Alone in a dark cave: what can we learn from extreme survival experiments?

• Why do humans undertake journeys of personal exploration, or subject themselves to challenging conditions for long periods of time?
• British mountaineer George Mallory undertook his fatal attempt to summit Mount Everest in 1924 simply “because it’s there”.

Searching for extreme environments

• Examples include places that experience extremes of temperature, pressure, altitude, rainfall, breathable air, natural light, or hazardous chemical concentrations.
• In recent years, humans have undertaken many extreme experiments, either alone or in groups.
• She aimed to “learn more about how the human mind and body can deal with extreme solitude and deprivation”.
• The project aimed to explore human adaptation to isolation and extreme conditions, together with the absence of the normal stimuli that provide a sense of time.

Training for space

• As part of its astronaut training program, the European Space Agency holds a three-week course in an underground cave system.
• Extreme environments can be useful not just for training and simulations.
• Places with physical similarities to space environments can also serve as locations for so-called analog missions.
• There are also closed small-group habitats such as NASA’s HERA module at Johnson Space Center and the privately owned Hi-Seas habitat on Hawai‘i island.
• Read more:
  NASA is launching the 1st stage of the Artemis mission – here's why humans are going back to the Moon

We’re all in this together

• Telehealth research already benefits people living in isolated and remote areas.
• The United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs runs a Space4Health initiative aimed at assisting countries in leveraging space infrastructure for better global health outcomes.
• NASA’s Spinoff archive documents the rich history of how space research has benefited life on Earth.