Scott Solomon

And also the psychological challenges.

And, you know, I mean, the U.S.

space program is a huge success, clearly.

But if you use those same criteria to select people for who's going to found a new population on Mars, you'd get such a tiny fraction of human diversity.

you'd be setting yourself up for failure.

Well, we do know from a lot of the studies that have been done in analogs, like we were talking about earlier, and this includes things like people who are working in Antarctica, in the most sort of similar environment that exists on Earth to what it will be like there, right?

You're in an

isolated, extreme, confined environment surrounded by hostile conditions.

So what are the factors that lead to success, especially for people who are overwintering in Antarctica?

You can't just leave whenever you want to because there's no way to kind of get a

a ship or a plane in, um, people who, uh, who, who do well in that environment are people who, um, are good team players are people who are, um, uh, you know, open about kind of how the experience is, is going for them, willing to talk about it, willing to talk about it with others.

Um, you know, you also want, uh, a good chemistry among the group.

Right.

So you don't want, you know, all type A personalities because they're likely to to kind of clash.

Right.

And so there's all these studies that have looked at the psychology of group dynamics.

An interesting one is you don't want an even number of people.

You want an odd number.

It's because it can split into, yeah, basically it could split into factions and you need a tiebreaker, right?

So there have been examples of where that has happened and it hasn't always gone well.