence of the opposite sex provides a calming factor and a valuable, different perspective on problems.
Nor is there any agreement about what would be a good number - five men to one woman (or the reverse) could lead to sexual rivalry, and three-three may lead to gender tribalism, pitching men against women. "Four and two might be appropriate," says Heppener.
In many minds is an ugly incident that happened in a 110-day experiment in Moscow in 1999, when two Russian men engaged in a fistfight and one of them forcibly kissed a Canadian female participant. She stuck with the mission but insisted on having a lock fitted to her door.
As for the crew, organizers are looking for people aged 25-50 who are engineers and biologists, as well as a doctor - and all must have proficiency in Russian and English.
Then comes the character part, in which candidates will be slimmed down by psychological profiling and other tests.
"You must be a team player but also able to work by yourself," says Heppener, acknowledging that this all amounts to a mixture as exceptional as a trip to Mars itself.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS