4 ms·

Great, and rats will become super adapted to space. Then they'll become endemic to any space habitats humanity builds. Terraforming planets sounds more plausibl

• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > and rats will become super adapted to space That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. I suspect, unfortunately, we'd have to iron out some kinks first [1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/
  • littlestymaar 1y ago
    > That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. Animals in their natural habitat and humans (especially with modern healthcare) are responding very differently to environmental pressure: we would need to accept a high infant and child mortality rate to be able to evolve. And the humans having a much longer lifetime and a much smaller amount of descendant means that even without technology we would evolve orders of magnitude slower than rats.
• eru 1y ago
  Rats can be pretty tasty. And: if rats can survive somewhere, it's a pretty small step to make it survivable for humans.