They didn't just travel on-site, they over-wintered, which means travelling to the site and then staying through the worst weather, while it's completely dark, without any practical means of leaving for months.
I feel obliged to say that while it gets cold over winter, the weather isn’t particularly bad by Antarctic standards; the coast is much worse. In places like McMurdo it can get bad enough that travel between buildings is prohibited, South Pole not so much. I also wintered for SPT which involves one of us going out to the telescope, daily. There were only a couple of days when it was marginal. Even then, winds and low visibility usually means cloud cover and warmer weather (-40 vs -90). The worst days are windy with clear skies.
As for darkness; consider a single day is stretched out over the year. There’s only a two months of astronomical night and the moon is up every couple weeks. You’re correct though, that the station is isolated between mid Feb and late October.
I argue that the Industrial revolution created 'unemployment' in beasts of yoke and burden at a larger scale than humans. So, there may be something instructive in that turn of events, even if it's not a highly representative analogue of the current ones. Of course, it's like saying what's a house cat to do when there's no more mice to hunt (assuming it remains fed). Maybe knowledge workers will become qualified pets if they prove cute enough.
My border collie will be pretty depressed though, once it's out of a job (maybe replaced by a drone sheep-herd).
The keys could random walk to lock-ports in finite time iff the search space were 2D or 1D. In 3D space, it is gets very unlikely. Biology solves it by dimensionality reduction, find substrates, cling, slide and find love/compatible hole.
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