Yesterday’s post highlighted the dangers involved in low-Earth orbit travel, while another earlier posting mentioned a book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith who wrote “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?“
Well, the evidence continues to build on the difficulty of space travel and the need for greater study. This time its a report from The Guy Foundation in England, established by Geoffrey and Kate Guy to “facilitate exploration into quantum effects in biology and the role it could play in advancing medicine.” The 94-page report is titled The Health Hazards of Space Travel: Novel Insights from Quantum Biology.
You can read it this weekend at your leisure, but the bottom line is stated succinctly in the executive summary, further summarized here:
- ...space travel seems likely to induce accelerated ageing in astronauts…associated with the disruption of cellular bioenergetics which could have other, perhaps more worrying health consequences.
- …complex long-lived organisms, such as humans, will not be able to adapt to the unnatural environment of space, while shorter-lived, rapidly evolving ones, such as bacteria will.
- At this stage, the following factors seem particularly significant…
- zero gravity…;
- {i}ncreased radiation…;
- [t]he lack of a magnetic field…; and
- [a] lack of near-infrared radiation.
- Further experiments are urgently needed to improve our understanding of the underlying causes of space-induced ill health, and potential approaches to mitigate it.
The bottom line is that if we want to spread more than bacteria throughout the solar system and beyond, we need to get to work on these issues.
I am hoping Mr. Musk and friends are reading this before jumping off a cliff (or Earth in this case) with Mars-bound Starships. In fact, it may encourage Mr. Musk to use some of his funds to study these issues rather than play games with politics here are Earth. The $47 billion spent on Twitter would have gone a long way to help Mr. Musk achieve his dream of a Mars-based society, if that really is his dream.
Our Awesome Universe 