On July 14, a team of researchers, Russians Sergei Ryazansky, Aleksei Baranov, Oleg Artemyev and Aleksei Shpakov, German Oliver Knickel, and French Cyrille Fournier concluded a “flight” to Mars while sitting safely in an oversized Soviet-era tin can in Moscow. The team emerged from three months of isolation, courtesy of the Russian and European space agencies.

But we've already done this, sort of. It's called social networking.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS SIMILAR, but without the borscht-flavored Tang. Don’t get me wrong. As much as I love connecting with people on Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc., social nets imply that our digital world is richer and more personal that it actually is. After you unhook, for whatever reason, you find yourself groggy in a silo in Moscow wondering where your friends really are. The shock of actually interacting with real people again is more than some people can bear -- much easier to enter your digital cave. I almost wrote “cage”--is that telling, or what?

In Advertising Age, Nat Ives wrote about so-called “Twitter Snobs”: “Speaking of Ashton (Kutcher), the much-touted Lord o’ Twitter may not get what Twitter really is. He’s held up as some sort of genius of social media, when what he’s doing is actually broadcasting, not trying to nurture real interactions with his followers.”

“A lot of this has to do with how a person uses Twitter. When you check Twitter, are you sticking your hand in the river to see what you catch? Are you trying to stay on top of your group’s every update? Are you using a Twitter app like Tweetdeck, which helps when you’re following hundreds of people, or just Twitter.com? Are you maybe spamming people with unwanted direct messages and using auto-follows or other apps that allow you “cheat” at Twitter?”

HAVE YOU EVER TRIED to get a clear view at a sports event, a graduation, or some other public venue? Isn't it annoying, almost like an insult, for us to be blocked when we’re trying to see? The “injustice” of paying money for a seat and then missing the show is bad enough. But think about this: has television and film subtly trained us to believe we deserve to have an unobstructed view of virtually everything? Unless the director wishes otherwise, we always have the perfect ringside seat.

Do we deserve frictionless relationships with people we barely know? Unobstructed friendships? Is there really such a thing?

One thing the press doesn’t highlight about the Mars “mission” is that there was an earlier simulation attempt that failed miserably. Why? Because the people just didn't get along. Personalities clashed, and the attempt was scrubbed.

But perhaps that’s what we’re really looking for with social media -- a network of “relationships” devoid of any rough edges. No “Friends” that have to look us in the eye and tell us when we’re jumping off the deep end. Without people like that, we find ourselves adrift in space, ankle-deep in sticky red dust.