by Kate Greene
But in 1996, Shannon Lucid didn’t have an internet connection. Her flight surgeon, who acted as a kind of astronaut advocate on the ground, helped her improvise her own comms from Mir using ham radio, which can transmit digital files wirelessly. Thus, using radio waves, she sent emails from her space-based computer to her flight surgeon in Houston, who then used the fledgling earthly internet to pass Lucid’s notes to their final destinations.
Mars communication would be an entirely different story. One of the main features of our isolation on Mars was the enforced lag in the speed of our electronic communications. HI-SEAS used a twenty-minute delay. This meant that the soonest we’d hear back about an email would be forty-ish minutes, or put another way, just inside two episodes of Who’s the Boss? without commercial breaks. We also didn’t have a working, real-time internet. This meant that we had to patiently request that mission support give us the internet manually, for instance by downloading and emailing us static webpages and files and episodes of Who’s the Boss? And while we could send voice and video messages over email, the lack of real-time communication—the thing so many of us are so accustomed to today with phone calls, text messages, DMs, FaceTime, and Skype—worked even better than the dome and the space suits and the remote location did in making me feel removed from Earth.
Honestly, sometimes it felt pretty great. I liked the quiet, the permission to turn away from the chatter of news. And there was something too, in not needing to keep a social calendar up to date. Everyone knew I wasn’t home. But then there were other times when the distance felt bad. Sometimes very bad. Strange things happen when you’re so far away, like misunderstandings, paranoia, hurt, and anger. In any message, there’s the thing that’s written, the actual words, and there are the things unwritten. Perhaps the writer of the letter intends an omission, is possibly accustomed to working with subtext. Or they could just be careless, inadvertently leaving gaps for the reader to fill, a reader who, for any number of reasons, might pour in a concrete mix of wrong assumptions. Although historical evidence shows communication failures and frustrations are virtually inevitable, there is a particular category that interests Mars mission researchers called the “Us versus Them” phenomenon.
HI-SEAS and other Mars analogs, including Antarctic research stations, fall under the category of isolated, confined environments, or as NASA calls them, ICE. These remote outposts stress people out in particular, predictable ways—the kinds of stresses that will undoubtedly present themselves on a Mars mission. “Us versus Them” has been frequently documented under such conditions: when small isolated groups interact with interdependent or support groups, factions form. In our case, the researchers whose studies we were implementing inside the dome and the mission support staff on the other end of emails were the support groups. Often, despite close ties to people on the support teams, feelings of “they don’t understand what we’re experiencing and how much they’re asking of us” can show up pretty fast.
Once the mission started, we felt at times like research requests were piling on, that some mission supporters were less than supportive in helping us solve problems. More than once there were problems with critical systems including power and plumbing (we were the first HI-SEAS crew, kicking the tires). We spent a number of cold nights in the literal dark because the solar panels didn’t transfer as much power as expected and the backup generator broke. And then there were the plumbing issues. The wet wipes, we learned soon enough, should not be flushed because once flushed, they coalesced into a fabric bolus that clogs the pipe to the black water tank. Mission support fixed the problem within a day, but in the meantime Simon, the former soldier, made field toilets. He then loaded the double-lined black trash bags of human feces into large Rubbermaid bins that Kim Binsted picked up the next day and drove down the mountain to dispose of in a way, one supposes, consistent with their biohazard status. It was at these times when communication needed to be patient and cordial—and both the crew and mission support needed to believe that everyone was doing their best. This didn’t always happen.
Beyond mission-support frustrations, there were other, unexpected misunderstandings and confusions. One night, Sian hadn’t heard from her then-boyfriend-now-husband after he’d gone to a baseball game, and it was getting late on the East Coast. It wasn’t like him, she said, to not send just a little note before going to bed. Normally one of the most calmly rational among us, she began to imagine the worst. She emailed support for reports of car accidents in the area. Or, was there an attack on the stadium? Why did the most drastic scenarios somehow seem far more plausible than the fact that he had just forgotten to email, which we learned the next morning was actually the case.
It happened to me too, deep into the mission, when I hadn’t heard from my parents in more than a couple weeks. Their health and the health of my brother was always precarious, and I suspected something was wrong—either that they were withholding unpleasant news, which they’d done in the past, or they were overwhelmed by some other life events that kept them from responding.
Finally, on July 4, I received the following series of emails from my mother, edited for length and clarity. It is, I think, an important document in the discussion of long-distance correspondence.
Hi Katie this is mom I don’t know if this is the way to do this or not but I’m on my iPhone and I’m using Dragon and I think I’m gonna try and see if this sounds okay okay bye
Sent from my iPhone
One of the reasons you don’t hear from me is because when I sit down to type something I’m so lousy at it that I don’t type it and anyway I just have been a real slug lately I guess is the best way to say it I have slept several days all day I stayed up several nights my sleeping is in a terrible state I really need to get it under control but I went to bed early last night woke up early this morning and I just strolled around on the computer all day so I
Sent from my iPhone
Okay I see that I’m going to have to put in punctuation. Period,—those kinds of things I hope you were able to make out the previous message I did not stroll around the computer I played around with the computer but I didn’t stroll around with it.
Sent from my iPhone
I also discovered the Dragon program only records a certain amount and then it stops even if it’s in midsentence so I want to tell you about something I did in genealogy but I think I’m at the end of the amount that it’s going to record so I’ll have to finish telling you about it in the next installment okay
Sent from my iPhone
Okay here’s the genealogy thing my grandma Rose had a brother named Ed and uncle Ed was always a great mystery we never knew what happened to a go-ahead he was always out west somewhere always out west we thought that was a little strange so the 1940 census has come out and I decided to see if I could find him because I had found him in the 1920 census and had not found him in the 1930 census this will have to wait I think Dragon is done
Sent from my iPhone
So I looked him up in the 1940 census and I find him in Marin County in California San Rafael is the name of the town and he’s in San Quentin prison I was a little surprised by that and I found his inmate number but I haven’t been able to find out any other information like what he did or not anyway this is indeed a great mystery so I thought I’m gonna have to do some more research on this and it occurred to me that and Helen the only living member of my mothers family might have
Sent from my iPhone
Okay so I think and Helen probably knows the story so I called her and I asked her what she knew about uncle Ed and she said oh he was out West someplace and that’s all I know and I said well are you sure grandma didn’t say something to you about where he was Outwest she said no I don’t think so so I said well I found him in the 1940 senses and she said oh really where was he and I said well he was at San Quentin in prison now I don’t know if you know and calendar
Sent from my iPhone
I really must speak more distinctly ign
ore the word calendar I don’t know where that came from anyway and Helen said oh that’s free d*ck Chillis my mother never said anything to me about uncle Ed being in prison I’m sure she would’ve told me if she knew so I said well that’s probably true and then she said to me I think it’s wrong of you to look into this and I said really and she said yes this is shameful I
Sent from my iPhone
I think I have the wrong address on the last e-mail so I’m going to record the information over again and Helen said to me I don’t want you to tell anyone about this I think it would be very upsetting to the younger ones I said to her I think it’s probably more upsetting to you then it would be to them because T U he’s a person of living memory but to the younger ones it would just be ancient history she said what do you mean ancient history and I said to her well after all you are 90s
Sent from my iPhone
I said after all you are 97 years old and uncle Ed would have been 122 so I think to the younger generation that’s probably ancient history well needless to say and Helen is really p*ssed at me that’s T I SS ED she’s very upset with me so I managed to create a little bit of a rift with my oldest living relative
Sent from my iPhone
Dragon pics out the most unusual things to misspell when I spelled out p*ssed it came back with a T not a PE anyway does this format drive you crazy I hope not it’s a little strange though anyway send me back a message and let me know if this is an okay format for you because it certainly gives me the chance to say a lot more than I would ever feel like typing love you dear bye-bye
Sent from my iPhone
Many discussions could blossom from this email in eleven parts, including genealogy obsessions and my great aunt’s shame around and desire to keep hidden the fact of an incarcerated relative. But what I felt at the time of receipt was something else. I wondered which errors in the text were my mother’s and which belonged to the software. Sure I could find humor in it, but in my faraway state, I also found the garbled messages deeply unsettling. It was as if the pen had turned treasonous and unruly, not completely in service of the hand that held it, and that the pen itself had something to say about what was real, something that wouldn’t have been written in the actual text. It wanted to remind me that my mother, as she’s gotten older, mispronounces and forgets more words, and as her hands have gotten shakier so has her voice. Though I should have been heartened that she was taking up a new technology, with enthusiasm even, the mediator seemed cruel, like it was mocking her even as she was training it to understand her better. I was glad for the messages, sure, but I despaired at a truth they forced me to see, one that I’m often trying to ignore, and that is that as my parents age, everything—the fact of daily living—is increasingly becoming harder than it once was. It felt to me as though this technology, like a jerk, wanted me to consider my parents’ mortality when, at such a distance, that was the last thing I wanted to do.
The word “weltschmerz” translates literally from the German as “world pain.” It can be a weary or pessimistic feeling about life, an apathetic or vaguely yearning attitude. The definition I tend to think of most, though, is the feeling of an expectation thwarted, a forced reckoning with the reality of a situation, or the way things really are. These days, as so much of so many people’s time is spent with computers and phones and the online portals and software that mediate our social interactions, I’d like to propose a related concept of “technoschmerz.” We expect technology to do one thing, but then it does another, less satisfying thing. Specifically it might show us a truth of a situation, one that’s usually hidden. In the mismatch between what we expect technology to do, which is to connect us better—more efficiently and effectively, make things clearer—and what it has the potential to do, which is to separate us—sometimes creating confusing situations, emotional rifts, and anxiety—comes anguish. And within this anguish is technoschmerz.
It happens often, actually, and not just to lonely astronauts who miss their spouses, children, parents, friends, or lovers. We see it when a friend takes too long to respond to a text, when a politically aggressive cousin posts an opinion on Facebook, when an algorithm reminds us of a dead loved one’s birthday, and when comment sections begin to roil. Technoschmerz lives within the dropped calls, the spotty cell signal, the too-quickly-drained battery. It’s in the glitchy app, the crashed hard drive, the forgotten password, the confusing interface. It’s everywhere.
I think of future astronauts on their way to Mars. For them, technoschmerz would likely be especially pronounced as they fly from home at twelve thousand miles per hour, surrounded and protected by, interacting with, and betting their lives on some of the most complex technologies ever invented, humanity’s own message and messengers. How separate would their technology make us feel from them? How separate would they feel from us?
* * *
Like Lucid, I also brought a box of books. Titles included but were not limited to, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, Mark Jarman’s poetry collection Bone Fires, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? and that stack of old New Yorkers. I didn’t know what I’d be in the mood for, and when I found it mostly wasn’t anything from the box, I bought e-books to read on my phone like the sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard, and Speedboat by Renata Adler.
Though obviously these texts weren’t letters addressed specifically to me, I count them as correspondences in the way all texts are—films, poems, paintings, diaries, music, reports, surveys, sculpture, workout videos, video games, email, physical books, message-board posts, photographs, and the rest. They all capture the world, a reality collated as information, channeled through a team or person, a creator or curator, produced within the context of a procedure that originated at some point with an impulse to bind and preserve experiences, emotions, and thoughts. Before this encapsulation—in word, sound, image, object, number, video, or game-play—there was nothing. After capture: a representation. From representation follows an asynchronous exchange across time and space: the transmission. And finally, a reception, an unfurling, a blossoming, or an explosion of meaning at the point of reader, the receiver of the text. The text can be made by one for a singular receiver or it can be made by one or many for the many. It’s a kind of information theory, not unlike the computer code that allows spacecraft like Curiosity roving Mars or Juno spinning Jupiter or New Horizons flying past Pluto, or the Voyager probes zipping out beyond the beyond, to send us pictures, spectra, and timestamps from their journeys.
Some correspondences persist longer than others. On this planet right now there exists The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian tales of Inanna, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Hebrew Bible, The Upanishads, Sappho’s fragments, Tao Te Ching, Beowulf, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Tony Danza and Judith Light’s Who’s the Boss?
The poet Francis Ponge wrote that he preferred human-size monuments over larger ones, that man should strive for “shells of his own size,” a concept which can apply to the vessels we inhabit such as homes, spacecraft, or space suits, all of which are monuments of a kind. Or his monument shells could apply to something else entirely. In Partisan of Things, Ponge writes:
I have no admiration for those like the Pharaohs who forced the multitude to build monuments to themselves alone. I would have preferred that he employ his multitude in a work not much bigger or no more bigger than his own body … That’s why I admire certain controlled writers or musicians—Bach, Rameau, Malherbe, Horace, Mallarmé—the writers more than all the others because their monument is made from the common true secretions of mollusky man, from the thing best proportioned to and conditioned by his body, and yet more different from his form than can be conceived. I’m talking about words.
For Ponge, it is our suits of language that house us; they are his preferred monuments.
* * *
Every day on Mars, Sian opened a
new note or package. She had brought with her a big box stuffed with these daily gifts from her best friend, a woman she had traveled the world with, played hockey with, and in whom she’d found a kindred spirit in boldness and exploration. There were photographs, handwritten notes, painted pictures, little trinkets. For 120 days, Sian unwrapped these correspondences. She also watched police procedurals like NCIS, which she had downloaded to her iPad, usually watching them while walking on the treadmill for her daily exercise at a speedy clip of 4.5 miles per hour.
Simon emailed friends and family but said he preferred less communication to more. In his experience deployed, he found he didn’t have time or energy for regular updates and didn’t want to burden people back home with the expectation of sustained correspondence. He also played video games like BioShock and Baldur’s Gate, often late into the night.
Angelo would also stay up late, sometimes until two a.m., responding to emails from acquaintances and friends. He’d email with journalists, future collaborators on art projects, mentors, mentees. His correspondence tendrils seemed extensive and kinetic. He also played video games like Crysis into the night, headphones on, which he said calmed him before bed.
Oleg’s correspondences were a mystery to me. I don’t know who Oleg communicated with or what he read or watched on his own time, though he did share videos with the crew of his skydiving adventures.
Yajaira corresponded with her husband regularly over email. She also responded often to media inquiries because of her interest in science and space outreach. Before the mission, she had appeared on Puerto Rican talk shows and gave interviews to magazines and newspapers. She had an audience that was hungry for her accounts of life on Mars.