Not necessarily.....................
Posted on 05/30/2018 9:29:30 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Mars will be a hard place to raise the children necessary to sustain a permanent colony there. And according to a new paper published in the June issue of the journal Futures, conceiving kids on Mars will be even harder.
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The biological challenges of rearing Mars babies are easy enough to wrap one's head around. For starters, Mars' atmosphere is about 1 percent as thick as Earth's, meaning the planet is hit by a lot more solar radiation than humans are currently used to. NASA studies have shown that radiation exposure might damage astronauts' brain cells and increase their risk of developing cancer. (More to the point of this new paper, it can also severely reduce sperm count.)
The effects of microgravity are also concerning. Mars' gravitational pull is about one-third as strong as Earth's, and that means less pressure and stress are exerted on astronauts' bodies. Nice as that sounds, it's not how human bodies have adapted to function; previous studies of microgravity have shown that astronauts experience vision loss, dehydration, accelerated muscle and bone deterioration, significantly reduced heart rates and even a weakened immune response when living in sub-Earth gravity.
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"The method of CRISPR makes possible adaptive genetic engineering," the authors wrote. "We should consider the idea of genetic human enhancement before and during that mission."
Doing so could literally result in a "new kind of human species" with a nature better suited for life on Mars, the authors wrote. Such human-made Martians could give a future colony its best shot at survival, even as a biological and moral gulf widens between them and their Earthling ancestors. Mars may still not be the kind of place to raise your kids — but it might become a serviceable place to raise Martians.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Not necessarily.....................
This will be ridiculously expensive. Instead, how about spending money on developing synths. These robots could do necessary tasks, including setting up factories to produce more of them.
The song “Rocket Man” sums it up. When it’s just a job, it’s nothing special. And once enabled to see the risks and benefits, and it is just routine, you’d have to pay a person a LOT of money to do it. And that might not even be enough.
There was an old Firesign Theater skit about the government wanting families to colonize space. Their ad went something like this: Godlike voice: “We’re looking for families who want to live in tubes and press buttons.”
Yep. It’s pretty obvious that very soon there will be no need to send human beings out there other than to make room for other human beings here.
And if the women do become unsexy, well, there's always the robots!
The entire point of space exploration needs to be to find water worlds.
They need to build underground.
Yes.
EXPLORATION ALWAYS IS
Duh...
OK, I don't want this guy in charge of the colony.
it will be done if they are beneficial
leave it to the private sector to make them better, faster, and cheaper
There’s no air to breathe, but the author is worried about getting a sunburn.
Mars needs to be smacked with an asteroid to get the outer crust oscillation against the inner core started again, so that it develops a magnetic field.
Then, smash another asteroid with a lot of water, and start oxygen generators
They did that in a movie once. If it saves the life of one triple-breasted midget it is worth it.
If you need to be underground, what's the advantage of living on Mars, rather than in space in a hollowed-out asteroid? In the asteroid you could live in an internal centrifuge to mimic full Earth gravity.
Questions needed to be answered:
1. Can mars be Tara formed from rock
2. Can humans survive while Tara forming is in progress
3. How long to Tara form
4. What is the cost to transform mars into a livable colony
Mars doesn't have a microgravity. It has gravity-lite.
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