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What You Can Learn from Living in Antarctica

69 points by dnetesn 6y ago

bagels 6y ago
Favorite Antarctica story: October 2018 – On 9 October 2018, a stabbing occurred at the Bellingshausen Station (станция Беллинсгаузен), a Russian research station on King George Island.[18] The perpetrator was Sergey Savitsky (Сергей Савицкий), a 54-year-old electrical engineer.[19] He stabbed Oleg Beloguzov (Олег Белогузов), a 52-year old welder, in the chest[19] multiple times.[20] According to some sources, the attack occurred because Beloguzov was giving away the endings of books that Savitsky checked out at the station's library.[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica
- mbeex 6y ago
  Opposite Favourite: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442 A remark from the article comes to mind: "If you’ve got a bunch of pessimists together, then nothing is going to happen other than misery."
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Interesting the guy survived. I wonder if the cold actually helps survival from wounds. In any case, the long list of professionals going crazy suggests the conditions at the stations cause emotional instability - I assume being stuck with a stranger in a confined space for long periods of time. They should build bigger stations, and under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave (and feels they need to commit arson to do so). EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted..
  - waste_monk 6y ago
    >EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted.. Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of the winter), but it's so fantastically dangerous that you risk losing the plane and killing an entire flight crew, so you only do it if there's absolutely no other choice. Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naive. If someone is disturbed to the point they pose a threat to life safety (including damage to the station that might affect habitability) then you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely - it's inhumane, but at least you won't risk getting other people killed trying to accommodate them. Similarly, you can't just say they should build bigger stations - crew morale and comfort are important factors, but at the end of the day practicality and survivability is king. You can't just order some building supplies and throw a house up in a couple of months - building supplies and tools have to be offloaded at the coast by ship and carried overland to the building site, buildings have to have appropriate HVAC for heating and conditioning the large spaces that require more power and thus more generation capacity, which means having to store more supplies, so you need to build more storage structures... saying "just build bigger" shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet.
    - Chris2048 6y ago
      Just getting to this, I didn't downvote, but I still disagree with these points. > Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naïve I didn't mean literally cannot leave, I mean choose to leave, i.e when safe to do so, rather than being forced to stay by naval order or contract. Though admittedly it's hard to find if that is the case in some of the historical examples. > shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet Why? If you commit human beings to an environment you either allow the conditions that will keep them sane, or you call the whole thing off. As soon as you decide the difficulty is surmountable, you lose this excuse, because not doing it is also an option. Would you build a station without a toilet or food? Then why not extra space? Skipping both will save money/effort, yet "there's more to living than just surviving" - both are requirements. If providing extra space is too hard, then the whole thing is too hard. The previous point only compounds this: "you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely" - If you can't control how long they'll be there, ensure the environment is one they can remain emotionally stable in, or don't send them there at all.
maga 6y ago
I wonder why no one tries to colonize Antarctica as a stepping stone for future space colonization. We can test and develop our greenhouse and energy tech there. E.g. create a colony that gets all its energy from solar and uses it to grow greenhouse plants supplying most if not all of its food.
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  There’s no sun in the winter for solar, and the winds are often too high for wind power - they’ve got I think three turbines over at Scott, just around the corner from McMurdo, but they only cover a small percentage of their power - the rest is diesel. They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill. In Antarctica, geothermal would probably be the most reliable renewable power source for somewhere like McMurdo, as they’re practically on Erebus - but way out in the interior, you’d have a few km of ice to contend with before getting to any kind of geo-anything. Weirdly, I was walking along behind a tractor yesterday, and found myself enjoying the stink of diesel fumes - it took me a few minutes to realise why - it’s the smell of Antarctica, minus the Penguin shit, as practically all power there comes from burning diesel! As to a Mars analogue, the dry valleys, just over the sound from McMurdo, are pretty close, and a lot of research of the “will it work on Mars?” type is carried out there - much of the Viking hardware was tested out in Taylor Valley, for instance.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    And it is likely still orders of magnitudes easier than actually living on Mars. So you'd expect that long before a Mars mission is feasible/desirable Antarctica would be colonized.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      The motivations for colonizing Mars are quite different from the motivations for colonizing Antarctica.
WalterBright 6y ago
I'd probably learn that I don't want to live on Mars!
bayesian_horse 6y ago
Don't get sick?
cbanek 6y ago
I doubt they would try to bury missiles under the ice. The US tried to build a base underground in ice in Greenland and it was was abandoned due to shifting ice. The last thing you want is your missile silo tipping over or squeezing what's inside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
known 6y ago
I liked this https://yts.mx/movies/antarctica-a-year-on-ice-2013 https://yts.mx/movies/antarctica-a-year-on-ice-2013
dreamcompiler 6y ago
I'd love to spend a year there, but what always stopped me was communication. The Internet in Antarctica is absolute shit because geo satellites are only barely visible, sometimes. Starlink might finally fix this problem. Anybody know the current status of Internet access at McMurdo?

69 points by dnetesn 6y ago

Favorite Antarctica story: October 2018 – On 9 October 2018, a stabbing occurred at the Bellingshausen Station (станция Беллинсгаузен), a Russian research station on King George Island.[18] The perpetrator was Sergey Savitsky (Сергей Савицкий), a 54-year-old electrical engineer.[19] He stabbed Oleg Beloguzov (Олег Белогузов), a 52-year old welder, in the chest[19] multiple times.[20] According to some sources, the attack occurred because Beloguzov was giving away the endings of books that Savitsky checked out at the station's library.[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Antarctica

mbeex 6y ago
Opposite Favourite: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442 A remark from the article comes to mind: "If you’ve got a bunch of pessimists together, then nothing is going to happen other than misery."
Chris2048 6y ago
Interesting the guy survived. I wonder if the cold actually helps survival from wounds. In any case, the long list of professionals going crazy suggests the conditions at the stations cause emotional instability - I assume being stuck with a stranger in a confined space for long periods of time. They should build bigger stations, and under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave (and feels they need to commit arson to do so). EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted..
- waste_monk 6y ago
  >EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted.. Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of the winter), but it's so fantastically dangerous that you risk losing the plane and killing an entire flight crew, so you only do it if there's absolutely no other choice. Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naive. If someone is disturbed to the point they pose a threat to life safety (including damage to the station that might affect habitability) then you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely - it's inhumane, but at least you won't risk getting other people killed trying to accommodate them. Similarly, you can't just say they should build bigger stations - crew morale and comfort are important factors, but at the end of the day practicality and survivability is king. You can't just order some building supplies and throw a house up in a couple of months - building supplies and tools have to be offloaded at the coast by ship and carried overland to the building site, buildings have to have appropriate HVAC for heating and conditioning the large spaces that require more power and thus more generation capacity, which means having to store more supplies, so you need to build more storage structures... saying "just build bigger" shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    Just getting to this, I didn't downvote, but I still disagree with these points. > Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naïve I didn't mean literally cannot leave, I mean choose to leave, i.e when safe to do so, rather than being forced to stay by naval order or contract. Though admittedly it's hard to find if that is the case in some of the historical examples. > shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet Why? If you commit human beings to an environment you either allow the conditions that will keep them sane, or you call the whole thing off. As soon as you decide the difficulty is surmountable, you lose this excuse, because not doing it is also an option. Would you build a station without a toilet or food? Then why not extra space? Skipping both will save money/effort, yet "there's more to living than just surviving" - both are requirements. If providing extra space is too hard, then the whole thing is too hard. The previous point only compounds this: "you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely" - If you can't control how long they'll be there, ensure the environment is one they can remain emotionally stable in, or don't send them there at all.

maga 6y ago

I wonder why no one tries to colonize Antarctica as a stepping stone for future space colonization. We can test and develop our greenhouse and energy tech there. E.g. create a colony that gets all its energy from solar and uses it to grow greenhouse plants supplying most if not all of its food.

madaxe_again 6y ago
There’s no sun in the winter for solar, and the winds are often too high for wind power - they’ve got I think three turbines over at Scott, just around the corner from McMurdo, but they only cover a small percentage of their power - the rest is diesel. They tried nuclear at McMurdo, way back when, and ended up with 10,000m3 of contaminated rock they had to export, as the aptly named nukey poo was a bit... poo. Poor reliability, not much power, lots of contamination. All that’s there now is a plaque and an NSF rad monitor a little bit up Obs hill. In Antarctica, geothermal would probably be the most reliable renewable power source for somewhere like McMurdo, as they’re practically on Erebus - but way out in the interior, you’d have a few km of ice to contend with before getting to any kind of geo-anything. Weirdly, I was walking along behind a tractor yesterday, and found myself enjoying the stink of diesel fumes - it took me a few minutes to realise why - it’s the smell of Antarctica, minus the Penguin shit, as practically all power there comes from burning diesel! As to a Mars analogue, the dry valleys, just over the sound from McMurdo, are pretty close, and a lot of research of the “will it work on Mars?” type is carried out there - much of the Viking hardware was tested out in Taylor Valley, for instance.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  And it is likely still orders of magnitudes easier than actually living on Mars. So you'd expect that long before a Mars mission is feasible/desirable Antarctica would be colonized.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    The motivations for colonizing Mars are quite different from the motivations for colonizing Antarctica.

WalterBright 6y ago

I'd probably learn that I don't want to live on Mars!

bayesian_horse 6y ago

Don't get sick?

cbanek 6y ago

I doubt they would try to bury missiles under the ice. The US tried to build a base underground in ice in Greenland and it was was abandoned due to shifting ice. The last thing you want is your missile silo tipping over or squeezing what's inside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm

known 6y ago

I liked this https://yts.mx/movies/antarctica-a-year-on-ice-2013 https://yts.mx/movies/antarctica-a-year-on-ice-2013

dreamcompiler 6y ago

I'd love to spend a year there, but what always stopped me was communication. The Internet in Antarctica is absolute shit because geo satellites are only barely visible, sometimes. Starlink might finally fix this problem. Anybody know the current status of Internet access at McMurdo?