"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart."
— Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly
"They think I'm crazy. But I know better. It is not I who am crazy. It is I who am mad!"
— Commander Hoek, The Ren & Stimpy Show
Even unknown, and monster-peopled by superstition, Earth had not been as cruel an environment as space; nor had a caravel been as unnatural as a spaceship. Minds could never have disintegrated as quickly in mid-ocean as between the stars.
— The Burning Bridge, by Poul Anderson.
"I fear that when our master reached for the stars, he came down with a touch of... space madness."
"It is so dark around, no life, no hope, no sound, no chance of seeing home again ... Somebody help me, I'm missing, somebody help me, I'm missing, now touch with my mind, I have no frame ... no people around, no one to touch. I am now quite alone, part of a vacant time-zone, here floating in the void..."
— Van der Graaf Generator, "Pioneers Over C"
"Additional: Our biggest enemy is going space-crazy through loneliness. The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes."
"How will Man's subconscious mind react to his first experiences with space travel? Will he not suddenly be aware of his precarious situation, trapped in a tiny metal box, floating through the incomprehensible nothingness of space?"
— Dr. Heinz Haber, Disneyland, "Man in Space"
Tumii: He has already certified free of transmissible celestial dementia.
John: We're callin' it space madness.
John: We're callin' it space madness.
— Farscape, "Coup by Clam"
"You have given me the incident counts for the colony, and I say that colony has been in operation for two and a half years. That much time in deep space is inherently dangerous, and the people attracted to this line of work are too."
— Captain Mathius, Dead Space: Downfall
"There's no relative direction in the vastness of space. There's only yourself, your ship, your crew. It's easier than you think to get lost."
— Commodore Paris, Star Trek Beyond
"Being lost in space has been known to drive one mad. Too much time contemplating infinity is not good for the mind."
— Allura, Voltron: Legendary Defender
"All the conditions necessary for murder are met if you shut two men in a cabin and leave them together for two months."
— Valery Ryumin, Russian Cosmonaut
Out here, there's a lot of ways to go crazy. Get cooped up in a passenger module not much larger than a trailer, and by the time you reach your destination you may have come to believe that the universe exists only within your own mind: it's called solipsism syndrome, and I've seen it happen a couple of times. Share that same module with five or six guys who don't get along very well, and after three months you'll be sleeping with a knife taped to your thigh. Pull double-shifts during that time, with little chance to relax, and you'll probably suffer from depression; couple this with vitamin deficiency due to a lousy diet, and you're a candidate for chronic fatigue syndrome.
Folks who've never left Earth often think that Titan Plague is the main reason people go mad in space. They're wrong. Titan Plague may rot your brain and turn you into a homicidal maniac, but instances of it are rare, and there's a dozen other ways to go bonzo that are much more subtle. I've seen guys adopt imaginary friends with whom they have long and meaningless conversations, compulsively clean their hardsuits regardless of whether or not they've recently worn them, or go for a routine spacewalk and have to be begged to come back into the airlock. Some people just aren't cut out for life away from Earth, but there's no way to predict who's going to going to lose their mind.
Folks who've never left Earth often think that Titan Plague is the main reason people go mad in space. They're wrong. Titan Plague may rot your brain and turn you into a homicidal maniac, but instances of it are rare, and there's a dozen other ways to go bonzo that are much more subtle. I've seen guys adopt imaginary friends with whom they have long and meaningless conversations, compulsively clean their hardsuits regardless of whether or not they've recently worn them, or go for a routine spacewalk and have to be begged to come back into the airlock. Some people just aren't cut out for life away from Earth, but there's no way to predict who's going to going to lose their mind.
— The Emperor of Mars, by Allen Steele
"The enemy up here is not a person or a thing. It's the endless void."
— Thomas Pruitt, Ad Astra
Gustav spent the next fifteen years rotating through a stim-diet of psychotropic phantasmagoria, simulated life programs, and pharmacological comas. It was during the return leg of the journey that he coined the term "ludicroustic." The food reserves hadn't kept as well as hoped, so Gustav had to rely more heavily on the protein recycler than was deemed safe. Tubed permanently to his chair, there were few intermissions from the Computer Reality Feed.
"Insanity is where one misperceives the external world but I am not insane yet. It is just that the world presented to me is too strange to bear and I have become ludicroustic. My senses and foldback are artificially controlled and lack the complexity of what I remember of Earth living. I have been a king, a queen; I have been all things and suffered all the fates I could desire. Not even the breakfast simulator can save me now."
Obviously, these long voyages were not for the human body or mind, and thus the Human Seed Project was given a further boost.
"Insanity is where one misperceives the external world but I am not insane yet. It is just that the world presented to me is too strange to bear and I have become ludicroustic. My senses and foldback are artificially controlled and lack the complexity of what I remember of Earth living. I have been a king, a queen; I have been all things and suffered all the fates I could desire. Not even the breakfast simulator can save me now."
Obviously, these long voyages were not for the human body or mind, and thus the Human Seed Project was given a further boost.
— The Museum of Unnatural History, by David M. Henley
Spacefleet regarded such luxuries as a necessary evil, undertaken only after several outbreaks of so-called space madness: a catchall phrase for the stresses and phobias that were inevitable when you locked people in a metal can and cast them into a deadly vacuum whose infinity was incomprehensible to the human mind.
"Space has that effect on some people. When you look too long into emptiness, the emptiness gets inside ya."
— Daimon Karnes, Wing Commander Academy, "The Last One Left"
"Separation from the earth with all of its unconscious symbolic significance for man [...] might in theory at least be expected [...] to produce — even in a well-selected and trained pilot — something akin to the panic of schizophrenia."
— Psychiatrist Eugene Brody, speaking at the 1959 Symposium on Space Psychiatry
