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."

Comments

Bad things COULD happen.

[symbolset]

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.

Re:Bad things COULD happen.

[Shimmer]

Well put. But this article isn't just saying that space is dangerous, it's saying that reproduction is statistically impossible in space without better shielding. That's useful information, not scare-mongering.

Re:Bad things COULD happen.

[symbolset]

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

- JFK, at Rice University, 7/12/1962

Re:Bad things COULD happen.

[sjwt]

My thoughts on how far we have come is this, my Grandfather was beaten by his dad for suggesting that man would go to the moon after reading some books, and those books where of course thrown out.

Re:Bad things COULD happen.

[SharpFang]

There's still one simple option: frozen embryos. They could be sent along with the crew, but due to small space required for storage, and minimal requirements, they could be shielded way better than the crew, who requires a lot of room. Infertility doesn't mean inability to give birth to a child. The crew gets to a remote planet, builds a good shelter, women get the embryos (may be just perfectly well their own children, just conceived before start) and give birth to a new generation, preparing for another launch and another "leap". This still limits the range of a single "leap" - between launch and landing - but removes the limitation of "human lifespan distance from Earth".

Re:Bad things COULD happen.

[argStyopa]

Actually, no - if you RTFA, it IS fear mongering.
It's not saying that cosmic rays make reproduction difficult or impossible without better shielding...the title of the article is "Why infertility will stop humans colonising space". ...you'd think by now people might be a little leery of pronouncing the impossibility of something as far as humanity is concerned. Using the same source logic behind their title, one might have stated unequivocally in 1700 "Why humans will never fly", because, barring technological advance, we couldn't do it then.

Making such a categorical statement is idiotic. Or an exercise in sensationalist headline-writing.

Re:Bad things COULD happen.

[Third Position]

A lovely speech. But it's sobering to remember that when it was given, putting a man on the moon was 7 years in the future. Now it's nearly 40 years in the past. At least as far as human space travel is concerned, that breathtaking pace has come to a grinding halt.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is a great place to have sex. It may not be a great place to reproduce, but that is a different matter.

Lack of imagination

[QuoteMstr]

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."

I hardly think...

[dargaud]

...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.

Au Contraire

[poliscipirate]

Women would be unable to become pregnant? On the contrary, it sounds like space is a GREAT place to have sex.

Re:Au Contraire

[Aeternitas827]

It sounds like they would be able to conceive, and be able to carry to term, but any girls born would have a significant chance of being born sterile; I think they indicated this of boys born as well (or the adult males becoming sterile, not sure, but either circumstance is not a good situation). Myself, I think the article intends this as somewhat of a best-case (or, a not-worst-case) scenario; there are certainly worse outcomes that could come of such a pregnancy.

space sex

[Odinlake]

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.

Terrible Article, Serious Issue

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:Terrible Article, Serious Issue

[SharpFang]

Goddamnit, why do you people keep dragging the old carcass that has been buried long ago? The same lesson once again: Every deep-space ship in any self-respecting sci-fi movie seems to have a rotating part. Not because it looks cool. But because centripetal force is a very accurate and perfectly sufficient for all practical purposes simulation of earth gravity. 50m radius from axis of rotation, 2.25s per rotation, and you have a neat 1g. And due to 1st Newton's Law and no air friction, it needs only to be started once and requires no power to keep turning. Now go and bury that stinky thing where it belongs.

Re:Terrible Article, Serious Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The coriolis effect on the inner ear would make any astronauts in such a centrifuge permanently nauseous and disoriented. You need a _much_ large diameter to get a good enough approximation of linear gravity..

Re:Laughable

[whereiswaldo]

I'd suggest breaking the problem into two parts:

1) That human kind may someday soon disappear.

2) That all life on Earth will eventually disappear.

Getting humans out of our solar system will take ages. Colonize the moon first. Create factories so more can be done in space (less requirements for launching from Earth).

But first, get _life_ off of this planet. Send some organisms, plants, rats, stuff that is hardy off to Titan or Mars and get something going. That way even if Earth is destroyed, at least there is life somewhere else that can evolve or at least live.

Tired, random thoughts... hope you get the gist of it.

Re:Here's another problem

[ardle]

Hey how do I put in a link with with just "Westermarck Effect" highlighted as the link?

Write full HTML for the link, e.g. The Westermarck effect is done by typing "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect#Westermarck_effect">The Westermarck effect</a>.
You can do quite a lot in this way, e.g. bullet points, italics. If shashcode doesn't like what you've done' it'll strip it.
Try hitting the "Quote Parent" button to get a lump of HTML to play with ;-)

Home on LaGrange

[Dadoo]

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.

Re:Magnets?

[Sockatume]

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.