(harrowing music) (wind whistling)
- Men wanted for hazardous journey,
safe return doubtful,
honor and recognition in case of success,
- [Host] Legend has that Sir Ernest Shackleton placed this ad
in "The London Times" in December of 1913
to recruit for his Antarctic expedition.
While the text of the ad
most likely never actually appeared in the newspaper,
these words paint a true picture
of what this expedition would entail.
They never reached Antarctica.
Their ship became perilously stuck
in ice at the end of the world,
slowly being crushed in the darkness,
stranded and completely isolated from the rest of humanity
in the harshest conditions on the planet.
What kept the crew from succumbing to madness?
Now, is this a fascinating historical mystery? Sure.
But more than a century later, historians, scientists,
and a new era of explorers
are realizing this failed expedition
also holds key lessons for our future:
how astronauts might survive on a journey to Mars.
(subdued music)
Shackleton and his 27-man crew
set sail aboard the Endurance in 1914
with the goal of becoming the first expedition
to cross Antarctica on foot.
But after departing from a whaling station
in South Georgia in December,
the crew would end up having no contact
with the outside world for nearly 500 days.
Less than a month later,
with Antarctica visible on the horizon,
the Endurance became trapped in sea ice.
It didn't take long for Shackleton to realize
that a hope for escape wouldn't come for months.
They had no way of communicating
with anyone beyond the ship for help,
but Shackleton knew that if they were
to have any hope of survival,
he had to convince his crew that rescue was possible.
From the start, Shackleton made sure
the crew stayed busy with teamwork.
They occupied their time with things
like soccer and hockey on the ice,
building igloos and even dogloos for their sled dogs
and training the dogs
for the still-planned trek across Antarctica.
In these early days, spirits and hope remain high,
but Shackleton knew the Endurance was slowly being crushed
by the force of the ice.
He began to prepare for the inevitable,
stowing supplies in the three lifeboats they had aboard.
And in October, 10 months after setting sail,
the ship began to take on water,
and that's when Shackleton made
a fateful declaration to his crew.
"Ship and stores have gone, so now we'll go home."
The mission to cross Antarctica was officially over.
He'd given them a new mission: to get back home safely.
The men salvaged as much as they could
before the ship was lost to the ice,
including the three lifeboats, food, clothing, tents,
everything they would need
to start a long trek across the sea ice
toward potential escape.
They also grabbed things
that might not seem like necessities for survival at first:
a bunch of books and a banjo.
Shackleton knew if there was any hope
to keep his crew alive and sane
while isolated from the world,
he needed to keep them focused
on the ultimate goal of getting home.
Psychological effects had been documented
by previous polar explorers like hallucinogenic fugue states
and a nervous irritability dubbed "expedition madness."
Shackleton kept a careful eye on the morale of his crew.
To keep their spirits up,
they celebrated holidays, put on plays,
sang and wrote songs, journaled,
read a lot of books, and exercised frequently.
If the conditions of the day were particularly depressing,
he'd tell the expedition cook to make an extravagant meal.
Well, as extravagant as you could get
when your diet is seal, penguin,
and dwindling rations from the ship
like tinned herring and fish paste.
But how long could they survive
isolated at the end of the world?
Surprisingly, an Antarctic expedition
that happened over a century ago can teach us a lot
about the isolation astronauts will face
on the two-year round-trip journey to Mars.
Cultural anthropologist, Dr. Jack Stuster points out
that while spaceships may be much more technically complex
than sailing ships,
they are similar psychological environments,
with crews that are isolated
from the rest of humanity for extended periods of time.
Isolation.
The experience of being physically
and psychologically cut off from humanity
is one of a handful of colossal challenges
faced by explorers.
For decades, Antarctic expeditions have been used
as both environmental and psychological analogs
for researchers interested
in how the isolation of space travel
will affect the human mind.
But a mission to Mars would be even more isolated
than most Antarctic expeditions.
Shackleton had approved 27,
while early missions to the red planet
would likely have just six to eight crew members.
This is Dr. Nina Lanza.
She's a planetary scientist who specializes in Mars.
And she also worked in Antarctica
as part of a program called
the Antarctic Search for Meteorites.
Pairs of scientists are sent
to live in tents out on the vast ice sheet
for six weeks at a time.
They have no creature comforts
and almost no contact with the outside world.
- One of the things about going to Antarctica
is that it's really, really isolated,
like more isolated than any other place on earth.
And because of that, it's a really good place to train
for long-duration space flight missions
because you're kind of in a spaceship, in your little tent,
and you need to spend a lot of time inside
in very cramped quarters
with people that you might not have known very well
before you started your mission.
- Psychological effects of extreme isolation
have been documented
in both real and simulated space missions
as well as during modern polar expeditions.
And these symptoms include depression,
hostility, trouble sleeping,
and issues with memory, attention, and cognition.
And these could cause problems,
not only for the crew members suffering those symptoms,
but for the entire expedition.
- One of the things that surprised me the most
about doing this work in Antarctica
was how much the isolation really affected me.
I knew I would be away from my family,
but I didn't realize how disconnected I would be
from my regular reality.
So it's incredibly discombobulating
and it really felt like I was on another planet.
- You might think one solution to the loneliness
would be for the crew members to talk
to their friends and families back home more often
to stay connected with the outside world.
Astronauts in the International Space Station
often look forward to their video calls
with family members back home.
In some cases, however, research has shown
that too much connection with the outside world
can be harmful rather than helpful.
In Antarctica, distractions around communications from home
have led to accidents and even sending crew members home.
During NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog missions,
most of the crew members stopped reading the news from Earth
despite being offered daily newspapers
because they wanted to escape the real world.
It was a distraction from the mission.
Admiral Richard Byrd, who spent eight months alone
in a 9x13-foot hut near the South Pole in 1934
even noted that getting news updates
from the outside world via radio
caused him anxiety rather than relief.
Saying "The few world news items which were read to me
seemed almost as meaningless as they might to a Martian."
There's a delicate balance to strike:
maintaining important connections with friends and family
while also keeping focus on the expedition at hand.
- We really have to work together
because our lives truly depend on it,
and so that's really important that we let things go.
You know, sometimes people irritate you,
especially if you're living in
an eight foot by eight foot tent with them, you know,
but we have to find a way to make it work
or else we cannot get our mission done
and we might actually hurt ourselves.
- Many of us experienced
the psychological challenges of isolation
during the COVID-19 pandemic,
but space and polar explorers face a form of isolation
that few humans ever will.
Isolation even leads to physical changes in our brains.
A group of German researchers took MRIs
of the brains of an Antarctic crew
before and after a 14-month-long mission.
They found that portions of their hippocampus
shrunk in volume.
This is the part of the brain responsible
for regulating things like memory, learning,
motivation, and emotion.
The researchers attributed these changes to a combination
of the monotony of their daily tasks and environment,
social and physical isolation, and stress.
These are all conditions that astronauts would face
on a journey to Mars as well.
There are two big unique concerns, however,
for crews traveling to Mars
the terrestrial explorers don't encounter.
The first is delayed communication.
Even at the speed of light,
signals from Earth take anywhere
between 4 and 40 minutes to reach Mars.
This means that at some point
along the journey to the red planet,
astronauts will no longer be able to communicate
with anyone outside of their ship in real time.
Living in a world today where we are constantly connected,
this will be a huge psychological shift.
Mars analog missions here on Earth, like Hi-SEAS,
simulate this time delay
when talking to anyone outside of their habitat.
But mentally, it's probably not quite the same
as knowing you are truly, completely, cut off
from the rest of humanity.
And these analog missions can't simulate
the second big concern:
the Earth-out-of-view phenomenon.
It's the point in the journey to Mars
where earth becomes a nearly indistinguishable blip of light
against the background stars.
Psychologists think this may lead
to deep feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Humans have never been that far from our home planet before.
This might all sound pretty bad,
but there's something called the paradox of solitude.
Isolation has both negative and positive effects.
Spending time alone with your thoughts can reduce stress
and give space for self-exploration,
a feeling of connectedness with yourself and the universe.
You might have experienced some of this yourself
if you've ever tried meditation
or gone camping in the wilderness.
And this sentiment is heavily reflected in the diaries
of Antarctic explorers like Shackleton and Byrd,
even memoirs of modern day astronauts.
- One of my favorite things that we did every single day
that we were out in the fields
that we read from the journals
of Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton.
And it's incredible because a lot of the things
that they were thinking and feeling
were the same things that we were thinking and feeling.
It's very harsh in in the Antarctic environment.
It can be really grinding.
Whenever I felt myself feeling very negative
and being upset about little things, I always took a moment
to focus on the horizon and to remind myself of where I was.
You know, Antarctica is an incredibly beautiful place
and you know, just looking out
and focusing outward and at a distance
to realize I'm so privileged to be in this place.
And so that's what I tried to do to keep perspective.
Just to think about how fortunate I was.
- Shackleton's crew spent
about 15 months stuck in Antarctica
before they made it to a location
where they could launch their lifeboats
toward Elephant Island.
This was far from the end of their journey, however.
The island was uninhabited.
Shackleton decided to set forth in one of the lifeboats
with five of his crew, hoping to make it back
to the whaling station in South Georgia
where they'd last had contact with the outside world.
It would take another four months
before a rescue ship with Shackleton on board
would make it through the sea ice back to Elephant Island.
And he arrived to find every single one of his crew alive.
Despite the dire situation faced by Shackleton's crew
as they were stranded on the ice,
he later wrote that the team,
"adjusted with surprisingly little trouble
to their new life,
and most of them were quite sincerely happy."
Humans are remarkably resilient creatures
when survival is on the line.
Their full ordeal lasted 22 months,
on the order of a round trip journey to Mars.
While our technology for exploration may have changed a lot
since the time of Shackleton,
humans, at their core, haven't.
Thanks to Shackleton's experience, leadership,
and keen observation of his crew,
he was able to maintain their mental health
as well as crew cohesion, comradery,
despite their extreme isolation and the risks that held.
- He never made it to the South Pole,
but in many ways what he accomplished
was even more incredible because he was able
to save every single person on his expedition,
even though they lost everything,
they literally lost their boat
and they had to find their way back to civilization.
- They were a team working together for survival
and the ultimate shared goal of getting home.
That same type of leadership and teamwork will be critical
for humans to make the journey to Mars
and stay happy and healthy in the process.
These days, we are really good
at getting humans safely to and from Antarctica,
and even to the International Space Station and back.
We know the technology we need to get to Mars
and to keep humans alive on the way,
but even with hundreds of years
of exploration experience under our belts,
it's still us, the human element,
that isn't fully understood.
"Uncharted Expeditions" is a special series
exploring the unique challenges facing human explorers
as we set off in the next great era
of discovery beyond Earth.
Make sure you subscribe to PBS Terra
so that you don't miss a single episode.
And to learn more about the effects
of isolation on astronauts in space,
be sure to watch "Space: The Longest Goodbye"
on the PBS app or just check the link down below.