The New York Times interviewed Christiane Heinicke, one of the six NASA researchers living inside a 1,000-square-foot dome in Hawaii for a year to simulate life on Mars. As Heinicke, a 30-year-old German scientist, describes it, life on make-believe Mars actually doesn’t sound so bad: You can garden, eat cookies, and play board games.
But before you start packing your suitcase for outer space, you should know about this possible deal-breaker: the internet connection in Bizzaro Mars is time-delayed by 20 minutes, to better simulate the time it would take messages to travel through the Solar System.