While the damage was devastating, one home remained intact after wildfires ravaged through Lahaina in Hawaii this summer. The historically preserved home on Front Street has a protective metal roof, but it also has landscaping that gave the house its best chance to not catch fire.  As wildfires become more frequent…

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The astronauts arrived at the Mars base one by one, dressed in faded orange spacesuits. After they walked through a pressurized chamber and removed their helmets, they were blasted in the face with some sort of decontaminating mist. When the cyclist Lance Armstrong walked in, one of his comrades was in awe. “The fact that we have an astronaut is so crazy,” Ariel Winter, an actor who appeared on Modern Family, told another contestant, who was visibly confused. Winter had mistaken this Armstrong for Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who died in 2012.

So began the first season of Stars on Mars, a Fox reality show that sent celebrities to “space” (the Australian desert), and whose season finale airs tonight. Over the course of 12 episodes, viewers have watched the participants live as Mars astronauts would, on freeze-dried meals and a 20-minute communication delay with the rest of Earth, fertilizing potato crops with (fake) human waste, à la The Martian. The point of the show is for contestants to work together when things go wrong—a communication tower goes down, a robot dog needs to be rescued, the habitat’s precious garden catches fire. If the group decides you aren’t “mission critical,” you go home. The winner gets the prize of being declared “the brightest star in the galaxy.”

Like most reality TV, Stars on Mars is cringy, mindless fun. It might also be the most believable reality show I’ve ever seen. We humans still have much to figure out before dispatching a real-life mission to Mars. We have to build the spaceships and rockets to get there, find a way to protect astronauts from intense radiation on the flight over, and figure out how they’ll live off the inhospitable environment once they land. Stars on Mars highlights one of the most significant challenges of extended spaceflight, one that’s often overlooked: the crew itself, with all of its personalities, opinions, and feelings. There will be drama on Mars.

[Read: Just like that, we’re making oxygen on Mars]

NASA knows this. Psychologists know this. For years, they've been running space simulations on Earth designed to study cognitive performance, interpersonal interactions, and team dynamics in an isolated, inescapable environment; the latest began in June, with four volunteers prepared to spend 378 days in a 1,700-square-foot outpost, only venturing out in spacesuits, as they do on Stars. Travelers to Mars will be stuck with one another for some seven long months—each way. Such a mission is the ultimate group project, and picking the right people is crucial. Everything researchers learn from simulations will someday be incorporated into guidelines for keeping astronauts nice and stable on long-term space missions, and not tearing at one another’s throats.

The researchers who run simulations, not unlike reality-TV producers, introduce “resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays, and other environmental stressors” to see how the participants handle them, as NASA has in its new Mars experiment. In a 2017 simulation, NASA put four recruits inside a tiny habitat for 45 days and kept them quite sleep-deprived in order to study the effects of crew fatigue. “After about a week, it was more like grunts than actual conversation,” John Kennard, one of the participants, told me back then. The crankiness led to some misunderstandings, the participants told me. One day could feel like an entire week. People got on one another’s nerves. All of this, in 650 square feet.

In 2018, I reported on a NASA-funded Mars simulation in Hawaii that was cut short after one of the participants sustained an electric shock. The others covered the shivering, injured crew member with blankets and called 911. When they heard an ambulance outside, one of them moved toward the exit. That participant, Lisa Stojanovski, told me that the simulation’s commander stopped her, warning her that whatever the crew did next—such as leaving the habitat without a spacesuit, for example—could compromise the experiment. “I actually lost my temper at this point,” Stojanovski told me. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, but there were some curse words involved.” The crew eventually opened the door, allowing first responders inside.

[Read: What would a dog do on Mars?]

Real-life astronauts on Mars might behave even less predictably. They won’t have the same kind of oversight as crews on the International Space Station, or even on the moon. They will make many decisions without constant support from mission controllers, and perhaps sometimes without their approval too. “That’s the complexity of humans. They are going to do things on their own, maybe outside of the mission rules,” Jennifer Fogarty, the former chief scientist at NASA’s Human Research Program, the office that helped fund the failed Mars simulation, once told me. “So thinking you can keep them in this tight little box of emotions is unrealistic.”

Unlike the Stars on Mars contestants, the crew of a real Mars mission would not consist of strangers. The astronauts will have spent months, perhaps years, training together, and they would have signed up—to borrow a term from another reality-TV show—for the right reasons. They will have undergone extensive psychological screening and been selected for roles that suit their skills and temperament. All of that, however, is no guarantee of a good time. “You can select a crew all you want, get the right fit and mix, but there’s too many variables when it comes to human beings,” Raphael Rose, the associate director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at UCLA, told me in 2018.

[Read: Even astronauts binge-watch TV while in space]

Some of those variables showed up on Stars. The drama was mostly minor and predictable; contestants would get annoyed when they felt that their fellow crew members weren’t pulling their weight on field missions. But at times, the tension rocketed up. In one episode, Armstrong, chatting with another contestant, the professional wrestler Ronda Rousey, declared that trans athletes should not compete alongside cis ones. (No, this had nothing to do with space missions.) The rest of the crew pushed back. Armstrong clashed in particular with Winter, and when the group picked Winter to be base commander—a position that rotates each week—Armstrong threatened to leave. “I’m not living in this hab another day with certain people,” Armstrong said; he quit a few episodes later. (This guy may not be cut out for Mars.)

Despite the fact that it’s a silly show stuffed with celebrities and edited to look as dramatic as possible, Stars on Mars may not be the worst thing to watch if you’re planning a crewed Mars mission. Even Dwayne Day, a respected historian of the American space program, thinks the series could teach us about the personalities best suited for expeditions beyond Earth—despite the fact that he’d expected to hate it. The show is “consistent with the requirements of a real space mission,” Day wrote in The Space Review last month. “A commander who makes choices based upon who they like rather than who is most capable is a lousy commander. A crewmember who doesn’t always do their best during an important task that the rest of them depend upon is a danger to their safety.”

Luckily for psychologists, no Mars spaceship is idling its engines on a launchpad, waiting only for someone to crack the secrets of human relationships before heading out. A Mars mission is still many years—decades, probably—from taking off. But if Stars on Mars is any indication, mission planners have their work cut out for them. Winter went home earlier this month, and on her way out, she said she was glad to have been on the show but also that “it was like a little bit of hell.” When people finally do make it to Mars, we’ll be the aliens, fumbling our way around a world that is not designed to sustain creatures like us. But we’ll still be only human.

Al Jazeera speaks to Kaniela Ing, director of Green New Deal Network, about devastating Hawaii blazes and what's next.

The Hawaiian Electric company is said to have failed to shut off power despite a recent drought and high winds.

Officials ask residents to submit DNA samples as at least 1,100 people remain missing after wildfires.

The 100-year-old wood structure was recently renovated but not fireproofed, say owners.

The death toll of the Maui fires, the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century, now stands at 114 people. Another 1,000 people are still missing. About 1,800 in people are in temporary housing. Displaced or not, people in Maui need food, water, toiletries, and medications. And in the coming days, weeks, and months, all that and more—everything needed for a long, difficult recovery—will have to come from somewhere.

“Imagine building the entire town of Lahaina from scratch, and how many hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars are needed to recover and rebuild,” Joe Kent, the executive vice president of Hawaii’s Grassroot Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank, told me.

A week in, locals are still struggling to find housing and meet their daily needs. The federal government has deployed hundreds of employees to help provide shelter and other assistance to those affected by the blaze. But in some parts of Maui, government assistance has been noticeably absent. Instead, Hawaii residents have been providing shelter, generators, and food.

“This happened in Puerto Rico—a constant clash between community kitchens or mutual-aid centers and municipalities or state agencies,” Roberto Vélez-Vélez, a sociologist at the State University of New York at New Paltz who studies disaster response, told me. When the authorities didn’t step in, community-run aid groups did. “We’re seeing this all over again.”

[Read: Maui’s fire risk was glowing red]

In 2017, Hurricane Maria, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in the 21st century so far, barreled into Puerto Rico, leaving about 3,000 dead. One week after the storm’s landfall, the island was still crossed with downed power lines and almost entirely dark. In the six years since, recovery has been slow and uneven. Last September, many damaged homes were still covered in blue tarps. Puerto Ricans endure constant power outages after the island’s antiquated electric grid was decimated.

Recovery after any disaster of this scale is bound to take time. But in Puerto Rico—and very possibly in Hawaii—a real, distinct lag slows response even further. Though they are across the continent from each other, devastated by different disasters, these islands’ remoteness and their particular relationship to the United States determine the aid they receive in these moments of crisis.

On the most basic level, geography constrains disaster recovery on an island. If a firestorm happens in the contiguous U.S., responders will have a much easier time getting supplies in and out. But on an island, that process is painstaking, Ivis García, an urban planner who has researched disaster-recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, told me. It involves a lot of ships.

And for Hawaii, as for Puerto Rico, all aid shipped in must adhere to the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, more popularly known as the Jones Act. This law allows only U.S.-flagged ships that are built, owned, and operated by Americans to carry goods among U.S. ports. Under normal circumstances, this results in increased prices for consumers on islands: One 2020 study estimated that the average Hawaii family pays an extra $1,800 a year because of the Jones Act. And as happened in Puerto Rico, these restrictions can make a crisis worse, by slowing the response and making it more costly.

There are 55,000 ships worldwide equipped for carrying cargo from port to port, and fewer than 100 Jones Act–eligible ships in operation today. Just two main operators dominate Jones Act shipping between the contiguous U.S. and Hawaii—Matson and Pasha. Although these operators have been deployed to send in aid, experts worry that the limited amount of ships available could bottleneck aid. Imagine, Kent told me, “all the materials that are needed to build housing and rebuild commercial districts” in Lahaina. All of those materials will have to come in Jones Act–eligible ships. If Japan wanted to send emergency supplies directly to Hawaii, for instance, it would not be allowed to because of the Jones Act, García told me.

The Jones Act can be temporarily waived: Former President Donald Trump issued a 10-day waiver to facilitate disaster relief to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. But a short-term waiver doesn’t ease long-term recovery. “Ultimately, the real cost of the Jones Act is going to be borne over a long period of time,” Kent said.

[Read: The relief effort in Puerto Rico]

Hawaii is often packaged as paradise, but that identity, too, can have a specific price following a disaster. Both Hawaii and Puerto Rico are archipelagoes that depend on the tourism industry; they are desirable places, where land is at a premium. The cost of living is high and constantly rising. “Things in general are already more expensive. In a time of disaster, that is really multiplied,” García said. “Everything is disrupted.” Food, shelter, and transportation are all harder to find. Inevitably, after a disaster, people leave their homes, and not everyone comes back.

More than 200,000 people left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In the years since, García told me, only a small percentage have returned to the island. On Maui, even before the historic fires, residents were dealing with an influx of wealthy outsiders buying properties and displacing residents. Even in these first days after the fire, one of locals’ first concerns was that this land rush would accelerate—that people who wanted to come back simply wouldn’t be able to afford to. That happened in Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, a wave of foreign investors bought up properties, displacing working-class residents to meet tourism demands and get their own slice of island life. From 2018 to 2021, housing prices for a single family home on the Caribbean island increased by 22 percent.

Kent, for his part, has watched the aftermath of Hurricane Maria closely; he has seen how long recovery can take. “That’s a daunting thought for us, because we’re about to go on a journey that lasts many years,” he told me.

When the wildfire came ripping down into the town of Lahaina, Maui’s state-of-the-art emergency sirens did not sound. That much is sure.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, officially the deadliest in modern U.S. history, the decision not to sound these alarms has been one of the more baffling ones. Sirens are supposed to warn people, and shouldn’t more people have been warned by any means necessary? The official in charge of making the call, Herman Andaya, resigned Thursday, citing health reasons. And yet, under pressure, officials have also defended their decision not to sound the island’s sirens.

Whether they should have is a more complicated question than it might seem—even wildfire-evacuation experts I talked with were divided on it. Communication with the public is one of the most important parts of a wildfire evacuation, but sirens? Sirens are tricky.  

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

Tom Cova, who has been studying fire evacuation since the early 1990s, told me that he understood the argument in favor of using the sirens, and against. Such alerts, he explained, wake people up and can get them talking, seeking information—maybe even seeing fire or smoke for themselves. But a big, loud noise doesn’t answer questions such as what the best route out is or which roads are closed. In a case like the Maui fires, where little information was available and key routes seem to have been blocked, he wondered whether sirens might’ve simply created the same traffic jam survivors have reported being stuck in earlier.

Officials worried that people would confuse the sirens for a tsunami warning and run uphill—which in this case, would have been toward the fire. Erica Kuligowski, a professor who has been studying disaster-warning sirens for years, told me that such sirens are best used when the local population is trained to know exactly what they mean—and they’re accompanied by further messaging, such as an emergency text. Even if residents could be taught what sirens mean, Lahaina needs to think about its tourist population: You can’t train a tourist to know how to behave when a siren goes off. “They may be from Tornado Alley, and they’re visiting Maui,” Kuligowski told me over Zoom, from Australia. “And that siren means to take shelter in their home.”

The sirens were not the only tool officials had; they are a single flash point in the much larger conversation about how the Maui government handled evacuations from the deadly fire. Many survivors have reported getting no form of notification whatsoever. What happened there? Why were parts of a key escape route reportedly blocked? What happened in the nine hours between the fire’s ignition and its expansion? The fire was first reported at 6:30 a.m., and later that morning, officials sent out an alert saying that it was 100 percent contained. Flames didn’t sweep across the town of Lahaina until late afternoon. What unfolded in the interim? Why didn’t emergency officials partially evacuate—even if such evacuations would’ve been preemptive—given how disturbing the wind was that day?

Disaster response is a series of choices made by officials with very little time and under pressure. Preparation matters. So does experience. Already, as the facts come into view, they show that this was far from a perfect wildfire evacuation, if such a thing exists. And yet experts I talked to stressed that they are waiting for more information to fully assess what happened—and that Maui’s emergency managers were struggling with a bad fire, in a place that might have dealt with wildfire before, but never like this. A week ago, no one in the fire community would have predicted that the deadliest fire in modern American history would take place in Hawaii. It’s as if the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit the West Coast and not the Gulf. “Another thought experiment might be like, What if Reno had a tsunami?” Cova suggested.

[Photos: Lahaina, after the fire]

This fire was unprecedented. And yet unprecedented is the new normal. As Enrico Ronchi, an associate professor in evacuation modeling at Lund University, in Sweden, put it, “We are continuously crossing the bar of what we have seen until now.” Any community would have likely struggled with a fire like this, evacuation experts told me. In 2018, the Camp Fire—also a fast-moving fire on a dangerously gusty day—torched the town of Paradise, California, killing at least 85 people. Until last week, it was the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Paradise was located in a fire-prone area of California. The town had a plan—and a good one at that. Cova would’ve given Paradise’s plan an A-plus. “Even the best-prepared communities can be overwhelmed,” he said. “Since Paradise, no one has been dealt a hand as bad as the Maui emergency managers and firefighters.”

What if the community had been more like one in California, where emergency managers and residents both have more firsthand experience with fire? “It’s hard to say… ,” Ronchi told me, hesitating. “It probably would not be the same story.” That doesn’t mean it would’ve been “a happy ending necessarily,” he said, but preparation does matter.

Researchers told me that every community might want to start thinking about a wildfire-evacuation plan, but especially those at high risk of fire. The U.S. Forest Service and the USDA offer a website that maps the wildfire risk across the United States. When I input Maui County, it glowed red—at higher risk than 80 percent of counties in the U.S.

[Read: Hawaii is a warning]

Just because something is “unprecedented” doesn’t mean it is unpredictable. “We keep hearing from certain elected officials and other people being quoted in the media, ‘we had no idea, this is unprecedented,’” Elizabeth Pickett, a co–executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, told the Honolulu Civil Beat last week. “But actually, those of us in the wildfire community, meaning our fire agencies, our forestry natural resource management community, we have long been working to increase our risk reduction efforts.”

Pickett has been at this for 15 years. She’s well aware that Hawaii is a fire-prone state, and has been pushing for better education. (One Hawaii-based researcher called her “the backbone of the wildfire community” there.) She told me that, in the past, she’s knocked on the doors of elected officials and handed them fire-risk maps for their district. “Maui is like the canary in the coal mine for our state,” she said over the phone on Friday. “It’s not a one off.” The goal cannot be just about getting communities in Hawaii up to speed with best practices elsewhere; fast-moving fires are requiring us all to plan differently. “We need to have a whole new conversation about evacuation,” she said. “Let’s acknowledge the reality of how fast this went.”

And what else can we do but prepare, with all the time and effort that takes? A good evacuation plan includes a full communication plan, with predrafted alerts and plenty of contingency plans. Early warning is key. Multiple evacuation routes should be thought through, roads and intersections perhaps optimized for a quick escape. Temporary refuge areas—extra-hardened school gymnasiums, for example—can be created as last-resort shelters. Experts stressed in particular the importance of planning for the most vulnerable: people without cars, children and older people, people with limited mobility, people who don’t speak the local language, people with disabilities. Tourists are also considered vulnerable. Many of those who died during the Camp Fire fell into one or more of these categories.

Nowadays, sophisticated evacuation-simulation programs allow planners to better draw up and evaluate their plans. Researchers can input information about a town (the type of vegetation, the type of homes, the traffic layout) and its residents (population, age, other demographics), and model how different fires might sweep through a community. Emergency planners can run these simulations over and over again, and see how traffic builds up under different scenarios, and who survives. They can leverage this technology to test if their plan actually gets everyone out.  

We don’t even know how many people died on Maui yet, much less who or how or whose fault it was. But their stories are starting to trickle out. Sixty-eight-year-old Franklin Trejos was trapped in the backseat of his vehicle, on top of a beloved golden retriever, whom he died trying to protect; a friend of his found his bones. Seven-year-old Tony Takafua was found with his mother and his grandparents in a car near their home.

This is what’s at stake. This is wildfire.

Herman Andaya, head of Maui Emergency Management Agency, had defended his decision not to sound warning sirens.

Authorities have formally identified five wildfire victims so far. Here's what we know about them.