ON 27 January 1990, we reported that V茅ronique Le Guen had taken her own life. Just two years earlier, she had set a world record for the most time spent alone in an underground cavern by a woman.
For 111 days, Le Guen went without clocks or any information from the outside world and lived in a cold, damp cavern 80 metres below ground at Valat-Negre in southern France.
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At this depth, not even the temperature of the cave 鈥� a constant, dank 9掳C 鈥� could give her any indication whether it was day or night, making it very difficult for her to know when to sleep.
Electrodes stuck to her scalp during the experiment revealed that Le Guen鈥檚 sense of time quickly came unstuck. On one occasion she slept for 18 hours, but when she woke up, she thought she had dropped off for only a couple of minutes.
In the cave, she read around 80 books, took thousands of urine and blood samples and developed a temporary hatred of the experiment鈥檚 leader, Michel Siffre, who himself had previously spent 205 days in a cave in Texas in 1972.
鈥淚 feel a wave of immense aggressiveness that dominates my spirits,鈥� Le Guen . 鈥淥ne after the other, I look at each of the instruments of my torture: equipment to take samples, analyze, count up, manipulate, pierce. A crazy desire overcomes me to smash and destroy everything.鈥�
The experiment was set up to see how humans tolerate, or don鈥檛 tolerate, states of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation. These are circumstances that people will almost certainly confront in any serious crewed exploration of the solar system.
Travelling to Mars, for example, would take around seven months, so a round trip plus time spent on the planet could easily involve 18 months of extreme isolation. NASA was interested early on in the project and sponsored Siffre鈥檚 Texas expedition.
Siffre鈥檚 last major cave experiment ended in 2000, after he spent 75 days alone in the Clamouse cave in southern France. Nowadays, the International Space Station provides a more realistic test bed for the type of isolation future astronauts may have to contend with.
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