The Weirdest Thing: One Week From Landing

Today was our last Sunday on sMars. In less than a week, the hatch will open and the six of us will rejoin the world. In some (obvious) ways, we never left. In many ways, we'll be aliens among our own kind. When your whole world looks like this, your values change a bit. It's easier than you might think to step out of the world - so easy, in fact, that people do it on accident. We spend a weekend in the woods; volunteer for a summer in rural Mexico; go for a long walk across Spain, moving from east to west, from the mountains skirting France to the edge of the Atlantic ocean. After the week, month, season or year away, we re-emerge into daily life in the developed world and suffer from a sort of shock. It happens all the time. It's happened to me dozens of times. In my experience, the magnitude and duration of the shock is generally proportional to the magnitude and duration of how far I stepped away and for how long; and regardless of duration, no sensory system is spared. The littlest things get noticed up here. Returning from my first trip to the mountains as a kid (age 11), I was struck by how loud Los Angeles was. It took several weeks not to feel like the city was actively trying to melt my brain. On coming back from a summer in Mexico (age 15), I remember looking around and thinking, "Where in the name of (your chosen deity) is everyone GOING in such a blinding hurry?" The pace of urban life struck me as bizarre and amusing - almost circus-like. Speaking of bli...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news