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> "It would still cause me a great deal of thought, but I think my answer now is it would be very difficult to leave my partner, to leave my people, for that am
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
> "It would still cause me a great deal of thought, but I think my answer now is it would be very difficult to leave my partner, to leave my people, for that amount of time, because it would be far more than a year," she said.
If we do long distance human space exploration, it will likely have to be as a community, where people can have long term relationships with pair bonding and sexual relations.
- gwbas1c 2y agoAnd children. I wonder if I could talk my family into this. (Edit, going on a space travel simulation as a family.)
- officeplant 2y agoI might have put my brother out of the airlock at some point in childhood.
- gwbas1c 2y agoAlthough that's funny, the ethical considerations of heterosexual couples on a long space flight are rather important. No one knows what happens if you get pregnant in space. No one knows what happens to such a baby. (No one's admitted to having sex in space, although it's generally suspected to have happened.) (See https://www.acityonmars.com/ https://www.acityonmars.com/ because the book discusses this in more detail.) Birth control isn't 100% effective. If couples are having sex in space, we have to assume that they will get pregnant. I personally don't like the idea of forcing astronauts to get abortions; but in this case, the unknowns of a fetus developing in 0-g makes it quite a conundrum that makes my brain hurt.