The Sea Looked Like Stone
What three hundred and seventy-eight days on a pretend Mars taught me about the real planet inside us
A euro a minute
Back in my sailing days, a phone call home was a planned event. The ship carried a satellite phone, and every minute on it cost more than a euro. For a young man at sea, that was serious money, so I prepared like a student before an exam. Days before a call, I built a list in my head. Ask about home. Ask about the neighbours. Ask what changed on our street and what people back home were talking about. I rehearsed the order so each expensive minute would carry as much as it could hold.
Then I dialled. My mother picked up, and after the hello I asked her what was happening.
"What's up with you?" she asked back.
That was all she had. She had made zero plans for the call. Her son was on the other side of the planet with a meter running in euros, and she simply wanted to hear his voice. I wanted the news of the whole town packed into four minutes, and she was happy just listening to me down a crackling line. It irritated me so much that I stayed away from the phone for a whole month.
Silly days. I smile about them now.
Two days, two nights
Life at sea bends time. On one Pacific crossing, the ship sailed through two continuous days and then two continuous nights, and every so often the clocks shifted by an hour as we crossed into a new time zone. Your body stops trusting the clock. On some stretches we drifted, engines quiet, waiting for orders.
I used to stand on the open deck and look at the water. On calm days the Pacific lay so still and so heavy that it looked like stone. My eyes insisted it was land. I felt I could step off the rail and walk across it all the way to the horizon.
The sea had its own visitors. Flying fish would leap out of the water and land on board, flapping on the hot steel deck. At night we fished for calamari. We hung glowing radium lures over the side, fixed with needles, and the squid rose towards the light and got pierced. We pulled them off, fried them right there and ate them on the open deck under a sky full of stars.
Those were my Mars years. I simply lacked the word for it then.
A calm sea at dusk, the kind of evening when the water looked like stone to me. Photo: Gary Walker-Jones, Unsplash
The pretend planet in Houston
In October last year, four volunteers walked into a 3D-printed building at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The building is called Mars Dune Alpha, and it measures about seventeen hundred square feet, roughly the size of a roomy three-bedroom flat. The four were Ross Elder, the commander and an Air Force test pilot; Ellen Ellis, the medical officer from the US Space Force; James Spicer, the flight engineer; and Matthew Montgomery, the science officer. The mission is called CHAPEA, short for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog.
They stayed inside for three hundred and seventy-eight days.
The habitat has zero windows. They lived without live calls to the people they loved, and every message travelled with a delay of up to twenty-two minutes each way, just as a signal would from Mars. They grew vegetables, went on simulated Marswalks in suits, ran a drone and a rover to collect rock samples, and tracked every last bottle of dish soap and every respirator filter.
Matthew Montgomery with vegetables grown inside the habitat. Photo: NASA/James Blair
Then came the hardest part. For two full weeks, the line to Earth went dead, copying the stretch when Mars slips behind the Sun and the whole planet goes silent. Fourteen days without a single word from home.
What they said when they came out
On the last day of October this year, the four walked out into the Texas sunlight with their arms in the air. Their families were waiting. Then they started talking, and what they said surprised me.
The crew steps outdoors for the first time in 378 days. Photo: NASA/James Blair
Ellen Ellis said that most days she felt far from isolated. She had three teammates she relied on every day, and that was enough.
James Spicer said he was surprised by how little he missed the constant news and social media updates. The break from distractions helped him focus on the mission. The best moments, he said, came from stories and jokes around the kitchen table.
Matthew Montgomery said he learned to give himself more grace when an outcome fell short. Then he summed up the whole year in one line: "It's really the people that make exploration possible."
Ross Elder, the commander, spoke about the body. Nutrition, exercise and rest, he said, were essential to keeping up the pace. And about his crew: "The real magic has been the privilege and pleasure of seeing everyone come together, with the makings of one of the finest teams I've ever been a part of."
Ellen Ellis on the habitat's exercise bike. Photo: NASA/James Blair
My phone call, two decades on
When I read Spicer's words about the news, I laughed out loud, because I was his exact opposite on that ship. I treated four minutes on a satellite phone like a news bulletin I was paying for. I wanted every update from home, and when the updates failed to arrive, I punished the one person who loved me most with a month of silence.
The crew in Houston had a two-week blackout forced on them, and they came out calmer and closer. I gave myself a one-month blackout out of pure ego, and it only made me lonelier. Silence is just silence. The mind decides what it becomes.
My mother understood that call far better than I did. She knew the news could wait. A voice from the far side of the world was the whole point. She is gone now, and today I would happily pay a hundred euros a minute to hear her ask me, one more time, "What's up?"
The planet inside you
On that Pacific crossing, the sea looked like stone to me because my mind turned it into land. That is the Mind Flow idea in a single picture. The world outside stays the same, and the mind shapes what we see in it. Your universe begins inside you.
A single ripple spreads across still water, the way one thought shapes a whole day. Photo: H&CO, Unsplash
The Houston crew lived in a box the size of a flat for over a year, and they described it as a team, a kitchen table and a garden of vegetables. They filled the quiet with people, routine and small jokes. I lived on a ship as wide as an ocean, and on one bad day I filled the quiet with anger.
Each of us carries a little Mars Dune Alpha around all the time. Some days the signal from the outside world is strong. Some days it drops for two weeks. The people who come through it well are the ones who tend the inside: they eat well, they move their bodies, they rest, they lean on their crew, and they forgive themselves when a day goes wrong.
So this week, try a small blackout of your own. Put the phone away for an evening. Call one person you love with zero agenda, and when they ask, "What's up?", simply tell them. Let them hear your voice. Four minutes like that might be the most valuable thing you ever spend.
The sea may look like stone. Walk across it anyway.
Santhosh Sivaraj is an author and mind trainer, and the voice behind Mind Flow. Before that he was a sailor, an entrepreneur and a teacher, and those years still shape every story he tells.
Photos: NASA/James Blair, NASA Johnson Space Center, CHAPEA Mission 2. Sea photos by Gary Walker-Jones and H&CO on Unsplash.
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