Episode 5: Tortilla!

No sound has ever been recorded on Mars. NASA has tried a few times to send recording equipment up there, and every time something seems to go wrong. But soon they're going to try again. They're planning to launch a brand new Mars rover in 2020, just two years from now. On the rover, we'll be a tiny microphone. And if everything goes according to plan, when that thing lands, we'll be able to hear sound recorded on another planet for the very first time. Maybe we'll hear a little dust blowing through the Martian atmosphere. Maybe the mechanical sounds of a lander digging in the dirt, or a rover moving across the surface, maybe we'll hear something unexpected. But whatever it is, the soundscape of Mars is likely to be very quiet. The sound of a place with no humans, no music, no language, not a single breath. There are moments when the high seas dome can sound like that. Moments when it gets so quiet, you can imagine you're really on an untouched planet. No moments. But then you hear something like this. This is the sound of Shea, the crew doctor, playing her didgeridoo. I bought it in the Outback in Australia in 2003, and it's very hard to play. It's one of those long hollow wooden tubes that you blow into. Here she is explaining how it works. As you play the didgeridoo, the air moves from your abdomen up through your torso, past your lungs, through your larynx, out your mouth, which is vibrating. And all of you vibrates back, and it's a cycle. As you vibrate it vibrates, you vibrate it vibrates and back and forth, and it's kind of like a conversation. When she found out she was moving to Mars, Shea thought it would be fun to bring her dig along. But after spending some time in here, she admits, "Not everyone thinks it's fun." People don't dislike my dig, but they don't enjoy it either. I don't really blame them, I'm not a fantastic dig player, but even if I were, the dig is a bit of an acquired taste. And this is the thing about sending humans to Mars. I'll try it one more time. We're really sending humans anywhere. Whatever we go, we bring our stuff. We bring our didgeridoo's and ukulele's and harmonicas, and our desire to play those things even in tiny enclosed spaces. We bring our little quirks and ticks, our annoying personality traits, our inexplicable wants and needs, and we bring all our human bullshit. And a lot of the recordings I get from the crew, there's a moment like this, a moment where someone's in the middle of a thought, and then a noise bleeds through from somewhere in the dome and interrupts them. I guess one of the most difficult things here is the constant sound that you're surrounded by. As you can hear right now in the background, someone's running on the treadmill, and there's almost no way to escape that sound. It doesn't need to be anything like a didgeridoo. And here, even small sounds are impossible to ignore. Anj is yelling in the background, so Anj, yes, the tendency to announce and report everything is doing. As an, if he's going to the bathroom, he's saying just that I'm going to go to the bathroom. Sometimes I'm working in silence in my room, and suddenly I hear his deep and loud voice which announces, "Okay, now I am going to eat some cheese and crackers." Man, he didn't need it. Necessarily convey that information in that way, but you did. Oh, she can take this out. Oh, wow, Anj, stop yelling. And this is Sipperen running up and on the stairs. Sipperen, the man comes down the stairs and allowed his possible way. He sounds like a pack of elephants. Yeah, it's very easy to tell who's moving around by their steps. Climb, climb, climb. Yeah. I can, I felt that in the wall. Right, I know. I did too. Oh. Yeah, so when people make certain noises in here, you don't just hear it, you feel it. The whole place vibrates. Like, even though you close the door of your room, you can still hear other people. So you're constantly with other people. There is no place where you can be by yourself. Under circumstances like this, of course, certain things will start to get on your nerves. But as the experiment goes on, and the audio diaries come in, I start to see it's not just the obvious stuff that's driving people crazy anymore. It's not just the stomping and the running. It's also stuff that, in the beginning of the mission, seemed really nice. For example, deep into the experiment, Anjay is still making the same breakfast burritos every week, with the same shouts of, there cannot go a Sunday. That we will be here, that we will not have the exact same thing for breakfast cooked every single Sunday. Mm-hmm. With shouts of tortilla. tortilla. He loves tortillas, man. As burritos kept appearing on the breakfast table week after week after week, some of the crew started to get bored with them, and then a little grossed out by them. And eventually, like nobody wants it. There's chocolate on the plate and throws it out after it's because it's disgusting. This thing, like, I love food and everything, and I love tortillas. I used to love breakfast burritos so much. Yeah. But it's just, like, if you have them, you know, again and again and again, like, it's just not good anymore. Every Sunday for 27 Sundays in a row. If you do the math, you'll notice that 27 Sundays is almost exactly six months into the mission. And when I talk to Steve Kuzlowski, a high seas researcher and organizational psychologist, he tells me the data he's getting from this crew matches something he's seen before. Something seems to be happening around six months. Okay. And what's that something? Well, that something is that things get more difficult. Basically, around six months in, people start to get a lot more pissed off at each other. So what do you think is going on? Why is that happening? It's a little hard to say, but I simply think that psychologically you can create a buffer, if you will, where you can absorb a bunch of things that may be unpleasant for a certain period of time, you know, whatever it might be. I can put up with it for a while. For a while. But there comes a point, Steve says, when it gets hard to remember life before the mission, it's hard to imagine life after the mission. The place you're in starts to feel like the whole world. And the people you're with starts to feel like you'll be with them forever. And the conflict begins to bubble up. Yeah, eventually, I guess the point where we're like, we could have, you know, Morgan Freeman in here. And at this point, I'd be like, Morgan, just shut up like for a game, you say that, but he has not been narrating breakfast for months. It's fantastic. It's like honey and caramel mixed with the melted sunshine and dreams of children, but you can have too much of that. No, there can be an excess of anything. I want my life to be so awesome that he could narrate it. Well, maybe he'll hear this and then he will. Yeah, Morgan Freeman, will you narrate my life? Okay. Here you go, Carmel. This one's for you. You wake up in the morning and the treadmill is already going. One of your crewmates is humming the same and furious little tourney hums every day. And then, say starts playing the digital redo. The other crewmate poised themselves a bowl of cereal. And you can hear every little bite, every little slurp, which maybe was fine for a while. And after six long months of this, the buffer that Guy Steve Coslowski talks about has been worn down. And you wonder how you'll make it. Six more months. No one thing you can do, you can find a focus for all that frustration, somebody to blame. That's after the break. I should tell you all, I'm not actually Morgan Freeman. My name is Jason Stevens and if you need a Morgan Freeman impersonator, I'm available. Oh, she wanted to hear dude ranch stories. Oh, yeah. Tell us dude ranch stories. All right. Well, let's see here. Tristan has plenty of experience living in difficult situations with difficult people. Before he came to the dome, he lived in a place called the Dude Ranch. This place was a shit hole. It wasn't actually a ranch, just a house that Tristan shared with his stepbrother and a bunch of his stepbrothers' friends. Just a bunch of dudes living together, doing dude stuff. Drink have parties watch porn in the living room, tear up bushes and throw them around the apartment. After a dude party, the whole place would be covered in garbage. The piles of garbage were sometimes taller than Tristan. The house was swarming with cockroaches, the dudes would throw dirty plates at each other like frisbees and one time one of the roommates got so sloppy drunk that he wandered into Tristan's bedroom two in the morning, decided it was his bedroom and tried to climb into Tristan's bed. And so I have my foot on his face and another on his shoulder and he's crawling up my leg like a sloth trying to get into bed because he does not understand and so I just get out of bed, grab him by the ankle and drag him out. And I'm like, he's super drunk so he just, bam, just face plans right onto the ground. And she just let him sleep in your bed and you go somewhere else. Because when I woke up in the morning, he had thrown up a lake of vomit and it was everywhere. The dude ranch seems worse than the dome in almost every possible way. There are no swarms of cockroaches in the dome, no piles of garbage, no one's gonna make you watch their porn and no one is gonna leave a lake of vomit in your bed. And yet, I can say of all the different places I've lived and all of the incredibly annoying people, probably the worst one is here. When Tristan says the worst one is here, he means the worst person. Usually he talks around this stuff, he tries not to name names, everyone in the dome wants to be a good astronaut and good astronauts don't complain. So the really bad stuff, they usually try to keep to themselves. I'm feeling a lot of this stuff, actually, would say about people we can't say already. Of course not. This is a highly censored version of what we really think. But every once in a while, what they really think bleeds through, like in this recording. I asked Tristan and Carmel to describe their crewmates and when they get to one particular person, they can hardly bring themselves to say her name, much less anything nice about her. I've got nothing for public hearing. She likes to be in control and be in charge of everything, that's probably the most politically correct way of saying it, and I should stop talking. Over time I start to hear more and more complaints about Shay. They're not about the didgeridoo, apparently, she doesn't really play it that often. They're about smaller stuff, stuff that from outside the dome sounds petty and honestly kind of stupid. Shay says she knows how to make ice cream, but she really doesn't. Shay says she knows how to make bread, but her bread isn't good. We were all going to record a song together, but Shay went off with Anjay and they recorded it without us. At first I had a hard time understanding why anyone would even mention stuff like this, just didn't seem like a big deal. But there's one recording that kind of clarified things for me. It's from Shay, and it's about Cheetos. This is Shayne and Gifford. Crew physician on the high seas for a mission to simulate Mars. So every few months, the crew gets a delivery of food and supplies. They can request things they want, and as long as it's something that would actually survive the trip to Mars, mission support will try to get it for them. And after one of these deliveries, Shay says, Now it's pretty hard to indulge in anything inside the dome. There's no alcohol up here, no cigarettes, no weed. You can't go shopping or get a massage or take a bubble bath. Junk food is one of the only things left. But still, Shay says, The way that people are continuing to eat just shocks me. It's just back on earth, it's not as shocking, I think, because we have so much junk food. Here the only way to get it is to be very intentional about it. On earth, it happens quite by accident. But here, food doesn't accidentally arrive on Mars. We can have peanut butter banana shakes made with, you know, beautiful, rich tofu and incredibly good for you, peanut powder, which has almost no fat in it. And you can eat so well here, at no extra cost. And it seems like that is the thing to do. And yet, and yet, we have the box of Cheetos. And I'm always having to say, stop eating that crap. Do you need to eat that here? I know what my answer would be. Now, no one has specifically complained to me about Shay badmouthing their Cheetos. But every time I listen to this tape, I cringe. And it makes me wonder if this is the kind of thing Carmel and Tristan are talking about when they say, Shay likes to be in control. If you talk to Shay, she does not agree with the idea that she's trying to control things in the dome. I went to Berkeley. I just go with the flow of things. She'll tell you she's just doing her job as crew doctor, trying to keep everyone healthy. She's not trying to control anyone. But with every recording that arrives, it becomes clearer and clearer to me. Shay is not beloved by some of the people in this dome. The thing is, she is beloved by some people somewhere. But somewhere is just very far away. Shay is married. She's one of the only members of the crew who left a partner back on Earth. The other one is Anjay. But since Anjay really only talks about space, I can't tell you much about his wife. Whereas Shay talks about her husband. There are many things I miss about him. A lot. Mostly, he's just the world's goofiest person. He's very funny and loving and supportive. He's a great beard. It's very soft. She talks about how good he smells. And she claims that in the decade they've been together, they've had almost no fights. She just gets him. And he just gets her. She is smart and eloquent and articulate and awesome. This is Shay's husband, Ben. You know, we are always the terrifyingly cute couple when we always happen. I sat down with him to talk about what it's been like having his partner off in the dome. And he said he wasn't really surprised when she signed up for this strange experiment. Because she's always doing some strange, new, exciting thing. Her adventures in this exploration is something that I really like and love about her. It was, you know, the fact that she would do something like this is exactly why I wanted to bury her. Still, there's a difference between a spouse who would do something like this and a spouse who is doing something like this. A spouse you can't call, can't visit, can't touch. Shay and Ben do everything they can to stay close on their separate planets. They email back and forth every day. Ben sends Shay lots of pictures of their two cats. And once in a while, Shay will arrange to have a gift sent to Ben back on Earth. What's the best thing that she sent you? The best thing she sent me was a robotic automated litter box. It's called a cat genie. She said, "Well, you know, I'm not there to clean the litter boxes and I arranged for something to be delivered to so that I can be doing my share." And then there's this automated robotic litter box where you don't have to touch it for weeks. And it's great. I love that because it's so mundane, like it's such an unsexy present. But it's so, exactly. It's so practical and functional and it allowed her to take a role in her day-to-day life. Shay is deeply tied to her life on Earth, the day-to-day stuff of her relationships there. And as the mission goes on, more and more things seem to be pulling her back. It's not just Ben. After the mission starts, one of her good friends gets diagnosed with cancer. Then her grandmother gets sick and dies. And then there's her dad. It's amazing how long people will linger, just at the edge of disaster. And dad's been there for a decade or more. Shay's dad is a doctor, just like her. And he used to come home with, like, literally brains. He used to come home with sheets of brains and hold them up and go, "Look at this brain. This is amazing." But when Shay was 19, he had a stroke that left him with some serious impairments. And since then, she's been kind of looking after him. It's like she's the parent and he's the kid. Before she went into the dome, she hired a lawyer and an accountant to manage his affairs, hoping that would be enough to keep him afloat 'til she got back. But then one day, she learned he'd gotten into a fight and ended up in the hospital. And there was nothing I could do. As each new problem came up, she tried to solve it the best she could. She spent more and more time emailing with people on Earth. But these things just kept happening back on Earth and they seemed like disasters. While Shay was dealing with problems on Earth, bonds formed between Cyprian and Cristiana and Carmel and Tristan. And Shay never really formed those bonds. So now, there's a divide in the crew that has gotten pretty deep. I spent quite a lot of time with Carmel and Tristan, whereas Shay and Andrzej don't to be by themselves. Here's Cyprian. I think this has kind of intensified since the beginning of the mission. Yeah, I don't think I play with Shay or Andrzej at all. Here's Tristan and Carmel. We don't like playing with them. Yeah, they're too cool and not fun. Well, they don't get our jokes either. No. They have this thing about them, we're like, we're adults and we're like chill out. And we are too. And we also like to have fun. Yeah. And Cristiana says something that makes it crystal clear, people are not getting along. I ask her what she would change about high seas if she could go back in time and start the mission all over again. Anything at all. I know one thing. I would recommend a different crew member. I would replace at least one crew member with another option we had. For whatever reason, because of their attachments at home or their priorities here or just their baked-in personalities, these people don't quite fit together. And it makes me think of something Shea said to me early in the experiment. I asked her how she would choose a crew for a real Mars mission. How do you pick a Mars crew? That's an incredibly complex question and the answer. The best answer is that we don't know. We don't know what makes a group of human beings successful in any context, forget space, in a corporate context, in a sports context, in any group dynamic. And if we can master that, we'll really be doing great. On many levels, we'll have better companies and more functional sports teams and better family units. I mean, basically what we're talking here is about engineering of family. There are things you'll tolerate from your family that you won't tolerate from anyone else. When your dad insists on making his specialty breakfast every single Sunday, it's kind of endearing. When your brother stomps down the stairs in the middle of the night, you might shout at him, but you'll forgive him. And when your mom tells you to stop eating all that crap, you might be really mad, but she's still your mom. Those bonds keep you together when things get rough. And for a long time, we've been choosing our astronauts by looking for the best individuals. The smartest, the bravest, the most level-headed, the ones with the so-called "right stuff." But when we go to Mars, the challenge won't just be finding one or two or even six exceptional individuals. It'll be finding a group of people who can become a family, who can trust each other no matter what, who can walk together into that cold, strange, Martian landscape. And ultimately, that's what we're talking about here. It's not just making breakfast and hanging out. It's putting on the spacesuits, and opening the hatch, and venturing into the unknown. And on the next episode of The Habitat, the crew puts on the spacesuits, and opens the hatch. The Habitat is a production of Gimlet Media. It's produced by Peter Bresnan, Megan Tan, and me, I'm Lynn Levy. Our editors are Alex Bloomberg, Jorge Just, Caitlin Kenney, and Blythe Tarell, additional reporting in this episode by Eric Eddingson. Music, sound design, and mixing by Haley Shaw, music supervision by Matthew Boll, additional music by Alexander Ubrington. Our credits music in this episode is performed by Alba and The Mighty Lions, and written by David Bowie. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Our Morgan Freeman impersonator is Jason Stevens, thanks to Eric Menel for all his help. And a very special thanks to the high seas crew, Anne J., Cristiana, Cyprian, Carmel, Shay, and Tristan.