Slashdot Mirror
Scientist Says NASA Must Study Space Sex
Velcroman1 writes "NASA has always been tight lipped on the subject of sex in space — which makes people all the more curious. How would it work? Has anyone done it before? Can a child be conceived in zero-G? With few animal tests (and virtually no human testing), there's been next to no scientific analysis of the issue. Until now. The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue detailing the mission to Mars, which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled Sex on Mars, Dr. Rhawn Joseph from the Brain Research Laboratory in California discusses everything from the social conditions that would push astronauts to have sex to the possibility of the first child being born on another planet. Such an infant would be the first real Martian — at least by nationality, the researcher pointed out. 'On Mars, the light's going to be different, the gravity will be different, it's a completely different atmosphere,' he said. 'So if you put an infant on Mars, they would adapt to varying degrees of the new environment. And after several generations, you'd have a new species,' he said."
Michael Valentine Smith. Martian by mentality, human by heredity.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did Mars move for you too, baby?
It's not like "submerged in water" isn't a decent enough approximation (and in fact used by space agencies, but to model different stuff). It's not like humans aren't imaginative, if there's a possibility of some action... (even easier: send slashdotters, we'll do anything) Progress of the pregnancy is another issue of course.
But you wouldn't have new species if there wasn't much of a selection. Not for the usual meaning of "several"
One that hath name thou can not otter
That was my first thought, too. Even then, the actual evolutionary forces would be such that speciation seems so improbable as to be impossible. The environment for colonists would be almost entirely artificial, and it seems doubtful that the color of light on Mars would significantly impact children's ability to grow to adulthood and procreate themselves, especially not with a sample size that is small enough that it wouldn't also be cross-breeding with Earth's population.
The only real scenario I can come up with involves Mars being terraformed and then completely cut off from Earth somehow.
I guess I wouldn't mind being the progenitor of a new species... also, it would get me out of my mom's basement, and most likely result in meeting girls?
Don't count on it.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Why would anyone wonder about this? From how I see it (and from what I believe to know about the mechanics involved), why should a child not be conceived in zero-G?
When a woman orgasms, her cervix dips into (depending on the position) pool of seed the man released, sucking it in. The female anatomy then helps transport the material to where it belongs, where several spermatozoa work together to crack the female egg shell.
This process is in no way a battle between the little guys to see which is the strongest but a joint effort and the female organism helps them along, too. So while conception might be a bit trickier due to the whole process being slower because of not enough contact with the female anatomy (and thus more time-consuming, possibly to the point where the spermatozoa die before doing their job), I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible.
The issue of illegal aliens will come up
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
If the objective were really to populate another planet wouldn't it make more sense to send a bunch of fertile women and a bunch of semen instead of males? The semen would be a lot lighter(big deal when you are talking space travel), require less resources to keep alive etc. Furthermore you could increase genetic variability by having semen from a bunch of males without increasing the number of people sent. Seems like we really are unnecessary guys :P
Monstar L
The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue...which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled Sex on Mars...
Are we sure we got the right "Cosmo" here?
Tweet, tweet.
Virtually no human testing? Given the kind of person who gets into the astronaut corps, I seriously doubt that. There's probably been no official investigation into this done, but when you coop seven mixed-gender, highly intelligent, very curious, extremely goal-driven, competitive problem-solvers up in a small ship for the lengths of time a shuttle mission runs, I think we can pretty much guarantee there's been plenty of unofficial investigations conducted. And there's been IIRC several mixed-gender ISS crews, so ditto there.
I also suspect they've found the entire exercise to be awkward, exhausting (and not in the good way), inconvenient to arrange around all the monitoring that's done, difficult to keep private in those cramped quarters, and generally an awful lot of work for a lot less reward than you'd expect. But if anybody wants to go to Mars they're going to have to figure out how to deal with sex and how to make it reasonably convenient, because no crew's going to remain completely celibate that long.
Speciation doesn't require selection pressure, it only requires that part of the population reproduces independently for sufficient generations. In the case of humans a generation is typically 20 or 25 years, and 'sufficient generations' depends on the size of the isolated population. Smaller populations drift genetically much faster than large, well-mixed populations. But several thousand generations would be needed as a minimum. So we're looking at somewhere in the region of 40 000 to 50 000 years or more for a new species of human to arise.
Selection pressures cause genetic drift to move in particular directions rather than in random directions. They don't *cause* speciation though they do guide the kinds of change that take place.
Hope that helps.
Indeed, humans have Borg-like powers of genetic adaptation, so that several generations of living in an extraterrestrial habitat that has been technologically rendered as Earth-like as possible would cause them to spontaneously mutate to the point of sexual incompatibility with normal humans (the normal definition of separate species).
For large values of several.
Not to mention a non-standard definition of "species." As I seem to recall, the biological definition of "species" simply involves whether or not a male and female can create a sexually viable offspring. Hence, donkeys and horses are different species, because mules (what you get when mating a horse and a donkey) are sterile, but different breeds of dogs (or cats or horses or whatever) aren't considered different species because they do create offspring which create offspring and so on (have your pets spayed or neutered!)
I'm really hoping the ESL author meant "race" instead of "species," because even after "large values of several," you'd probably still only end up with a race of Martian humans that are as different from us as our different racial groups are from each other - differences being mostly skin deep.
There are easier ways to get a girlfriend than going to Mars. And having a girlfriend isn't really worth losing the whole internet, your family, friends, etc.
Okay, it might seem like it for your first girlfriend, but you'll get over it.
which is totally what she said
since you cannot call people with an other skin color an other species
Because they don't meet the definition of distinct species.
If two populations can interbreed freely, they are the same species. If you put a bunch of these earth-humans and mars-humans together in a colony and you get a significant number of hybrids, which in turn interbreed with either population, then it's a single species.
At most they could be considered subspecies.
"Married couples are probably the best bet"
We're talking about a stress-filled, claustrophobic situation in which there would be no possibility of sex for months at a time, if not years. And space travel too.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have a hard time imagining that we would be willing or able to develop the infrastructure for children to grow up on Mars anytime soon. It is one thing to send (adult) astronauts to Mars, they can wear the same sized space suit pretty much until they die. But if you send a child (or a pregnant woman) to Mars, the growing child will need far more of everything in order to survive. I understand that space suits are not exactly cheap to manufacture here on earth - can you imagine trying to make on one Mars? And if a child on Mars grew at anywhere near the rate they grow on Earth, the wait time to ship a new suit from Earth would likely be completely unacceptable.
And that says nothing about the piles of diapers, or the need for something resembling a proper education, or proper pediatric care and nutrition...
I just don't see it being reasonable to have children on Mars until we have a sizable established population of adults there for a reasonably long time. And at that, we might want to wait until we have figured out the round trip (although a long car ride with a child can be infuriating - I can't imagine what interplanetary transport would be like!).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And, though I rarely ever use the word these days except when talking about some foreign cultures, the article even manages to come across as sexist since the majority of it seems to be written from the perspective of whether to include females in space flights with the rationale that females cause sex! (Note to critics, it is the combination of these two things that triggers a response of 'sexist'. In my experience, men also, uh, cause sex).
History of space exploration is a history of man. First man in space, first man on the moon. Most likely first man on Mars. It's fair assumption that we will be adding women to men teams not the other way.
In short: don't be so politically correct. Man and woman are different, they behave differently, they have differnt physical abilities. Giving women right to vote is good thing but it doesn't make them magically equal to man in every way. And by saying that I don't mean women are inferior - they are just different.
TCP wouldn't work, but replacing it is damn straightforward[1]. With that done, even regular http would work, although it would suck due to needing several round trips for referenced CSS/images/subframes/whatnot. The latter is also quite obvious -- many of us could whip up a primitive but working proxy in an hour.
If bandwidth isn't a concern, it might be better to do a whole-site wget rip and send it in one go.
[1]. Nearly all complexity in TCP is due to handshaking, retransmissions and adjusting the window. With no handshaking possible and terabyte windows, you can throw most of that away. Adding generous Reed-Solomon codes over the whole message and possibly retransmitting just damaged blocks would be obvious goodies to add, but that's still nothing compared to the mess that current TCP is.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
He didn't say to blindly indulge your impulses, only to recognize what they are and accept that you have them.
TCP is already being transparently recreated at the ends of the link in many satellite internet access systems. The TCP connection is transparently terminated at the uplink side, and re-created at the downlink. Over-the-air uses custom protocols geared towards high latency and dropouts.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'd mod you up for getting a nice Heinlein first post, but you've gone and reversed his name (Valentine Michael Smith)
And by saying that I don't mean women are inferior - they are just different.
Indeed, and most of us here love to keep looking at the differences
---
This guy and his fake "Journal of Cosmology" is a lune. The joke is on slashdot for even putting this in the science category.
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
But several thousand generations would be needed as a minimum. So we're looking at somewhere in the region of 40 000 to 50 000 years or more for a new species of human to arise
I'd say even longer than that. Native Americans immigrated from Asia what, thirty thousand years ago? Yet they're not a different species from Africans or Europeans; not much different at all from any other race.
Free Martian Whores!