understanding the world through space

„What are you doing?“

„I work in the space industry.“

“And what do you do there?”

“Trying sending people to Mars and stuff.”

“Seriously? You don’t have anything else to do?” 

I can understand why people react in a confused way, when I tell them about my work.  Turning the news on provides a five minutes long image of the problems we have on earth: refugees, wars, racism, sexism…the list is long. One should activate his resources and work on these problems and improve society. And what am I doing? Sending people to Mars. 

Especially as a psychologist, I have the best possibilities to support people in any situation: work with war victims on their trauma or treat people who suffer under depression or stress. Instead I am observing how people react when being confined in an artificial habitat somewhere in the desert.

Shouldn’t I do something else?

No!

(c) europeanspaceagency

Researching space means: analyzing how people behave when living isolated or confined for a longer duration. It means that we look at the cognitive changes of someone who suffers sensory deprivation. We try to understand how groups communicate and cooperate and what happens if we train them in a certain way.

Now look what happens on earth: the same! We find isolation and confinement in every hospital and old peoples care. The number of people living alone is increasing, especially in cities. We work in environments which demand a high level of communicative and social skills, group awareness and coping strategies.

To research these fields is difficult. Working environments are not consistent; many people follow different scenarios of living and working.  Space provides us a perfect paradigm, using people whose psychological condition has been analyzed and positively judged before being exposed to extreme situations. Space discriminates all confounding variables, such as free choice communication to earth, differing possibilities for entertainment, a comparable environment or variations in food. It allows us to produce a perfect laboratory creating the correlation between the healthiest human being and the most complex environmental condition.

How can we interpret our findings from space? Space, being extreme in its way, shows us extreme results and symbolizes a clear picture of what happens if we send people in these conditions. We can assume that there are variations and small aspects of these findings on earth - at any time in everyone’s life. Space allows us to form an obvious map of problems we won’t recognize on earth during our daily life.

Space seems far away and therefore invites us to see things from a different perspective in a compressed way. Once we zoom out of our daily life, we can understand how our world is shaped: with no borders, no limitation.

I often imagine how the world would be if many statesmen and important people would see earth from space. I believe we would have less wars and conflicts and more awareness about our environment. Yet, travelling into space is prohibited to only a few people. Nevertheless we all have the capacity to imagine how it would be and react in an appropriate way. Research is a baseline to support our understanding and transform into a ‘spacewise’ human being.