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NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew
globaljustin writes "Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA concluded, "Small women haven't been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale. "The logical thing to do is to fly small women." Kate Greene, who wrote the linked article, took part in the first HI-SEAS experiment in Martian-style living, and has some compelling reasons for an all-women crew, energy efficiency chief among them: Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members. Less than half! We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least 45 minutes a day for five consecutive days a week—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways. During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000. ...
The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.
The end of that post was totally unnecessary. Did we really need our hands held to make that connection between amount of food required and the weight/cost of a launch?
That is a pretty compelling reason to have most of the crew women.
However I'd argue in a truly remote environment where no external help is to be had, that the raw strength a few very fit males could provide could be useful in an emergency.
Some women can also be very strong, but then would there be any metabolism benefit?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If this was true, the men would have burned the same amount of calories as the women, as they would have been expending the same amount of energy.
This is going to be great. I can't think of a single reply to this I could make that wouldn't start an immediate flame war other than the one I'm making, and that's only because it's totally off topic. And I think there's still a 50/50 chance it'll happen.
I expected with lack of gravity you would spend less calories pumping blood to your HEAD. The useful one.
You're welcome
I suggest a mixed crew, with a diversity of strengths and weaknesses. Plus for a super long journey (one which they may not return from), companionship from the opposite sex will likely be important for long term mental health.
Instead it is: Radiation and muscle loss
Long term travel exposes humans large amounts of radiation, in particular from cosmic rays, and from
In addition, living in a low gravity environment destroys your bones.
These two issues are far more problematic than food, air, and water.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yeah, that's great and all, but the right way to post this is that the ideal astronaut has a low calorie requirements and leave unsaid that the people who can fill that role is women. No need to drag sexism into the fight when there are perfectly logical rationals for crew selection.
And this comparison is useful to point out because.... ?
So why isn't the article tagged "trollbait"?
THIS IS RACISM
What's wrong with small men?
Well, small women are a smaller target for high energy particles to hit.
However it has been show that muscle atrophy is less serious for an overweight person.
... is that there are too many men on Earth. Men on average burn (and consume) more calories. Therefore they are a larger drain on natural resources and have a larger carbon foot print.
He who forgets will be destined to remember. - EV
Of couse, astronauts should be midgets (hope that term is not too derogative), horse jockeys (strong but light).
Or, better, children !
Weight is key in space. This is why I have always maintained that paraplegic midgets are the way to go. Cut off their useless legs and they will be like 5 pounds, that is like 50 times lighter! And that weight and size difference translated to less food, less water, small equipment and living spaces.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Kate Greene, who wrote the linked article, took part in the first HI-SEAS experiment in Martian-style living, and has some compelling reasons for an all-women crew, energy efficiency chief among them:
Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members.
Also, they stopped an asked for directions when they got lost.
The need for additional shoe closets and the weight of the shoes themselves would more than offset the savings from food.
Mars does need women.
If they do send only women, they'd better make sure it's only a 2-person crew. It's widely known that 3 women can not get along for any period of time. Two of them will team up against the 3rd. (They'll switch groupings many times over, but it will always be 2 versus 1.)
I actually don't have any data on what happens in groups of 4+. But 3 is definitely a bad idea.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
I suppose we'll have to send the men there and that will turn the whole thing on it's head.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Am I the only person thinking of the Rocket Girls anime? I am? Oh, well, forget I said anything.
I guess it's time to update the adage of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" to "Women go to Mars, Men chill out and drink beer on Earth"
Yet another case of Science Fiction becoming Science Fact ;)
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
+ 1 man.
I recall a sci-fi book that goes like that.
That argument could be extended to suggest that crew should be only people with Dwarfism. Everything could be smaller!
Then you could name the spaceship "Snow White", and sell the movie rights to Disney.
I can list a whole lot of reasons why sending only women would be problematic. Worked in all female environments, when things go bad, they really go bad. Its like living in a non-stop soap opera.
Samantha Brick (an executive producer for television shows) started "the first all-female production company" so that "smart, intelligent, career-orientated women could work harmoniously, free from the bravado of the opposite sex". Unfortuntately, it disintigrated within 2 years because of "catfights over handbags and tears in the toilets". In fact, Brick says that "if I were to do it again, I'd definitely employ men. In fact, I'd probably employ only men." See
http://dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182
No really. Before you mod this flamebait, check the studies. It's 100% true. Statistically speaking (well, at least according to several large surveys), most women actually do prefer male authority in the work-place.
http://www.businessweek.com/ar...
And there are thousands of nightmare tales about all female workplaces...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem...
Of course such statistics and stories will forever be dismissed by social justice warriors... And there are many here on Slashdot.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I recall hearing that from a physiological standpoint, the best fighter pilot is a short female with slightly elevated blood pressure. Apparently, such a pilot could tolerate G-forces better in addition to requiring slightly less thrust from the aircraft. I'm not surprised they're better in space.
Of course for historical reasons that's not a common profile for a fighter pilot or an astronaut.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
NASHLA?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I suggest me for that one male. The rest of the crew should be female....
"Leather Goddesses of Phobos!"
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
First spaceship to Mars; one male captain and a crew of women!
They suck down less oxygen too. Divers know this firsthand ;-)
And the lack of gravity would make their skirts float up, revealing their space-panties. I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse televised women in space.
Their next alternative was people with dwarfism, but many of them suffer from problems that shorten their lifespan considerably. Actually, I kid ... the article *actually* said:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I think I saw this movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060672/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Needs_Women
An anorexic, reclusive woman who'd give her right arm to just be left alone. Negotiate the price up to an arm and a leg and on her merry way!
I am now looking forward to a hobbit/starwars crossover!
So it turns out that women are from Venus and are best suited to send to Mars? Maybe I'm fixing a metaphor.
As we all know, it's still very expensive to put a kilo into low Earth orbit, so sending a kilo to Mars will only be that much more expensive. Therefore, even as a guy, the line of reasoning seems plenty reasonable to me. Ideally, we would put the crew in stasis while en route, but in lieu of that, having a crew that will not have to take nearly as much food with them makes a lot of sense. Besides, including men in the mission "just because they can lift heavier things" would be tantamount to admitting our inability to plan ahead and solve certain technical problems. Putting boots on Mars is going to be hard enough as it is, so clinging needlessly to old ideas and refusing to think outside of the box will not get us there any sooner.
No shit an all-female crew would need less food on a years-long trip confined in a tin can.
Only one woman would survive the cat fight.
And you know it's true. Except you sitzpinkler Pajama Boy metrosexuals. You know - you wussies who always get "friend zoned" by the hot women who go for guys who make posts like this...
If your Mars mission is cutting it so close that the calorie requirement between men and women is a major factor ... maybe that's a sign no one should go using your plan.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
...just don't put any mission critical supplies in pickle jars.
The problem w/ the "women only" conclusion is that it myopically focuses on **ONE** factor as if it is the determining factor in mission success.
Part of this is the fault of NASA admin/beauracracy: "We can't spare the weight" is an excuse for all kinds of ideas NASA wanted to kill...
"Too heavy" is almost a trope in NASA/space circles...it's the go-to way for beauracrats to make their presence known.
As others have pointed out, weight and food requirements are not a determining factor in mission success.
At best, the "weight is everything" mentality is obsolete...IMHO it was never about weight ultimately (of course it matters to mission planning)...it was just a handy excuse.
Also...there is some misplaced feminism here...women have been dismissed from science b/c sexism for centuries, and often the reasons given are something **other than gender**...a beaurecratic answer that belies the real motivation for the decision.
All in all, dumb analysis like in TFA are a legacy of sexism and bad beaurecratic management...it's like the sexism equivalent of what the CIA calls "blowback"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Clearly, we need to start a eugenics program that would create humans that have the following traits:
- Petite in stature
- Ultra efficient metabolism. Just increasing our intestines efficiency by 1 or 2 percent would save huge amounts of food.
- Highly intelligent.
- More efficient gas exchange (Humans in the Himalayans already have this trait) so they could function in lower pressure, lower O2 levels.
A human with those traits would be perfect.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
More sexist hipocrisy passed off as pragmatism.
"'Cause every woman's got another woman at her job that she can't stand. Women, y'all exaggerate everything. You turn it into some Dynasty shit, like, 'She's trying to destroy me!'
What the fuck are you talking about? You wrap up bags at J.C. Penney's! What's she doing, ripping up your paper?"
It's how will he pick up the phone with no arms or legs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Women are from Mars, as any married man can attest. It only makes sense to send a few back. Besides, what would the Martians make of a buch of alien men, when they could relate so much better to women.
tsia
The plot for Amazon Women From Mars II.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Obviously.
May I suggest to send Snow White and the seven dwarfs, and no Apple please.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Why not replace "Women" with "Asian" in that article? Asians are shorter on average than American women. While size is a compelling argument, gender isn't. Last time I went to the race track I saw plenty of men who are around or under 5 feet tall. Then of course there are people with dwarfism who would make the best astronauts of all.
I remember decades ago when Masamune Shirow gave a similar justification for why, at the time, all of his trademark powered-armor suits were depicted as being piloted by well-oiled young women...
Females can handle g-forces better than males can. OK, all males out of fighter jet cockpits. Women, take over
Females eat less for given output than men. OK, all males out of everyones space program, due to weight considerations.
Females are generally smaller, and can fit into smaller spaces. OK, all males out of the mining industry. Time for the women to step up
Females consume less oxygen than men. OK, males...out of the underwater construction and demolition workforce.
Time to step up!
You need to learn the anecdotal evidence logical fallacy, we could argue that men are not suitable for space travel and then provide some links to street brawls. As to whether women prefer male bosses, people may prefer all sorts of things but we rarely get what we prefer and make do just fine. Besides the correct answer to space travel is obvious, its dwarfs, we should start breeding the smallest people we can possible get now, starting with dwarfs, if we start now by the time we are ready to send someone to mars we could have dwarfs half a meter high or less.
I doesn't make any difference if they are a smaller target, they are also having less cells and everything is about the potential for the body to repair damages due to radiation. Since the intensity of the radiation is the same whatever the size of the target damages will still be proportional to the size of the target. Usually, damaging radiations are mesured in rem (Roentgen Equivalent Man) with is a quality factor multiplied by the amount of rad (Radiation Absorbed Dose) which is measured in amount of energy per kilogram. The quality factor is to take into account the type of radiations and the effect of the type of living cells that absorbe the dose.
No matter the size of the target, the amount of energy deposit in cells per kilogram will be a constant for a small target or a large target provided the intensity of the ambient radiations is the same.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Then your opinion doesn't matter a whole lot.
Seriously, how many of you commenters are going on the first manned mission to Mars? Bueller? Bueller?
Piss and moan all you want, but if the numbers are right, then send who costs less to get out of the gravity well.
So - a crew of mostly females and Tyrion then? Sigh. I'm betting there is an HBO writer working on this right at this moment.
I hope they don't need to open a tub of jam halfway there or houston is gonna hear from them.
Send Robots and children. The robots will do most of the real work but if they get stuck or you need something only a human can do you are all set. They eat less than full grown women and are happy eating the same thing every day. How many chicken nuggets and juice boxes will you need to pack for this?
Anyone not realizing that there are differences between men and women is an idiot. Men can lift more weight than women, and we have known this for thousands of years. In fact my favorite book "The Republic" has Socrates stating that Women should be in the military, even though everyone else argues that they can't carry as much weight into battle. It's not a shock, it's a fact that we each have some strong and weak points regarding our physique.
We also know that women tend to use more emotion in judgement than men. In fact women use emotion all the time quite, and quite differently from men. Amazingly, we have known about these differences for again thousands of years. It does not mean a women can't learn math, it means that when it comes to a snap decision a women will weigh the decision with a bit more emotion than a man. That is not a bad thing! At the same time, it does not make a man's decision always wrong.
Working together, all of these things can offset very nicely. 2 men and 2 women on the mission would give half of the crew with extra lift capability if needed. It would also provide different views of problem solving on the spot. I really don't see this as any type of problem, but then again I'm not a sexist.
Instead of promoting a work together attitude, TFA is yet another example of trying to separate the masses and keep us bickering with each other. Meanwhile, nothing will happen because the bureaucrats want your money for at least their lifetime. They do not progress, harmony, peace, or anything that may risk their lifelong free ride telling you how to live and where your tax money should go.
See how the game works? I really hope so. Don't argue the exception to the rule, argue the "normal" if you are going to respond.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day."
Why are they comparing the most to the least? That doesn't really say anything does it. The fastest snail moves slowly. The slowest car doesn't move at all. Surely we should do all of our transportation by snail!
I don't think there is any problem with them chosing astronauts based on things like weight, volume and calorie needs. If that means they end up with an all female or mostly female crew then so be it. But why even make the connection that this means female? It just invites an opportunity to pass up some worthy, unusually petite male that could have done as well. Why not just leave things like gender and race out of it, pick them based on their pertinent qualifications and attributes as individuals. Oh.. speaking of race.. how about Pygmies? I would think they would be ideal candidates based on this criteria, not that they should automatically discount people with dwarfism of other races.
Just what mission control wants to deal with. A cramped can more inhospitable and treacherous than the planet they're heading for.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Kate Greene states that "the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day" and then goes on to state that " the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day". All other things being the same, she's saying that the least hungry female eats less than the most hungry male. Pardon my French, but no shit. Get some better data...
Who would have thought?
All of the dinosaurs were engineered to be female and still re-produced offspring in the closed environment (toad dna by the book).
"Clever Girl!"
We can finally get rid of the Spice Girls once and for all
An exclusively female crew?
Are they sliced sandwich pickles or whole dill?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale.
Ah, that makes sense.
"The logical thing to do is to fly small...."
Ah, that's good thinking.
"...women."
What the ....????? Now I just got totally lost.
Earlier I thought we were talking about brain power.
We have a surplus of males and can afford to have the vacuum eat a few now and then.
Restricting to females isn't going nearly far enough. It should be restricted to skinny little oriental females. Let's be honest. Ah, and one male should be sufficient for, um, long term planning... I hereby volunteer!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
So are we giving up on the idea of some sort of low metabolism sleep state?
All we're going to hear about from now on is how women are better than men, and men spend all of their time oppressing women.
It has been demonstrated that women who are living in close proximity to each other slowly synchronize their menstrual cycle.
By the end of this trip, you would end up with a crew of women who are mostly all on the same cycle PMSing at the same time while trapped in a small vessel they can not leave.
If they did this, they would have to castrate these women one way or another to halt that cycle or it would cause a LOT of problems. Men have issues as well, but that cycle is notorious for the social problems it causes.
...but in the other direction, and it turns out that you can put nothing into orbit with no effort whatsoever.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You ever get women together to do anything? They're genetically wired to basically kill each other even if the nearest male is millions of miles away. It would be a disaster.
a women only mars expedition would need huge amounts of chocolate and tampons... without them nasa would risk a mission failure at the first PMS (?)
The problem with male crews, according to Peter Griffin, is that after a while it's like living in a snow globe.
why stop at small women? brilliant dwarfs must be the way to the stars?
why not midgets and kids by same logic?
Do small men also burn more calories than small women?
I was surprised to not see that point considered in an article attempting to be credible.
Seems to me that if you want to make a reasonable comparison, then you would compare most metabolically active male with most metabolically active female and least metabolically active male with the least metabolically female.
Therefore, IO am going to call the post .... incomplete and inaccurate.
> The logical thing to do is to fly small women.
I'm pretty sure the martian grand council would welcome their new geisha overladies...
(While the gesiha can only hope all martians look like young Marlon Brando.)
The spacecraft will be a closed environment: recycling waste from food and water (with some slight inefficiencies and consequent loss - but you'd expect that to be very small). So once the craft is loaded with enough raw materials to produce food fast enough (a function of energy availability) then it won't matter how many calories per day the crew consume, so long as the onboard systems can recycle the waste and replenish them fast enough. Same applies to water use: very little will be "consumed" (lost irrevocably) and if there's enough energy to recycle it the crew could use as much as they please. It's not as if there will be a stream of empty MRE package dumped out of the vessel every morning.
As far as calories goes: this is just heat generation. So however many calories the crew "consumes" will ultimately contribute towards the heating of the cabin. Obv. if the cabin needs cooling more than heating there will be a greater energy cost - but again it comes down to the ability of the craft to generate power to run itself, not very much in the way of "lost" consumables.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
An entire crew's MS cycle synced up ... another splatter movie in the making. :)
It will be an interesting experience and our first ship lost to deeper space
Dwarfs.......In.........Spaaaaaaaaace.........
One issue that an all-women space crew could have is that some of them could be too small to fit into space suits. Women under 5’5" can’t wear NASA’s current model, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMUs), because they are not made small enough.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Get everyone to agree that gender's a 'thang', same gender crews, or seriously imbalanced ratio for an extended mission is an unnatural and cruel idea.
Therefore in deference to human nature, a coin toss for gender of each position is performed as the positions are filled.
Mandating equal number of each invites trouble, if a greater portion of applicants are one gender, it injects the meme among the most arrogant of 'which' particular minority gender positions were filled by the 'least' qualified. An equal gender mission also carries another cruel twist: once monogamous pairs form there is unspoken expectation among those remaining that they too will pair up, and the diminishing possibilities lead to a choice-drama. Tabloid fixation on this formula (by participants and those on Earth) would is an unnecessary distraction.
By going coin toss, the mission is guaranteed to result in a mix of humans that everyone can agree is not the direct result of some manipulative policy, prejudice or conspiracy. It would give the participants freedom to form their own bonds (or not) without the sense that they are playing out some 'experiment'.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
At ~120 lbs an IQ nearly double average and a 11.25" penis size I'd be happy to lead this Mars harem.
CAPTCHA: boners
I think such a mission would be doomed from the start.
I believe I've read somewhere that the ideal mission composition is around 1:1 male to female ratio, simply due to the fact that over long periods of time it's the most stable social makeup.
From an evolution standpoint it makes sense, since that's how human societies have been organized for millennia.
Also, popular wisdom tells us that groups of women get along worse with each other than groups of men. I can't state this as fact, but I believe there are clinical studies which corroborate this.
So yeah as someone else said, if the difference between the mission's success or failure is the difference in energy expenditure between males and females, perhaps you're cutting it too close. And those X kg you're saving in food cargo will mean nothing if the mission fails due to psychological and sociological breakdown.
Unless you could guarantee that all the women were hardened lesbians. Then it might work, but I don't have and data points on that, unfortunately.
Even less thin women.
"During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day."
Stating the least metabolically active would have been fine alone, but if you use the opposite end of the spectrum to try and re-enforce that fact, it seems to diminish the impact of the results.
Males are not optional. The psychology of the trip without males would be toxic. And male aggressive creativity would be essential to survival both on the trip and on Mars itself. In any case, the trip would be suicidal and anyone aiding and abetting it would be culpable, at least morally.
E Proelio Veritas.
You said it yourself.
an average estimate
If you are clocking in below average... you are below average.
I.e. That is either not an average woman, or she is not eating all calories she needs cause she's on a diet, or she is getting her calories elsewhere, OR, and here's a radical thought...
The author of that article is not as scientifically literate and/or diligent as she thinks she is.
And either those men and women were doing radically different things or it is simply not even bad science but bad and inaccurate measurement.
1475 calories per day is VERY low for any adult.
Those are Auschwitz and Mauthausen portions.
Only difference being that these would-be astronauts don't have to do backbreaking work for 12 hours each day.
At least those doing just fine on 6 powerbars a day are not.
Regardless, if you can eat that much and not lose weight, you are FAR below the average, bordering on malnourished.
http://www.holocaustresearchpr...
Food
Prisoners in the camp received three meals daily - in the morning, at midday and in the evening.
In the morning the prisoners received only a half litre of black coffee or of a herbal brew known as tea. These liquids were generally unsweetened.
The midday meal consisted of one portion of soup measuring about three quarters of a litre, with a value of 350 - 400 calories. The soup was foul tasting and watery, with 'meat' four times a week and the rest with vegetables.
For supper the prisoners were given about 300 grams of bread and something extra in the shape of about 25 grams of sausage or margarine, or a spoonful of jam or cheese. The food value of supper came to about 900 - 1000 calories
Given such hunger rations most prisoners after a few weeks in the camp began to develop symptoms of exhaustion, which led in consequence to people being reduced to the state of 'Moslems'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
The work in the quarries - often in unbearable heat or in temperatures as low as -30 C (-22 F)[20] - led to exceptionally high mortality rates.[40][note 6]
The food rations were limited, and during the 1940-1942 period, an average inmate weighed 40 kilograms,[41] roughly 88 pounds.
It is estimated that the average energy content of food rations dropped from about 1,750 calories a day during the 1940-1942 period, to between 1,150 and 1,460 during the next period.
In 1945, the energy content was even lower and did not exceed 600 to 1,000 calories a day; that is less than a third of the energy needed by an average worker in heavy industry.[1]
This led to the starvation of thousands of inmates.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I sympathize with those infected by gynocentric, gender-levelling political correctness, but the proof is obvious. Men invented business, industry, science, technology, government. Steve Jobs and the Woz of Apple, Bill Gates and Ballmer of Microsoft, Hewlett and Packard, Thomas Edison, Ford, Dell, Zukerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon,even Thomas Savery who invented and patented the steam engine that fuelled the industrial revolution - the list is unending. Men invented and developed every aspect of the internet. These are men that pushed the exploration of the world and each and every subject that has advanced mankind since the beginning. Where were the women, the "founding mothers" of the United States, or ANY state? Where are their political philosophies, their physical inventions that significantly altered and advanced mankind? And please don't say they weren't "allowed" to achieve and invent. Women are half the population of the world and always have been. You cannot keep half the world from doing that which is natural for them to do, yet, women have not been aggressively creative anywhere near the level of men. You believe what you believe (if you are an American) because the 19th amendment to the Constitution of the United States created a political equality that has forced over time a phony physical, social, and economic equality that requires us to lie about the real differences between men and women. That is nice. If the world were 100% safe and there was no need to advance every aspect of life creatively I would embrace the lie. But, there is still, and always will be, a need to perceive and deal with the brutal realities of life if we wish to survive and prosper into the future. And that means we must perceive and deal with the real differences between men and women, not hide from them.
E Proelio Veritas.
How will they keep that much salad fresh anyways?
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
Supposedly a man of Indian heritage (Asian Indian, from India, not Amerindian) will burn fewer calories than a woman of so-called "white" heritage.
Of course, all this is based on "average" people of particular genders or races, and the variance within those groups is probably far greater than the variance between the averages. And you don't necessarily expect astronauts to be average, now do you?
So you're still probably better off picking people with exceptional caloric efficiency who have the other skills you need and leaving race and gender entirely out of the selection process. Don't pre-bias your results with bigotry based on averages - average people are not what you want!
Based on this discussion I gather that the optimal solution is to send midget women without legs.
I was rushed for time when I wrote that, it didn't come off too well. What I had in mind was from a future where people are being chosen for long term assignments such as a grand tour of the solar system (and part two), extended Mars mission -- or colonization -- where there are qualified volunteers of both genders. There's a lot more to this than sexual liaisons or pair bonding.
The Sex Differences in Psychology is a good read on what has been observed by experiment, there's some physiology in there too. And with any 'delicate' topic, the Wiki talk page for it shows an interesting struggle to identify and manage bias for a topic that is so rich with historical flavor it has its own category of humor.
But a most fascinating tangent from the Wiki page is this recent study Widespread sex differences in gene expression and splicing in the adult human brain (Trabzuni et. al 2013), showing "that sex differences in gene expression and splicing are widespread in adult human brain, being detectable in all major brain regions and involving 2.5% of all expressed genes."
Sequencing inherited genes has taught us that there's no more than ~0.5% variance among the races of the world. We have leveraged the smallness of that number into a scientifically based bias against racism and prejudice which we apply to classic arguments of "nature vs. nurture?" to stack the deck against "nature" when debating things like intelligence and ability.
This is good. This ~0.5% figure gives us a hard baseline for "humanness" superior to that applied by Phrenologists and early Darwinians. If I have inherited a certain gene that affects skull shape or skin color or susceptibility to a disease, I can expect a noble society NOT to apply judgment from it of inherent ability or potential.
So what about that ~2.5% difference in gene expression between male and female brains? "We are not alone." I mean that in the full Close Encounters aliens-are-among us sense, because when discussing sex-triggered gene expression we're firmly in "nature" territory. Science reveals the existence of an intelligent (yet 'alien') species on this planet. And even though your genes are expressed differently, you both fall within the ~0.5% genetic baseline.
This means "including women equally" in everything that matters in a direct or Monte Carlo 50/50 ratio or a process is NOT like that "gotta strive to ensure that all races are represented" thing. The human race is a successful species because of this working partnership. It is a successful one and we ignore or diminish it at our great peril.
By peril I mean that any enterprise without equal genders by default is ahuman. Not 'inhuman' with its connotation of injustice. Ahuman is "not us", creepy, weird, uncanny valley. I propose the gender coin toss+'merit' --- and not just 'merit' (plus equal action political metric) --- as a way to statistically implement what is our intrinsic nature, impose a system that can be agreed upon that eases us into gender parity as the likely default, but yet does what nature does --- when the toss weighs heavily to one side something new is tried.
Because there may be dynamics of gender interaction (not sex) that are not just necessary to evolve. By excluding gender at times through history we may have been losing ground.
For something completely different, see Women: How do they do it?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I'm so tired of Slashdot implying that it will take 6 months to get to Mars & 6 months to get back. No one is paying attention to Astronaut Chang Diaz' Vazimir engine. He says he can get us to Mars with this new tech in 39 days. We're note talking WARP speed, but we are talking about a ship that can scream across the heavens every bit as fast as Charlize Theron's space ship in the movie "PROMETHEUS".
Send children to Mars. They're even smaller, they use a larger proportion of energy for thinking, their bodies and minds are more adaptable to space conditions and they bring the necessary enthusiasm.