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One thing you can’t ever change about Mars is its gravity though. All of our biological construction over billions of years was in 1g. Maybe we could thrive fro
by spfzero 5y ago
One thing you can’t ever change about Mars is its gravity though. All of our biological construction over billions of years was in 1g. Maybe we could thrive from birth, for 100 years or so, in one third G, but I’m skeptical. Even more so on an asteroid. Even on Earth, reduced muscle mass is associated with poorer health outcomes. To maintain that in reduced gravity would mean a lot of hours per day in resistance exercise.
- lmm 5y agoGoing from 1g to micro/no-gravity seems like a much more dramatic change than going from 1 to 0.3, so I think that's an argument for going to Mars ahead of asteroids.
- spfzero 5y agoThat’s what I thought I said. Mars bad, asteroids worse.
- inglor_cz 5y agoIt is possible that we will hack our own biology to grow stronger muscles without exercise or at least not as much exercise. Famously, Neanderthals, a very close species, were more muscular than us. It probably translated to higher consumption of food, though; a muscular body needs to eat a lot to maintain itself. That might be a problem on Mars.
- BelenusMordred 5y ago> To maintain that in reduced gravity would mean a lot of hours per day in resistance exercise. There's zero evidence for this at all. We have no experimental data on living in partial gravity, only microgravity(zero-G). It may be perfectly fine, it may be just as bad as no gravity, we truly don't know. There was a module for the ISS that was designed to test this but it got scrapped, a massive waste IMO, as it seems to be one of the most outstanding questions we have right now for space biology. Other big issues like radiation exposure is well understood.