One of the challenging aspirations of humankind is to make itself a multi-planetary species. It's not for leisure. it is necessary. More than 99 percent of all species, that ever lived on this planet have been wiped out. Dinosaurs didn't survive. What are the odds that we will? After all the progress we have made in human biology, astronomy, technology, we can't just be here and meet an inevitable extinct. We need to shift so that we can increase our chance of survival. We are not going gentle into that good night. We will rage against the dying of the light.
For now, we are aiming for Mars. But it is easier said than done. Mars doesn't have a habitable atmosphere. So, we first need to terraform it. And even before that, we first have to land on Mars. So far of our every attempt, we have have been successful in a few, and every one of those was unmanned. Because the risk is too high. There is a risk of radiation. Mars soil has toxicity. We don't even know all about its atmosphere. There are could many other life-threatening risks. But with all this, there is one more problem that is not much discussed. And this problem is not on Mars or in its atmosphere. This is within us. The Problem of boredom.
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| Martian Boredom |
Trip to Mars can take about 200 to 400 days. And all these days, to be inside in a small space capsule with a small crew doing some daily repetitive with low error margin can be challenging for astronauts. Though astronauts spend many days in space stations, space stations are quite near to earth. The international space station orbits at the 400 km average height around the earth. And astronauts there in their leisure time gaze to earth, which is a remarkable experience for anyone. It's truly astonishing. You can even chat in real-time with people on earth.
But Mars is a long long way from our home. It's millions and millions of miles away. So, neither you get the sight of our blue planet nor you can chat in realtime. There is a communication delay of at least 20 minutes. With this, it becomes challenging for anyone to spend so many days with a small crew. They can be at the risk of suffering from acute boredom. And this is posing a challenge to NASA psychologists for the selection of stable and sound crew members.
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| Mars Mission |
But boredom is not exclusively an issue for Mars going astronauts. Sometimes we are also caught up in it in our life. Sometimes we just get fed up with our life momentarily. Nothing fascinates or interests us. Boredom is a very unique state of mind and different too. Boredom is proof that our life is not intrinsically meaningful. We make it meaningful by all those work that keeps us busy, by all those emotions that make us feel alive. And when those aesthetics are washed away momentarily, we find our lives to be boring. What do we do now? We are left with no motivation.
In our waking life, most of the time we are always under the influence of any emotion. There are so many shades of human emotions and we are shaded by one of those. Either you are happy or sad or anxious, jealous, angry, afraid, joyful, and with this our experience of time distorts. It is called the subjective experience of time.
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| Boredom |
Time flies when you are having fun. It slows down in threatening situations. In any accidents and mishaps, we perceive time in slow-motion. In our dreams, we experience time differently. And sometimes we get a sense of timelessness when we are in a flow state. Our perception of time is always influenced by our emotions and feelings. But when we are bored there is no stronghold of emotions within us. Sometimes we do get frustrated, and seldom prolonged boredom can switch into depression. But in our everyday life, when we get bored, we are not emotionally influenced. On the contrary, it creates a vacuum in our life. We get to see the nakedness of life without any aesthetics. We get to realize that life is so fuking boring if we don't have meanings and beliefs attached to it. It stills the flow of time. Everything halts for the time being and it is torturous.
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It is true that from the perspective of infinity our life span is not even of the size of a dot but the time scale that we live by, which is in seconds, minutes and hours, and with this time scale, our 70 years of life will also be no less than infinity if don't be occupied with something, if we don't have responsibility and emotions. We can't even sit idle for 5 minutes, let alone 70 years. The truth is that we hate boredom. And whenever we are caught up in such situations, we find an escape. And these days, it is our smartphones and digital devices where we take refuge. These devices have virtually made it impossible for anyone to be bored. Compared to our ancestors, we have less tolerance towards boredom. And it is just getting lesser.
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| Time |
When we don't find anything to stimulate us in our surrounding environment, we start to get bored. And often, in such times, we try to stimulate ourselves with our minds. We start to think. We let our minds wander. And this stimulates creative thinking. While daydreaming sometimes we go beyond our conscious thoughts. We dive into our subconscious mind to extract something interesting. And there are collections of many such memories, thoughts, and questions buried down that went ignored in our everyday life. And sometimes it is these memories and information that help us make connections, see a pattern. You get into a dialogue with our own subconscious. Sometimes it helps you with the next paragraph of your script or sometimes with a business plan or you find a solution to any long tormenting problem. In some cases, you unearth some long-forgotten memories that make you smile.
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| Subconscious Mind |
Alas, most of us don't experience this. Today if we are even made to wait for a minute, we quickly take our phones out. We can be lost in this digital device for hours on end without being bored. But for the thought processes like mind wandering and creative thinking, we have to embrace boredom, not escape from it. We have to build up a tolerance capacity for it. And only then, we can steer our thinking in such a constructive manner.
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| Astronauts |
I firmly believe, sooner or later, we will be multi-planetary species. We are born on the earth but never meant to die here. All these big giant rocks that revolve around the sun with our planet, we will reach there too. But that's for later. Right now, here on this planet, we first need to learn to sit alone in our room with just our thoughts.
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