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Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same
- sfly 8y agoHave there been precious studies that look at generic changes in astronauts? This article is great but it feels like everyone mentioned in it is making a lot of statements on an extremely limited sample size.
- djsumdog 8y agoYea, it's pretty rare to find identical twins, and rarer still to have one of them enter a space program. Hopefully we'll see more volunteer for research like this in the future. It is certainly a bad sample size, but it's a start.
- hFAUST 8y agoYeah, so far there were just estimations. Even this is still in a wayI mean my gf's father has a twin and they were mirror image of each other but then in less than 5 years both became so different that you can hardly even tell that they are related in any way. If there will be few more twins to repeat this project then a more generic result could be gathered.
- Gunstig2Snath 8y agoMaybe the reality is that all the science fiction stories have got it wrong all these times: that we have to genetically engineer different humans to traverse interplanetary (and in the far future, interstellar) distances and to live in alien worlds, so that we have less in common with them, physiologically, than we have with, say, the Cro Magnons.
- RobertoG 8y agoThat's the subject of many science fiction stories. Paul McAulie excellent "The mouth of the whale" comes to mind, for instance.
- jacobush 8y agoStephen Baxster IIRC has some weird dolphin like humans living on Titan.
- bognition 8y agoThis is a major plot point in the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
- narag 8y agoI imagine interstellar travel with some kind of Matrix-like hibernation. But all the problems with interplanetary are just a matter of stinginess. Low gravity? Make a 2001 style ring. Radiation? Make a big ass ship with enough isolation. Is that astronomically expensive? Of course. But avoid gravity well. Start building a Moon base with mining facilities, then move to Ceres, and son on. Current Mars fever is a distraction. We have no idea what Mars gravity could do to babies born there. Do parents have the right to raise their children in Mars? Even if they're viable, they might want to come to Earth and find out their bodies won't resist the gravity. What about waiting for animal tests?
- Udo 8y ago> Current Mars fever is a distraction. Yes, but it's a distraction from doing absolutely nothing at all with humans in space. I agree in a saner world we'd have built a Moon base first, and then moved on from there. But it's apparently not how we as a civilization operate. Instead we set lofty and slightly impractical goals. If we meet those goals, we usually take two steps back and wait for a few generations. But if we are not successful, we usually never try again. It's not ideal, but yes, I'd absolutely prefer an ambitious Mars program over nothing at all. And for decades, until recently, nothing at all was where we were comfortable. > We have no idea what Mars gravity could do to babies born there. Do parents have the right to raise their children in Mars? Historically, we have been very bad at predicting these things, and we usually mispredicted on the side of doom. Yes, there will be a physiological impact, not just on babies, on everybody living there. However, there is no reason as such to assume babies in particular would be unviable there. Today, parents can and regularly do make decisions about their children's mental and physical health that are absolutely known to be detrimental. For better or worse, we generally accept that children are brought up completely powerless over their lifestyle, their healthcare, their economic situation, their education, their belief system... Compared to that settling on another world with unknown dangers seems at least on par. I'd wager that a child born on Mars today is way more likely to die of things other than gravity or the lack thereof. We already have animal test data in microgravity.
- whatshisface 8y ago
- laHiesh1 8y agoI think it's more likely that we would peruse spinning space habitats to simulate gravity regardless of whether zero gravity has long term and irreversible negative effects on the human body. I don't think it'll be quite necessary to genetically modify anyone.
- djsumdog 8y agoThe Expanse series kinda touches on this. In those fictional books, those raised in space (Belters, Luna, etc.) are often taller being raised in lower gravity. Kim Stanley Robinson also kinda hits on this describing people who are raised on Mars. I highly recommend the Mars trilogy; best Sci-Fi I've ever read.
- arethuza 8y agoFor interstellar distances I'd go with Greg Egan's Diaspora and Accelerando by Charlie Stross and assume that interstellar distances could only be achieved with uploaded minds - bags of meat and fluid being far too big, slow and delicate for the energies and distances involved.
- inflatableDodo 8y ago>Drawing his own blood in zero gravity, for example, was a familiar routine. “I’ve had a couple spills in my time,” Mr. Kelly said. “You just reach out and grab the blobs of blood.” That paragraph stopped me short. It reads like something from a Heinlein novel.
- Klathmon 8y agoI absolutely love hearing stories from astronauts about how quickly they adapt to microgravity and how easy it is to forget when they come back. Things like stories of them suddenly letting go of stuff they are holding on earth and expecting it to float there, or reaching out to grab on to a wall to stop themselves while walking down a hallway.
- taneq 8y agoI've heard a couple of similar stories from people who spend a lot of time in VR and forget that the rules don't transfer back. One guy smacked his head into the fridge door trying to look inside it because he forgot that he would actually collide with the door.
- whatshisface 8y agoI'm really not looking forwards to VR driving games, then.
- lqet 8y agoI heavily played GTA: Vice City during the time I learned how to drive. After I got my driver's licence, I remember one instance where I clearly noticed how my brain drifted into GTA mode while I was driving through town. I had to actively remember myself that this is a real environment and that I cannot just drive over the street lamp post without anything happening. I talked to a classmate about this and he had had a similar experience, but with Mafia (which had a very realistic car handling, you could even activate an expert mode where you had to shift manually iirc). I stopped playing GTA for a while after that.
- ChlorophZek 8y agoThe article is missing information about how the preflight genetic and other data compared between these putatively "identical" twins. How genetically identical were they at the start of the study? Missing too is the within subject comparison of the earthbound twin's own pre and post flight data, which the study presumably collected too.
- TheBeardKing 8y agoI guess outline.com doesn't work on NYT any more. Copy/paste here?
- imglorp 8y agoJust delete all your nyt cookies.
- brootstrap 8y agobrilliant, does this work? It makes sense, great little hack
- imglorp 8y agoFor a while...reapply as needed. That said, NYT is one of my top news sites and I feel it's worth subscribing to support their traditional journalism model.
- pgrote 8y agohttp://archive.is/6N9jR http://archive.is/6N9jR
- duxup 8y agoDo what you got to do, but I'd like to take a moment to say I signed up for an online subscription. Journalism is important and I'm ok with a couple bucks a month to support it.
- mises 8y agoI would rather not support the New York Times. I find their coverage to be overtly biased, and don't think that's worth giving money to. I think the Wall Street Journal is closest to center: reporting leans left; editorials lean right.
- duxup 8y agoTo each their own. I've found WSJ is fine, it gets a little simplistic at times where I find it a bit disingenuous. Too many "here's a one line bar graph that shows a thing going up 10 years after de/regulation" like that's not evidence of anything.... but that's hardly unique among news these days. Outside of what I think are the obviously truly "biased" groups, I don't perceive it as just left or right all the time. I think there's a lot of room to cover a story various ways and not necessarily be "biased". But I certainly see how folks think that way, it does worry me though, even on HN you'll see "here's 3 negative sounding articles about this topic... that reporter is biased". Like that's not necessarily biased man...
- everyone 8y agoHis moustache fell off.
- winseybash 8y agoIt's his twin brother, Mark, who has the moustache: https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/mark-scott-kelly-nasa-ht-jc-190410_hpMain_16x9_1600.jpg https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/mark-scott-kelly-nasa-ht-jc-...
- everyone 8y agowinseybash doesnt get jokes lol
- DJBunnies 8y agoI would expect a body to change after a year of any circumstance.
- smeyer 8y agoThe point is that it changed in ways different to his twin's body, and some of those changes even reverted once he was back on earth for a while. It's pretty unlikely that this is all just an anomaly and the regular changes of a body over the course of a year independent of the fact he was in space.
- VyseofArcadia 8y agoI read his memoir when it first came out. It's mentioned briefly in the NYT article, but I highly recommend giving it a read.