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Infertility Could Impede Human Space Colonization
intellitech writes "The prospect of long-term space travel has led scientists to consider, increasingly seriously, the following conundrum: if travelling to a new home might take thousands of years, would humans be able to successfully procreate along the way? The early indications from NASA are not encouraging. Space, it seems, is simply not a good place to have sex."
It's cold out there, and dark. Lots of miles between gas stations. It's full of risks and danger. We haven't got what it takes to do this any more. You go.
We'll wait here by the fire where it's warm. You go: to Mars, the Asteroids, the stars. If you make it back tell us your traveller's tales of petroleum seas, of fields of diamonds, of the strangeness men have become Out There. Write if you find life.
One day the Rock will come, or the Flare, or some other thing. In our final moments it will comfort us that Out There are Men, continuing our journey.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Space is a great place to have sex. It may not be a great place to reproduce, but that is a different matter.
I paid money to make myself infertile (snip, snip). Space could have it done it for free, so to speak.
The article presupposes that we'll be limited to our present thin-walled spacecraft propelled by chemical rockets. There are other options: we don't even need new technology per se. Something like Project Orion would permit the construction of a craft heavy enough to have effective shielding.
I'm reminded of this famous quip from Napoleon:
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
Seriously, people want to get they freak on. They will not be stopped. :P
We can't seem to get our own affairs in order here on planet Earth. What makes you think we won't have infighting and mutiny in a space ship? Within a thousand year trek to the final destination, there might not be anyone left alive by that time!
We're the most innovative of all live as we know it. But, in one form or another we still fling poo. Some things never change regardless of where events take place.
Life is not for the lazy.
...I'm going to be the first one here to volunteer for a job at Nasa to test that theory about sex in space. With lots of trials if necessary.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Women would be unable to become pregnant? On the contrary, it sounds like space is a GREAT place to have sex.
The universes best contraception.
It's "if you have crappy shielding, you'll likely kill the fetus".
The solution is simple. Better shielding in such transit vehicles, as well as good shielding once at the destination.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Space, it seems, is simply not a good place to have sex.
The quoted text doesn't really give any reason not to have sex in space - though several for why it is a bad idea to try and have a baby.
As soon as astronauts enter the zero gravity environment they start losing bone mass. Exercise doesn't help - based on spiral CT (so-called QCT) studies which measure bone loss in trabecular bone as well as cortical bone, the problem of bone loss is twice as bad as was once suspected.. it appears the trabecular bone you lose in spaceflight doesn't come back. That is, It may be permanently lost. As for reproduction, experiments with mice done by Russia were inconclusive (as so much of Russian space medicine is) but indicated that the embryo has trouble embedding. So where the article says "try not to get pregnant", there's most likely no chance of that anyway.
That's zero-g, what about partial gravity? The only data we have is from Apollo and no-one stayed on the Moon for long enough - or knew what to look for - to get conclusive results. When people ask "could humans colonize the Moon or other planets?" the answer has to be that we don't know. We'll probably not know conclusively until humans go there with the intention of staying, and making a new generation.
Now stop and think about that for a minute. If your idea of people-in-space is NASA astronauts then I hope you find this suggestion as distasteful as I do. In our modern world governments should not be sending anyone anywhere with orders to reproduce - it just seems a little totalitarian doesn't it? Maybe China will do it. Personally, I'd rather see free men and women go out to the frontier and populate it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
how babby is formed? how girl get pregnant in space?
I hereby volunteer for the randomized double-blind study.
Guess we will extinguish soon
Take along a large statue of Tawaret. That should help. Just don't break it.
broke my bed last night here in earth... just imagine what would happen to a weak walled spacecraft... :)
We just need to pick men with balls of lead.
TFA says: "Flares are the result of huge explosions in the Sun's atmosphere that catapult *highly charged* protons across space"
Does it mean than a proton can have more charge than 1,602 176 53×10-19 C !?
Wouldn't the simple (yet uncomfortable solution) be to create a space chastity belt with extra shielding to protect the gametes during travel. You only need to protect a much smaller area.
And when it comes to failed fetuses, isn't that a self solving problem? Damaged sperm and eggs probably won't make it. But the healthier ones will have a better chance of fertilizing. And so what if you have a larger percentage of miscarriages? That is simply nature sorting life out. All you need are 2-3 healthy babies in the end.
The problem appears to be that growing up or procreating in zero-gravity causes problems. Solution: Spin the ship to create artificial gravity.
Jan Davis and Mark Lee, or maybe a gay relationship. Have there been any gay couples in space yet? Let's face it NASA won't be telling us (maybe they don't even know)
It isn't the sort of thing which would be announced beforehand and I doubt the astronauts will be revealing anything while they still care about their careers. It will be revealed in old age when they write their memoirs.
Anyway, who cares.
Unshielded ships may make female fetuses infertile by killing their eggs. This is no big deal if we're colonizing, say, Mars, as it's only a 6 month trip. If we had a generation ship going to Alpha Centauri this may be a problem, but that doesn't tie into Hawking's assertion that we need to colonize space. This is because colonizing another solar system before colonizing other bodies in our own solar system would be asinine. By the time we've colonized every planet and moon we can set foot on, we'll have the technology to shield our space ships from cosmic rays.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I don't know about other people having sex in space but I'm sure that Captain Kirk KAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHN!
wont work?
That's absurd. When a serious colonization was made, the ship will be huge and will have enormous shielding, including zero gravity and radiation conditions similar to Earth.
O'neill colonies and similar.
And on moon and planets, the first colonies will be underground, where enough deep will be a good protection until an alternative is ready to allow a beter life "outside" (covered cities).
For now, we should work to industrializate the space, because it takes too much energy to lauch the infraestructure from Earth. We need to have a small buch of robots on the moon to work seriously not only for explore else for build more and more machines, mines, buildings..., using native materials to make a good base to prepare for indefinite human presence.
Tight-lipped
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
From the article it sounds like space is a fine place to have sex, just not to be pregnant.
After a few years the travellers will leave the sun behiind and it will take a helluvalongtime before they reach the next one, so the radiation danger is probably much exagerated.
Interesting medical issue with radiation, but there are other issues with reproduction in space:
1) How do you get people to WANT to shag? The spaceship ain't gonna be big, and there's something called the Westermarck Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect#Westermarck_effect (Hey how do I put in a link with with just "Westermarck Effect" highlighted as the link?)
2) What's a fair way to divide up the shagging opportunities? On Earth, we seem fine with letting unattractive people go unpaired, but on a spaceship, presumably everyone is needed for something. It might be hard to get motivated if you're not getting any.
There's an embarrassing set of experiments that simply won't go away that imply physics isn't as local as relativity would suggest.
Before someone tells me that "absolute simultaneity does not exist", let me point out that there's nothing in our current knowledge of physics against the existence of *one* specially privileged inertial frame having absolute simultaneity, provided that all other inertial frames are relative.
At least for me, it's easier to believe in one inertial frame that allows FTL transportation or communication than to believe in something that makes the universe suddenly grow by 78 orders of magnitude.
"high-energy proton particles" ... "even heavier charged particles"
Shouldn't be a sheet of paper sufficient for shielding? Simply add that to the space craft...
Or is it the gamma rays generated when the heavy ones hit the space craft that are causing the issues?
Our only hope is to create engines capable of pushing our vessels to high speeds as in 0.9c upwards. Let time dilation take care of the rest.
"space simply not a good place to have sex"
Have you seen those woman astronauts?
Giving birth in zero g would be impractical to say the least. The delivery room walls would look like the inside of a blender
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Also most of the radiation that is the problem is from the sun. Once a starship is underway, that will be pretty low. And it will have lots of shielding, probably megatonnes of water will be needed for the biosphere anyway.
The usual provocative headline with no relation to the actual facts of the story, which was just a flimsy excuse to print a photo of a naked Jane Fonda.
From TFA: "Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."
Replace planet Earth with Germany and space with Russia, and you have almost a verbatim translation of Hitler's justification for operation Barbarossa.
If I could I would remind the speaker than in the long run, there is no survival, no matter how many worlds we infest.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is really StarTreck futurism: considering huge improvements in spacefaring techs but with humans beings still stagnating in present biological and cultural levels ...
IVF and ectogenesis would be efficient by this time. Even better, extreme longevity would be also granted since it is a precursor to the techs allowing bone loss regeneration and resistance to increased ionizing radiations damage.
Space is for transhumans & robots ... Not the likes of captain Kirk guys.
http://www.transparency.org
Ok when I was in basic training, we had port potties that were overflowing with shit. You literally had to stir the shit to level it out so you could take a shit, that's how bad it was. The smell? Awful! However, this didn't stop all the little boys and girls from having sex inside of these port potties late at night. Moreover, I think about 40% of the women in my unit at the time, got pregnant from these port pottie visits.
Now I think to myself, how the hell did two people get inside the shit filled port potties, let along have sex inside of them? People always find ways...
Reminds me of something I read a *long* time ago:
Oh, give me a locus
Where the gravitons focus
Where the three body problem is solved
Where microwaves play, down at 3 degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects
We possess, so it seems
Two of man's greatest dreams
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
It's not the "having sex" that is the bad idea. It's "trying to have offspring" that may be problematic.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
If the voyage will be centuries long (or longer!) duration as is what we can expect for interstellar travels in the forseeable future, send embryos. They can be reliably frozen for long periods of time and, being very small, could be well shielded. Of course this presumes some sort of artificial womb (perhaps a placenta grown from thawed out stem cells?) and then artificial "parenting" system to guide, protect and educate the young until adulthood (now THAT would be a real test of applied psychology!).
I seem to remember coming across this idea in a later edition of one of Arthur C. Clarke's books, "The Songs of Distant Earth". SPOILER ALERT. The earth based civilization, having determined that the sun would explode in 1000 years starts sending many of these "seeding" probes to suitable star systems in the hopes that a few would survive. Despite the long odds against them (particularly because the human infants who are raised by machines grow up severely maladjusted) some survive and eventually develop flourishing colonies. Centuries later, shortly before the sun's demise the earth civilization discovers a way to harness the zero-point energy(?) and is able to send huge ships that can travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light (even so, the crew and colonists are still put into suspended animation). One of these ships suffers a breakdown near a previously established colony and puts in for repairs.
Just use IVF. A medical pod needs less shielding than a ship.
I did a little research into this for a Mega Joule Plasma discharge reaction vessel shielding in case of various particles or fields were generated. Didn't want to go sterile or alter my brain. Here is a few links. I had a PDF from 1960 that was like 600 pages detailing various ideas for the future of space travel and the huge amounts of Tesla required. Like if the magnetic field were to be able to collapse then the space ship would melt and implode. Can't seem to find the link right now.
http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~Simon_G_Shepherd/research/Shielding/index.html
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/2003ICRC....6.3481S/0003484.000.html
Was how I read it. :-)
No-one can hear her scream.
Maybe they could make it out of Unobtainium?
In fairness, TFA says only space isn't necessarily the greatest place to make babies. Inhabitants of the United States may be surprised to learn that some people have determined sex has a rather significant recreational component.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Samuel R. Delany pondered this issue already back in 1967 in his thought-provoking short story Aye, and Gomorrah.... It earned him a Nebula Award.
Paddle faster, I hear banjos
Earth's shield from cosmic radiation is its magnet field. What strength of magnetic field would you need to generate to protect a long-distance spacecraft? I'm aware that it's probably so strong it would induce cancer and cause mechanical and electrical failures on the spacecraft itself, but I'm just curious...
Does anyone know?
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I'm surprised no one has noted the obvious point that at current it might take a 1000years to send said Astronauts to a distant galaxies.
But in say 200years from now it might only take 50years? or even less.
So while impregnating might but a bit of problem right now.. The case of "I got here first" vs "I was sent first" might be a bigger problem!
Well, I am not surprised they haven't had any pregnancies yet in all male crews. They may want to try and bring a woman to the space ship before they reach their final conclusion though.
You can't handle the truth.
In space no one can hear you scream
Test it to see if it can withstand sufficient spin. If it can, tunnel under the surface and create inverse domes, etc. Spin it up. Apply thrust. Live on the ceilings. Find a comet with sufficient hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and trace elements. Send it on the same course, separated by a safe but commutable distance. You have your generation ship and your food supply. Of course, the thrust to move such huge bodies is a problem, but if we're talking about thousand year journeys I'd hope we would have solved that particular problem. -Joe
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Really, having - and raising - children in space would require a whole additional set of resources above and beyond what we would carry for a regular mission. Diapers, (infant / child) food, (infant / child) clothing, etc; all that are items that adults in space would not have a use for. On top of that are all the requirements for human development as we recognize it today - education. stimulation, physical activity, etc. As it is we pay a high cost to lift each pound of whatever into space, do we really want to pay to send a rocket full of pampers to Mars as well?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of space colonization; but I just don't think we are anywhere near close enough to making this routine that we should be talking about creating children in space.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What about partial gravity as suggested in the previous comment? What about training? We have people learning to walk again going into rehab after complex surgery. What about artificial help like some sort of mechas?
Yeah, it's complicated, it sounds sci-fi, but hey, colonizing planets it is too, and I don't see it coming in the next 500 years at least, so we have time more than enough to deal with that issues. Look at the changes in the last 50 years in those areas.
Greetings people of earth. We, the peoples of the Peptoid cluster connected to your 'inter net', deduced your simplistic language structure and deciphered your premier news stream - Slashdot. We have just learned that you cannot procreate in space. There is much rejoicing here.
*** Don't be dull.***
Great, so radiation may cause problems trying to get pregnant en route to the destination.
If we're going anywhere that babies are needed en route we have so many other things to solve first the mind boggles. Procreation in space will most definitely not be an issue by the time we've solved the problems inherent in multi-generational space voyages. As far as Mars goes, wait until you're there to start having kids... it's a six month trip.
First and foremost, we need more practice -- uhh, research.
Add "Have you ever been a calendar model" to the astronaut screening form.
ACC touched on this a long time ago.
Seriously - '62-mile high' club sounds forced. A decade ago, I ran an informal poll at a launch vehicle company I worked for. The choices were:
I'll come back and post the top three winners later. I will say that I was surprised by the winner.
I can see the fnords!
You can freeze embryos and implant along the way. Except if space is bad for reproduction then its probably also bad for incubation and in utero development.
I've been picking up old SciFi books at my local thrift store and just finished on that dealt with the topic, The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany. The plot centers around a student who must conduct an anthropological study of the "Star Folk"--the first interstellar travelers from Earth whose vessels were so slow that the rest of the galaxy was settled (by colonists in later, faster ships) before they arrived. They're considered a throw-back society that has received little attention.
Delany did a good job of tackling the kinds of issues that would come up on such long journeys, including procreation. I won't say more. It's an enjoyable read if you can get your hands on a copy.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I would say that not being able to conceive a baby only makes space a better place to have sex.
The very nature of this topic automatically excludes gays from any experiments and eventual missions. Of all the hurdles that could impede the progress of Operation Space Babies, this is the one that would most likely prove insurmountable.
There are dozens of alternatives out there that were simply not considered- it would have only taken 10 minutes of brainstorming... Someone mentioned frozen embryo's- while not necessarily preferable- not a bad idea. I was thinking if we really won't have better shielded ships in the future (not likely)- than at least it could be practical to have at least part of the ship additionally shielded. Now it's not preferable to be confined to one room- but there are tribes in Africa that serve their expectant mothers who spend most of their gestation time in a special maternal hut. I'm sure with some further thinking and less narrow-mindedness- we would have a long list.
Originally a harsh frontier under U.N. control[citation needed], the Belt declared independence after creating Confinement Asteroid, a habitat with spin gravity that permitted safe gestation of children
Space is a not a good place to have children. However, it's a great place to have sex.
I guess this is why Capt Kirk could mess around with an alien women on every planet he visited. He was sterile from the radiation. I wonder if Vulcans are more resistant to radiation, I seem to remember they are. And this could be why Spock could be born.
Space is likely a great place to have sex. Why not?
Now, when it comes to reproduction, that's a little trickier. However, you can freeze and shield both eggs and sperm, so even if you can't shield the people well enough, they can still reproduce with stored and good sperm and eggs at the destination.
Find a few couples who are fertile in space despite these problems and problem solved.
Only if no human can reproduce under these conditions is it a block.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The story ponders the problem of thin walled spacecraft not being able to provide enough necessary shielding.
What sort of magnets and/or magnetic fields are required to generate a force field that will defect incoming nasties? Or is it impossible? (Consider that the Earth doesn't deflect them, but then how strong is the Earth's magnetic field?)
Think "force field" (or "sheilds") from science fiction and instead of deflecting phasors and other sorts of weapons, think of it as being a way to deflect radiation.
Can it work without being hazardous to the humans within?
Space is no place for biological entities.
But no matter, long before we have the technology to travel decent distances in space we will have evolved into transhumans.
That is, we will have discovered how to build true artificial intelligence and life will evolve into something way beyond life as we know it.
...because most of us have watched Star Trek or similar shows and dreamed about being able to experience such a life. But I believe that no human will ever go on a deep space trip and therefore the problem mentioned in the article will not need to be solved at all. The more probable scenario in my opinion is that machines will become intelligent enough so we can send them instead (in case they do not send themselves). In case this does not happen we will either destroy ourselves in the next decades or the sun will go supernova in about 4.5 billion years and carry out that job for us.
So, let's work together on making at least the machine scenario happen to ensure the survival of intelligence and to make ourselves and especially Ray Kurzweil happy. ;)
Completely idiotic problem.
LONG before we get the chance to colonize some other interstellar planet, the human species will be replaced by entities that don't procreate using current biological methods.
Another example of idiot scientists inventing problems that will be made utterly obsolete by other developments long before they will occur.
Must be a slow day at the lab.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The first crewed Mars expeditions aren't going to be two-person operations. And the current space station's small enough that *everybody* can hear you scream.
The "humans colonizing space" concept can be rewritten as "primates in a can". It assumes that human beings will continue to exist in biological bodies that are extremely fault prone, use brains that are horrendously noisy and short-lived, with embarassingly poor performance. Isn't going to happen. I'm of the school of thought that homo sapiens will NEVER colonize space. Won't ever happen. Long before we ever launch enough rockets and space missions to actually have a self sufficient colony, we will develop artificial intelligence and nanotechnology and the means to either transform ourselves or our successors will take over. Either way, the beings that explore space won't be humans. They will be sentient, self repairing, atomically precise bundles of hardware that have no lifespan limits other than the need for constant input of energy and a small of amount of matter. Hopefully, these beings WILL be us. They'll remember what it was like to be human, to feel hopes and dreams and love and pain and loss. Compared to the lifespan of the universe, the speed of light is plenty fast. We don't need FTL (though it would certainly be convenient). The only reason for even the concept of FTL...the reason why our species is obsessed with it...is that science fiction writers a certain era could perceive no other means by which we could explore the stars. The distances are vast, and sci-fi writers of that era did not know what we know today regarding biology.
Anybody having a clue on what an incredible complex task space exploration truly is can't mind a little bit about such an issue. At the current state of things we can hope to explore our solar system at best. We have already started to do it by drones (Mars rover) and in the future, with the constant improvement of artificial intelligence and robotics, this will be the norm. Space travel to far aways planets such as Jupiter or even Mars are too long and risky for an human crew where drones don't need a round trip ticket. Besides, stars' exploration, in order to be feasible, requires much more advanced technology to be researched. It involves theories such as the Alcubierre's warp drive, which requires creation and manipulation of exotic energy at the highest levels. This is probably the last technological advancement to be accomplished. Any other advancement appears to be much more at hand: nanotechnology, advanced genetics, photonic CMOS, quantum computing, strong A.I. .... everything else is a joke compared to star exploration, which means that, by the time we'll be able to reach Proxima Centauri, such issues as "how to have sex in space" will be vastly irrelevant.
Living in water provides two benefits -- radiation shielding and progressive resistance for muscle maintenance (think whales having big bones but they essentially live in a weightless environment).
In The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage there was a discussion of using six feet of water as shielding as the outer layer of habitats, as well as drugs or genetic alteration to deal with weightlessness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
There are other ideas like clothing that provides resistance to movement.
I wrote about this issue here: http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss
From there:
===============
For a broader outline on "Liquid breathing", see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
From Wikipedia: "Liquid immersion provides a way to reduce the physical stress of G forces. ... Liquid breathing for acceleration protection may never be practical because of the difficulty of finding a suitable breathing medium of similar density to water that is compatible with lung tissue. Perfluorocarbon fluids are twice as dense as water, hence unsuitable for this application."
However, consider if a suitable compound was found. Ignore the issue of acceleration. What is a potential big problem on long duration space flights or indefinite habitation in microgravity is bone loss. The body adapts to lack of stress by eliminating bone and muscle that in no longer used, but this makes returning to a strong gravity field problematical. Savage has proposed future medicine or genetic engineering to overcome this, and one can also in theory create big rotating O'Neill-style structures, and there is also (boring) microgravity exercise, but what if there was another way?
Fish and mammals like whales and dolphins spend their entire lives in a sort-of microgravity suspended in water. They can have strong bones and muscles. Aquatic therapy in a pool is often recommended for humans to improve strength. So presumably, like the mythical Seapeople, if humans could breathe a liquid while living in outer space in microgravity (like during a long trip to Mars), then by just living and moving around in a liquid environment in a space craft, they would maintain their muscle tone and bone mass. The liquid might also provide cosmic ray shielding, and might even be designed to use cosmic rays to clean or re-oxegenate itself.
An important difference between an undersea civilization and a liquid-breathing space-faring one is that there is no water pressure in space in Zero-G (beyond surface tension or compression). Thus, liquid structures could extend in space for miles in three dimensions of endless tubes, all at essentially the same pressure. So there would be no risk of the "bends" when moving around this construction. Another possibility is that a big drop of liquid a mile across might be all one needed for a large space habitat floating in zero-G if the surface tension held the liquid in. This might make it trivial to construct habitats, and micrometeorites might pose less of a problem as the surface would heal itself by surface tension. Comets and asteroids could be mined, but the major result need only be a stream of this breathable liquid, which could be shaped into habitats of desired size by how much liquid was added.
This is all speculative at this point.
Liquid breathing obviously should not be experimented with outside a well-monitored research laboratory situation due to the risk of drowning or lung damage. Various research has already been performed, see Wikipedia for links.
Anyway, all speculative. But kind of cool (to me). I was inspired a litt
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The zero-G sex thing has mostly been solved, and it turned out not to be a huge engineering problem (as in, no new technology is required): the 2suit will both conceal the couple's mutual entertainment, and keep them from spinning off in different directions. I'd imagine they could still find themselves bouncing around the cabin like a pinball, but that just means they need a padded room.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Terra has a magntic field which protects it from radiation.
One could be generated for a spacecraft. Not easy but likely not impossible.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/36558
Peter AI6PG
Being that radiation and high energy particles are such a problem is space travel in general, this is going to have to be a problem that we solve before we go too far. Simply lining all future space missions in 2 foot thick lead shields is not really an option, so magnetic shielding or similar technology will have to be developed. As an aside, I wonder if the creating a large magnetic field for the purpose of deflecting harmful particles would also have the side effect of acting like a solar sail? Seems like a very useful side effect...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Who needs to procreate when we live forever anyway?
Note that this *requires* solving the "closed ecosystem" problem. That's the main reason we couldn't start on this right now. The other problems are all simple engineering, that we already know ways to solve (though there may be better solutions).
E.g.: For power one can use a large mirror and a sterling steam engine. A large enough mirror would work most places in the solar system. (Exceptions are places like penumbras, etc.) Of course, if you got out around Pluto you'd need a rather large mirror.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There is another, very serious, potential problem. There is a hypothesis that gamma rays from the Earth's uranium deposits provides the viability to basic cellular structure, by providing a tiny mutation, sort of a cellular "kick in the pants." If the hypothesis is correct, creating background radiation within the spacecraft to properly match Earth's would be non-trivial. I suspect there may be a lot of factors affecting humans in space for which we have barely scratched the surface, so there is a possiblilty that travelling in space may turn out to not really be viable for the human species. There is no guarantee that every potential problem for human space-travel will have a practical solution.
Regards, John
Realize that this was three silly unimaginative scientists who can't figure out how to have sex in space. Other people will do much better, both with the actual mechanics and the shielding. Do or die.
...is the NASAsutra. ...Lorenzo
In reply good sir, I have only one thing to say:
"................." (no one can hear you scream in SPACE!)
signed,
the Janitor
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti