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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.
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."
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.
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.
I hereby volunteer for the randomized double-blind study.
So? The solution would be the same, build better shielding.
From the article it sounds like space is a fine place to have sex, just not to be pregnant.
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.
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.
Then you have two goals. One goal is to develop shielding that doesn't require so much additional mass to block out the harmful radiation. The other is to develop a means of propulsion that can handle the additional mass.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hideous waste of energy. At 0.9c, you've put more energy than the rest mass energy of whatever you've accelerated to 0.9c. For example, at current energy price ($0.10 per kWh), I get that it'd cost around $6 billion to accelerate 1 kilogram to 0.9c.
There's two types of ionising radiation to worry about: ions and photons.
Ions are hugely damaging but poorly penetrating. A helium nucleus won't get past a piece of paper, for example, while a proton is stopped by a modest thickness of aluminium. They're charged, so a magnetic field will divert them. If the Earth's magnetic field wasn't there, they wouldn't get past the atmosphere anyway, but they would start to erode it. It'd be similar on a spacecraft. You don't need a magnetic field to protect the occupants, but you'd be exposing the ship's hull and outboard systems to (perhaps non-trivial) radiation damage.
Photons are not as damaging but are much more penetrating. Your old-fashioned X-ray is the classic demonstration. Our atmosphere protects us from those by absorption. You can use a kilometer of gas, or a foot of lead. Either way that means carrying a lot of mass which can be a problem for a space mission. A poster above observed that colonists would be carrying resources like water that they could use as a shield though.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yep, colonizing other, more than likely uninhibited bodies of rock in space is the moral, legal, social, and political equivalent of invading a neighboring country. That makes so much sense, I can't think of a reason that nobody else has thought of it before you.
Oh, I know why, perhaps it's because that is one of the single most asinine equivalencies I have ever heard drawn in the history of stupid commentary. Don't try to equate space travel with Nazi-like ambitions of world domination. That's just fucking stupid.
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