by Deborah Blum
Which means that astronauts will get bored. In fact, a number of scientists say that—of all things—boredom is one of the biggest threats to a manned Mars mission, despite the thrill inherent in visiting another planet. And so, attention is being paid to the effects of boredom at HI-SEAS and on the International Space Station. But because of the causes of chronic boredom, scientists say, research facilities in Antarctica might actually provide a better simulation of the stress of a journey to Mars.
Most living things constantly seek out sensory stimulation—new smells, tastes, sights, sounds, or experiences. Even single-celled amoebas will move to investigate new sources of light or heat, says Sheryl Bishop, who studies human performance in extreme environments at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Animals deprived of naturalistic environments and the mental stimulation that comes with them can fall into repetitive, harmful patterns of behavior. Anybody of a certain age will remember zoos full of maniacally pacing tigers, bears gnawing on their metal cages, and birds that groomed themselves bald—all a result, we now know, of their rather unstimulating lifestyles.
Human boredom isn’t quite as well understood, says James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He’s currently working on what he says may be the first study of how our brain activity changes when we’re bored. Danckert is hoping to find out whether boredom is connected to a phenomenon called the “default network”—a background hum of brain activity that seems to remain on even when you aren’t directly focused on something. There’s a lot of observable activity in the brains of people who are staring at a blank screen—way more than anybody expected, Danckert says. The default network maps closely to the brain-activity patterns scientists see when someone’s mind is wandering. It suggests that what we call a restless mind is just that—a mind desperate for something to amuse it, searching frantically for stimulus.
Boredom, it turns out, is a form of stress. Psychologically, it’s the mirror image of having too much work to do, says Jason Kring, president of the Society of Human Performance in Extreme Environments, an organization that studies how people live and work in space, underwater, on mountaintops and other high-risk places. If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do—it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind’s normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficits.
Astronaut candidates go through two years of training before they’re even approved to fly. And before they are chosen to be candidates, they have to compete against thousands of other applicants. The 2013 class, for instance, had more than six thousand applicants, and only eight were chosen. Astronauts are rigorously tested for psychological as well as physical fitness. But no mission in NASA’s history has raised the specter of chronic boredom to the degree that a Mars mission does, because none has involved such a long journey through nothingness.
What if, millions of miles from home, a chronically bored astronaut forgets a certain safety procedure? What if he gets befuddled while reading an oxygen gauge? More important, Danckert and Kring say, bored people are also prone to taking risks, subconsciously seeking out stimulation when their environment bores them.
The cognitive and social psychologist Peter Suedfeld says that people will sometimes do reckless, stupid things when they suffer from chronic boredom. In Antarctica, where winter can cut scientists and crew off from the rest of the world for as long as nine months, the isolation can lead to strange behavior. Suedfeld told me he has heard about Antarctic researchers venturing outside in 40-below weather without proper clothing and without telling anyone else they were going out.
The diaries of early polar explorers are full of tales of extreme boredom, depression, and desperate attempts at entertainment reminiscent of prisoners’ stories from solitary confinement. An important lesson that Antarctica can impart on a Mars expedition is this: even scientists on important missions can get excruciatingly bored.
One effective way astronauts combat boredom is by staying busy with work. That’s a strategy at HI-SEAS, where the crew member Kate Greene told me that her schedule is packed—every hour planned and accounted for, from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed at night. Life on the International Space Station is similar. (In fact, historically, NASA’s problem has been overworking people: in 1973, the exhausted crew of Skylab 4 actually staged a relaxation rebellion and took an unscheduled day off.) But Antarctica is different from HI-SEAS or the International Space Station. Communications are limited. There’s nobody outside the base directing your day. Spectacular views vanish in a haze of white. It’s just you, the people you came in with, no way out, and little to break up the monotony.
And so some researchers there have learned to actively fend off boredom by creating what you might call a unique office culture. They celebrate a ridiculous number of holidays, both traditional and invented. You need something to look forward to, Suedfeld says, and planning the events helps change the routine. Even Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic crew found ways to put on skits and concerts. On one expedition, Shackleton brought a small printing press. At McMurdo Station, the 1983 winter crew created costumes, learned lines, and acted out scenes from the movie Escape From New York. It’s possible that we may someday watch recordings of Mars-bound astronauts acting out other John Carpenter films. (It’s not so far-fetched. Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, made a tribute to David Bowie’s Space Oddity that racked up more than 16 million views on YouTube.)
It might sound absurd, but many scientists say strategies like this are necessary because without proper mental stimulus, we risk making a physically and technologically challenging endeavor into a psychologically grueling one. It would be catastrophic if humanity’s greatest voyage were brought low by the mind’s tendency to wander when left to its own devices.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
The Lost World
FROM The New Yorker
I
On April 4, 1796—or, according to the French Revolutionary calendar in use at the time, 15 Germinal, Year IV—Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric Cuvier, known, after a brother who had died, simply as Georges, delivered his first public lecture at the National Institute of Science and Arts in Paris. Cuvier, who was twenty-six, had arrived in the city a year earlier, shortly after the end of the Reign of Terror. He had wide-set gray eyes, a prominent nose, and a temperament that a friend compared to the exterior of the earth—generally cool, but capable of violent tremors and eruptions. Cuvier had grown up in a small town on the Swiss border and had almost no connections in the capital. Nevertheless, he had managed to secure a prestigious research position there, thanks to the passing of the ancien régime, on the one hand, and his own sublime self-regard, on the other. An older colleague later described him as popping up in the city “like a mushroom.”
For his inaugural lecture, Cuvier decided to speak about elephants. Although he left behind no record to explain his choice, it’s likely that it had to do with loot. France was in the midst of the military campaigns that would lead to the Napoleonic Wars and had recently occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. Booty, in the form of art, jewels, seeds, machinery, and minerals, was streaming into Paris. As the historian of science Martin J. S. Rudwick relates, in Bursting the Limits of Time (2005), a hundred and fifty crates’ worth was delivered to the city’s National Museum of Natural History. Included among the rocks and dried plants were two elephant skulls, one from Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—and the other from the Cape of Good Hope, in present-day South Africa.
By this point, Europe was well acquainted with elephants; occasionally one of the animals had been brought to the Continent as a royal gift, or to travel with a fair. (One touring elephant, known as Hansken, was immortalized by Rembrandt.) Europeans knew that there were elephants in Africa, which were considered to be dangerous, and elephants in Asia, which were said to be more docile. Still, elephants were regarded
as elephants, much as dogs were dogs, some gentle and others ferocious. Cuvier, in his first few months in Paris, had examined with care the plundered skulls and had reached his own conclusion. Asian and African elephants, he told his audience, represented two distinct species.
“It is clear that the elephant from Ceylon differs more from that of Africa than the horse from the ass or the goat from the sheep,” he declared. Among the animals’ many distinguishing characteristics were their teeth. The elephant from Ceylon had molars with wavy ridges on the surface, “like festooned ribbons,” while the elephant from the Cape of Good Hope had teeth with ridges arranged in the shape of diamonds. Looking at live animals would not have revealed this difference, as who would have the temerity to peer at an elephant’s molars? “It is to anatomy alone that zoology owes this interesting discovery,” Cuvier said.
Having successfully sliced the elephant in two, Cuvier continued with his dissection. Over the decades, the museum had acquired a variety of old bones that appeared elephantine. These included a three-and-a-half-foot-long femur, a tusk the size of a jousting lance, and several teeth that weighed more than five pounds each. Some of the bones came from Siberia, others from North America. Cuvier had studied these old bones as well. His conclusions, once again, were unequivocal. The bones were the fragmentary remains of two new species, which differed from both African and Asian elephants “as much as, or more than, the dog differs from the jackal.” Moreover—and here one imagines a hush falling over his audience—both creatures had vanished from the face of the earth. Cuvier referred to the first lost species as a mammoth, and the second as an “Ohio animal.” A decade later, he would invent a new name for the beast from Ohio; he would call it a mastodon.
“What has become of these two enormous animals of which one no longer finds any living traces?” Cuvier asked his audience. The question was more than rhetorical. Just a few months earlier, Cuvier had received sketches of a skeleton that had been discovered in Argentina. The skeleton was twelve feet long and six feet high; the sketches showed it to have sharp claws, flattish feet, and a short muzzle. On the basis of the sketches, Cuvier had identified its owner—correctly—as an oversized sloth. He named it Megatherium, meaning “great beast.” Though he had never been to Argentina or, for that matter, anywhere farther than Stuttgart, Cuvier was convinced that the Megatherium was no longer to be found lumbering through the jungles of South America. It, too, had disappeared. Like the mammoth’s and the mastodon’s, its bones hinted at events both strange and terrible. They “seem to me,” Cuvier said, “to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.”
Extinction may be the first scientific idea that children today have to grapple with. We give one-year-olds dinosaurs to play with, and two-year-olds understand, in a vague sort of way, at least, that these small plastic creatures represent very large animals that once existed in the flesh. If they’re quick learners, kids still in diapers can explain that there were once many kinds of dinosaurs and that they lived long ago. (My own sons, as toddlers, used to spend hours over a set of dinosaurs that could be arranged on a plastic mat depicting a forest from the Cretaceous. The scene featured a lava-spewing volcano, and when you pressed the mat in the right spot it emitted a delightfully terrifying roar.) All of which is to say that extinction strikes us as an extremely obvious idea. It isn’t.
Aristotle wrote a ten-book History of Animals without considering the possibility that animals actually had a history. Pliny’s Natural History includes descriptions of animals that are real and animals that are fabulous, but no descriptions of animals that are extinct. The idea did not crop up during the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance, when the word “fossil” was used to refer to anything dug up from the ground (hence the term “fossil fuel”). During the Enlightenment, the prevailing view was that every species was a link in a great, unbreakable “chain of being.” As Alexander Pope put it in his Essay on Man:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul.
When Carolus Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature, he made no distinction between the living and the dead, because, in his view, none was required. The tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, lists sixty-three species of scarab beetle, thirty-five species of cone snail, and fifteen species of flat fish. And yet in the Systema Naturae there is really only one kind of animal—those that exist.
This view persisted despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. Cabinets of curiosity in London, Paris, and Berlin were filled with traces of strange marine creatures that no one had ever seen—the remains of what would now be identified as trilobites, belemnites, and ammonites. Some of the last were so large that their fossilized shells approached the size of wagon wheels. But the seas were vast and mostly unexplored, and so it was assumed that the creatures must be out there somewhere.
With his lecture on “the species of elephants, both living and fossil,” Cuvier finally put an end to this way of thinking. Much as Charles Darwin is often credited with having come up with the theory of evolution—his real insight, of course, involved finding a mechanism for evolution—so Cuvier can be said to have theorized extinction.
Darwin’s story has been recited (and re-recited) countless times by now. Entire books have been devoted to the few months he spent in Australia; to his mysterious and quite possibly psychosomatic illness; to the death of his oldest daughter; and to his decade-long study of barnacles. (This last subject is one that Darwin himself seems to have found tedious.) In 2009, when the two hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth rolled around, the occasion was marked by scores of events, including an “evolution festival” in Vancouver, an uninterrupted reading of On the Origin of Species in Barcelona, and the construction of a massive Darwin doll for the Carnival parade in Recife. That same year, a full-length biopic, starring Jennifer Connelly as Darwin’s wife (and first cousin), Emma, was released.
Cuvier, though, is very nearly forgotten. Many of his papers have still not been translated into English, and in studies of professional paleontology Cuvier is routinely slighted, even as he is acknowledged to be the founder of the discipline. Unless the situation changes dramatically, the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth, in 2019, will pass without notice.
Darwin’s work is inconceivable without Cuvier’s discoveries. And yet Cuvier’s obscurity is directly linked to Darwin’s fame. Darwin’s theory of extinction—that it was a routine side effect of evolution—contradicted Cuvier’s, which held that species died out as a result of catastrophes, or, as he also put it, “revolutions on the surface of the earth.” Darwin’s view prevailed, Cuvier’s was discredited, and for more than a century Cuvier was ignored. More recent discoveries, however, have tended to support the theories of Cuvier’s that were most thoroughly vilified. Very occasionally, it turns out, the earth has indeed been wracked by catastrophe and, much as Cuvier imagined, “living organisms without number” have been their victims. This vindication of Cuvier would be of interest mainly to paleontologists and intellectual historians were it not for the fact that many scientists believe we are in the midst of such an event right now.
Since Cuvier’s day, the National Museum of Natural History has grown into a sprawling institution with outposts all over France. Its main buildings, though, are still in Paris, on the site of the old royal gardens in the Fifth Arrondissement. Cuvier worked at the museum for most of his life and lived there, too, in a large stucco house that’s been converted into office space. Next door to the house, there’s a restaurant, and next to that a menagerie, where, on the day I visited, some wallabies were sunning themselves on the grass. Across the gardens, a large hall houses the museum’s paleontology collection.
Pascal Tassy is a professor at the museum who specializes in proboscideans, the group that includes elephants and their lost cousins—mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres, to name just a few. He’d promise
d to show me the bones that Cuvier had examined when he came up with the theory of extinction. I found Tassy in his dimly lit office in the basement under the paleontology hall, sitting amid a mortuary’s worth of old skulls. The walls of the office were decorated with covers from old Tintin comic books. Tassy told me he decided to become a paleontologist when he was seven, after reading a Tintin adventure about a dig.
We chatted about proboscideans for a while. “They’re a fascinating group,” he told me. “For instance, the trunk, which is a change of anatomy in the facial area that is truly extraordinary. It evolved separately five times. Two times—yes, that’s surprising. But it happened five times, independently! We are forced to accept this by looking at the fossils.” So far, Tassy said, some 170 proboscidean species have been identified, going back some 55 million years. “And this is far from complete, I am sure.”
We headed upstairs to an annex attached to the back of the paleontology hall like a caboose. Tassy unlocked a small room crowded with metal cabinets. Just inside the door, partly wrapped in plastic, stood something resembling a hairy umbrella stand. This, he explained, was the leg of a woolly mammoth, which had been found, frozen and desiccated, on an island off Siberia. When I looked at it more closely, I could see that the skin of the leg had been stitched together like a moccasin. The hair was a very dark brown and seemed, even after more than ten thousand years, to be almost perfectly preserved.