> It's really difficult to be isolated in a high stress environment.
Mars seems more like a high boredom environment. It's a dead planet where nothing more than the occasional feeble dust storm happen.
Mars seems more like a high boredom environment. It's a dead planet where nothing more than the occasional feeble dust storm happen.
Adding to the difficulties imposed by the harshness of the environment and the paucity of its resources, a habitat there will be more remote than any human habitat that has existed in centuries, perhaps in history, in terms of difficulty of resupplying it.
Simply surviving without the vast support network of civilization at hand is a constant struggle on Earth, and all of this will be exponentially more challenging on Mars.
Even a technology as seemingly unrelated to Mars settlement as autonomous robots I believe would see significant advances as part of any effort to create a permanent human presence on Mars.
My point is not that it's safe, but that there isn't much to do there, and very little unforeseen happens.
I assume no one goes to Mars without the resources to live safely and feed themselves. If we're talking about some adventurers hijacking a Starship, I fully agree that they're in for a world of stress :)
Something tells me that the first few thousand people sent to Mars won't be bored. There will be tons of things to do in the pursuit of making a habitable space.
Besides that, you have the constant death factor. I know we all live with risk 24/7. But, unless we're doing something outside our comfort zone, our brains largely ignore it. Living on Mars will not be like that for a settler. There are real risks that some piece of equipment will fail and kill you all. You'll likely be well aware of that because you'll be working on it. (Or worse, that idiot over there holding the spanner the wrong way is working on it.)
This is the key, IMHO. We've simulated such things as human isolation and closed-loop ecologies before, numerous times. And we did learn some things. But I don't think there is much you can do, and surely not anything ethical, that would correctly simulate being months away from Earth.
Just as you said, when you're on-planet, anything that goes wrong can be dealt with. Have a leak you can't fix? Someone just had a medial issue and is unresponsive? You just can't take it any more? Whatever the case, help is just a press of the red button away. I'm not sure if you've played many video games on Hardcore mode, but it's a totally different experience to know your saved game file(s) are in jeopardy if what you're about to do goes south. I would imagine the feeling is somewhat like this, but worse.
A lunar base might simulate it. An undersea base (as you suggested) might work too if you put it deep enough. But again, you're entering unethical territory here by making something exceedingly dangerous just for the sake of increasing the risk/stress.