The competition is on. The US and China, along with companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, have ambitious plans to send humans to the Moon and Mars, with the ultimate goal of setting up temporary or permanent outposts. As global powers and entrepreneurial tycoons surge forward in this new space race, scientists want to better understand the challenges humans will confront when living in extraterrestrial environments.
To prepare for humankind’s spacefaring future, extensive funding, time, and effort have gone into observing test subjects living in an assortment of analogue environments across some of the harshest and most forbidding locations on Earth. Recent projects include NASA’s NEEMO, in which astronauts and others live for up to three weeks at a time at a station located 20 meters beneath the ocean’s surface near the Florida Keys. At Antarctica’s Concordia Station, scientists brave temperatures as low as –80 °C to simulate long-duration space missions. Perhaps the most famous example is Biosphere 2, an experiment in which eight crew members spent two years, beginning in September 1991, closed off in a 3.14-acre artificial ecosystem in Arizona. Such projects allow researchers to examine, at least to some extent, complex social phenomena such as eating habits, privacy, conflict and resolution, sexuality, and gender.
Yet significant gaps in our understanding of the complexities of life on an alien world remain, particularly involving factors such as birth, death, war, peace, reproduction, hierarchy, and kinship. Those cannot be comprehensively analyzed within the confines of past and present analogue sites, even multiyear experiments such as Biosphere 2. Researchers could, for example, stage a war among a group of test subjects, but war games will never approach the real thing. In many situations, simulation just doesn’t compare with reality.
A better option is to refocus analogue research on populations that were born and raised in environments that can serve as serendipitous analogues to extraterrestrial ones. Although research has been conducted on the behavior of those who inhabit extreme environments, none has been done with space travel in mind. An ideal place to start is by studying the diverse collection of people indigenous to Arctic environments.
Arctic peoples, such as the Northern Cree, Saami, Aleuts, Chukchi, and Inuit, typically live in extreme climates that require protective clothing and specialized tools. Living and working on a distant planet, moon, or asteroid will also require specially designed equipment such as breathing apparatuses and space suits. Arctic communities are often remote and isolated, which leads to a level of self-sufficiency when it comes to industry, medicine, and social development. An extraterrestrial human civilization would have to be similarly independent and rely on its own inhabitants, along with the tools and resources at hand, to make the most of opportunities and handle complications that arise.
By adapting an ethnographic approach—living as the natives live and observing all aspects of an Arctic society from as unbiased a perspective as possible—researchers could observe cultural phenomena and practices that can’t be observed in simulation with authenticity. They could explore intrinsic aspects of human existence, such as birth and death, as well as other complex facets of culture that span generations.
To gain a preliminary understanding of what space scientists might learn from Arctic communities, I spoke with University of Florida anthropologist Peter Collings, whose research focuses on the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic. From our discussion I identified three lessons from Arctic peoples that would be useful for future spacefarers.
Lesson 1: Travel light. Arctic populations are primarily foragers who rely on hunting and gathering for sustenance and survival. During his ethnographic fieldwork, Collings observed that when Arctic peoples travel long distances, they bring along minimal supplies. If they need to construct or fix something, they come up with a solution using materials taken from their surroundings. They treat each problem they encounter uniquely and find solutions using resources that can be found across the tundra. “One wonders, as we get farther and farther from ground control, if there needs to be a social system that engages in problem solving in a subsistence fashion similar to the Inuit—one with independence,” Collings says.
In situ resource utilization (ISRU), the use of space-based resources for human missions in deep space, is a comparable concept and the subject of considerable research. NASA’s approach to ISRU technology advancement focuses on Mars atmosphere–based resource acquisition and processing, regolith-based volatiles resource acquisition and processing, and regolith-based in-space manufacturing and construction. Last year NASA selected four companies to address technology gaps associated with ISRU.
ISRU is ingrained in Arctic life. Resources are not acquired and kept, but rather found and used as needed. As humans travel farther from Earth and it becomes more and more difficult to receive resources, adopting a similar relationship with our environment might be not only optimal, but necessary.
Lesson 2: Avoid conflict. As Biosphere 2 demonstrated, long-duration analogue missions hold promise for constructing deeper and more accurate predictions about the realities of spaceflight. Two years was long enough for the biosphere participants to alter culinary customs, handle an ecological disaster, develop a disdain for artificial smells, and break into social factions.
In Arctic communities, multiple families often share a small, one-room space for months on end during the hunting season. The 1974 documentary Cree Hunters of Mistassini chronicles three families in James Bay, Northern Quebec, who share a 5 m × 5 m log house deep in the Arctic bush, where they spend the winter hunting and trapping. Throughout the film, narrator Boyce Richardson emphasizes their lack of conflict. Despite their confined quarters, the 12 family members never express anger toward one another. “There is a social structure built into Cree society that allows them to avoid conflict,” Collings says. “Westerners, and Americans especially, don’t have that built into their social systems.”
The stress levels humans will experience in extraterrestrial environments while participating in long-duration space missions go beyond necessitating thorough psychological and behavioral testing. By observing conflict resolution methods used by Arctic peoples, perhaps space scientists can work to understand not just how to handle conflict in the short term, but also how a society develops a social structure that remains inherently peaceful.
Lesson 3: Avoid generalizations and stereotypes. Hunters and gatherers interact with their environment differently from how the people of most Western civilizations interact with theirs. Collings describes a socialization pressure “that emphasizes willingness to experiment and engage with the world around them directly, and in ways Western educational systems don’t typically encourage.”
From his fieldwork, Collings noticed that Arctic peoples don’t generalize their environment. “When you watch a hunter interact with a caribou, they observe the caribou as an individual; they examine it with specificity,” he says. “They don’t make judgments, such as ‘This is the best way to hunt a caribou.’ Instead, each caribou is hunted independently.”
Arctic peoples’ knowledge isn’t a corpus of absolute facts; it’s a suite of cognitive skills that emphasize observing and interacting with the environment. “If you have that, you can construct the facts,” Collings says. “Inuit go out into the world, they experience, and they collect data—much like scientists.”
Humans won’t be hunting caribou in space, but they will be encountering unique challenges, obstacles, and opportunities. Not every problem will have an immediate or prescribed solution. Humans will bear hardships that previous generations haven’t borne.
Though many might consider Arctic environments harsh and unforgiving, peoples of the Arctic don’t. Arctic peoples exhibit inquisitiveness when facing both new and habitual experiences. They treat each situation with both caution and curiosity, and they avoid generalization and stereotyping of the environment. In a similar but undeniably grander sense, space exploration requires travelers to set aside biases and expectations, adapt to change, and accept the unexpected as unavoidable.
Although nobody is going to be living on the Moon or Mars in the foreseeable future, it’s imperative that researchers prepare for the cosmic goals that commercial and global powers so eagerly want to meet. Ethnographic observation of Arctic peoples would need to be conducted over a period of several months to several years. After tracking the customs and practices of native peoples to better understand why they do what they do, researchers would then need to conduct follow-up studies to turn that qualitative data into quantitative results. The more deeply we can understand complex social behaviors in the present, the more accurately we can formulate predictions about their evolution in a multigenerational extraterrestrial human civilization.
Analogue communities worthy of ethnographic exploration
Arctic peoples aren’t the only ones who might help researchers understand the complexities of living in extreme environments. Here are some others:
- Submarine crews. Crews on submarines are chosen for their ability to cope with isolation, the lack of diurnal cues, confinement, and the lack of privacy. Psychological, sociological, and biological research conducted on submariners offers hints on what we might expect to see on, say, a 225 million km journey to Mars.
- Ancestral Puebloans. Making predictions about the future often requires glimpsing into the past. From 100 to 1600 CE, the ancestral people of the US Southwest were experts at constructing their homes out of local hand-hewn stone and adobe mortar, similar to how future space wanderers may use Martian or lunar regolith as a building material.
- Oil rig workers. Like a spaceship or extraterrestrial outpost, oil rigs are driven by technology that is omnipresent. Surrounded by ocean, employees on rigs rely on their coworkers and the machines around them to work constructively. They possess the ability to handle often unpredictable situations, just as astronauts on space stations do.
Savannah Mandel is a social anthropologist whose research has focused on space science, technology, and society. Currently a writer for the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today), she has previously written for Anthropolitan, the CASTAC Platypus blog, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. In her spare time, she writes a science-fiction serial for the Geek Anthropologist.
