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Space anemia
- viburnum 5y agoEventually people will come to realize that humans don't belong in space.
- detritus 5y agoEventually people will come to realise that humans don't belong above 36°N.
- toss1 5y agoIf we don't get a handle on climate change, that statement will be that humans don't belong below 36°N (and 36°S)...
- detritus 5y agoThat too, which is why we need to get crypto-mining off-planet, stat!
- boringg 5y agoWe are completely off the rails on climate already. Best we can do is mitigate the full extent of the damage but our politicians can't quite pull it together.
- tacocataco 5y agoAnd I'm over here wondering why we don't just migrate with the seasons.
- dwaltrip 5y agoIt’s a science and engineering problem.
- supperburg 5y agoThe most controversial opinion of all.
- hogrider 5y agoWe literally don't but the alternative is dying out here in this planet which is guaranteed to suffer some catastrophe eventually.
- pgt 5y agoAren't blood cells made in our bones? If yes, it seems reasonable to assume that anything which affects bone density would also affect blood cell production, no?
- 420official 5y agoThe post contends that there's an increase in destruction and not a decrease in production.
- delecti 5y agoThings like this amuse me in a way. I'm sure many of us have written code that worked a certain way based on assumptions we didn't realize we were making, or didn't realize could ever be incorrect. Why wouldn't we have evolved with similar "assumptions" based on terrestrial conditions? And I don't think this is a novel observation on my part, but it does make me feel better when I have to refactor code when my assumptions turn out to be wrong.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoHave we run any centrifugal habitat experiments in space on animals to compare? The ISS is just a floating bunch of tubes. If/when Starship becomes viable, a real space station becomes a real possibility. As I read once, solar / cosmic ray radiation shielding isn't about thick lead armor, instead an envelope/shield of air/water vapor that is a 100m thick works better. Is that still the thought on practical radiation shielding in space?
- westcort 5y agoBlood ultimately comes from your bones. Microtubule stress is known to be important to the hematopoietic process. The microtuble-binding drug plinabulin, for example, binds in such a way that helps ameliorate neutropenia. I would guess that these problems would be solved by artificial gravity. Another factor might be increased levels of background radiation, but I would guess that is already accounted for.
- eps 5y agoKinda puts 9 months needed to get to Mars into an interesting perspective. Is there a "fast fix" for treating anemia? Because if humans do get there and land on a surface, this will probably be required.
- bena 5y agoAnemia isn't a disease in and of itself, it's a symptom of something else. You don't treat anemia, you treat what's causing the anemia. From reading the article, we don't know why it's happening. So we don't know how to treat it yet.
- lapetitejort 5y agoAnemia is just one of a myriad of problems humans would face on a Mars trip. My chief concern, and the one that's probably hardest to tease out, would be the psychological stress. There's no escape pod, no truncated emergency schedule, no one to greet you on the other end, and potentially not enough work to keep you busy. These conditions are hard if not impossible to replicate on earth.
- skulk 5y agoIf stress is such a problem, then why not just sedate the passenger? Some forms of sedation can be quickly reversed as a last-ditch effort if there's a problem that the computer/mission control absolutely cannot solve.
- 420official 5y agoAstronauts on the space station work out nearly every day for several hours to stave off atrophy and still have issues. Leaving someone sedated for months in a zero G environment would make the atrophy far worse.
- _tom_ 5y ago> These conditions are hard if not impossible to replicate on earth Really? Where have you been for the last two years? On the other hand, it does fully supports your hypothesis that the psychological stress will be huge.
- DrammBA 5y agoDefinitely makes you wonder how dependent the human body is to gravity. Would be interesting to run these tests on different groups experiencing varying degrees of gravity, on a spinning station perhaps, and see what's the minimum amount of gravity we can get away with while keeping side-effects to a minimum. Long term tests would also be very valuable, 1-2 years.
- bena 5y agoGravity is probably the big one as it is the hardest to approximate in space, but we're likely dependent on a lot of stuff that exists on Earth. We evolved to live on Earth. Earth may not be particularly suited for life, but what we consider life may be particularly suited for Earth.
- chinathrow 5y agoScott Kelly spent a year on the ISS while his twin brother Mark stayed on the ground for comparison studies. https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kelly_(astronaut) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kelly_(astronaut)
- ginko 5y agoI really feel like it's high time we try a rotating wheel space station to see if the artificial gravity fixes problems people develop in zero gravity.
- dwohnitmok 5y agoMy impression is that a rotating wheel space station, while theoretically well within the grasp of current engineering ability, would be extremely expensive given that we've never done it before.
- bjelkeman-again 5y agoThese guys are planning to fly a prototype in 2023. https://orbitalassembly.com/ https://orbitalassembly.com/
- xwdv 5y agoNot a doctor but perhaps we can give astronauts some sort of coagulants.
- kderbyma 5y agoprobably the EM field of the earth causes the blood to polarise in the correct way for iron to work properly