American mathematicians conducted a simulation of the long-term life of the crew of an inhabited base on the Red Planet. The simulation showed that a stable functioning of the mission would require a team of 22 people, unless there were neurotics among them.
Sooner or later, manned flights to Mars will begin, and then the construction of a permanent habitable base. The closer this moment is, the more practical questions about the implementation of such projects appear. Many of them are connected with the team of future colonists. How many people will be needed for the stable functioning of the base, what psychological characteristics will help survival? The authors of a new article presented in the arXiv preprint library tried to answer them.
Such assessments have been carried out before. For example, in one of these works, scientists concluded that a team of 110 people would be required for the first steps of the Red Planet exploration. However, now Edgar Arguello and his colleagues from the American George Mason University proceeded from slightly different initial conditions. Unlike the authors of the previous work, they modeled a colony that would receive part of the resources from Earth: this configuration allows sending fewer people on a flight and, despite the need to organize regular supply missions, reduces the cost of the project as a whole.
Argueio and colleagues conducted mathematical simulations of a long stay on Mars for groups of different numbers of people, from 10 to 170. The simulations lasted for 28 Martian years, while the "people" had a certain amount of "health", the exhaustion of which led to death. The creation of resources on the spot or the arrival of a supply mission made up for this figure. "Health" was lost under the influence of "stress factors" that arose in various parts of the "playing field" and accumulated over time. They could either be resolved through the work of specialists, or they began to worsen their health more and more noticeably.
Each virtual character was assigned various characteristics related to the possession of a useful specialty (skill level and experience), which allowed to develop the extraction of local resources and eliminate breakdowns. In addition, psychological characteristics corresponding to the key types of the " Big Five " personality traits were taken into account. These indicators influenced the consumption and efficiency of virtual astronauts. Scientists also took into account the randomness factor, which also sometimes led to the death of characters. Occasionally, new settlers joined the colonies.
Under such conditions, the minimum number of people required for the stable functioning of the colony was 22. Moreover, the simulations showed the importance of the psychology of the colonists in the group. It turned out that the characters with high rates of benevolence demonstrated the maximum chances of survival. Conversely, virtual colonists with pronounced neuroticism (emotional instability) and weak cooperative abilities had the highest mortality.
Separately, it should be noted that the work did not consider the effect of reduced gravity (gravity on Mars is 62% lower than Earth's). This is due to the fact that today there is no clear understanding of how it affects human health. From the experience of flights into orbit, it is known that complete weightlessness in the absence of proper load and nutrition leads to loss of bone mass, threatening death in two to three years. But the result of long-term health effects of reduced gravity still simply had nowhere to study.