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posted by martyb on Thursday May 31 2018, @09:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-out-of-this-world! dept.

Sex on Mars is going to be risky, but it could create a new human subspecies

In a new research paper published in Futures, an international team of scientists examines the challenges of reproduction on the Martian surface. It's a risky proposition, but if humans succeed in conceiving, carrying, and birthing offspring on another world it might actually be the start of a new species.

In the paper, the researchers tackle a huge number of potential problems that could crop up when humans are finally ready to rear young on Mars. The first and most obvious hurdle is the low gravity environment, which could pose a serious threat to the conception and pregnancy processes that seem so simple here on Earth.

[...] The paper also examines the inherent challenges of bolstering the numbers of a small colony of settlers on the planet. The concept of "love" might have to take a back seat to pure survival, with men and women being paired up by their biology rather than emotion. Additionally, some individuals may never be allowed to have children due to undesirable traits that are a risk to the colony as a whole.

In a somewhat scary aside, the researchers also note that editing the genes of future Mars babies might be an easy way to increase the prospects of survival.

Also at Live Science.

Biological and social challenges of human reproduction in a long-term Mars base (DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2018.04.006) (DX)

Related: Space colonization and suffering risks: Reassessing the "maxipok rule" (DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2018.04.008) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday May 31 2018, @12:00PM (9 children)

    by looorg (578) on Thursday May 31 2018, @12:00PM (#686684)

    I'm sure there will be some adaptation over time, nature tends to find a way and all that -- even on a red barren desert planet.
      Interesting how they mention that "love" as a concept might have to take a step back considering that the notion of romantic love is fairly new and it wasn't that long ago that people married for completely different reasons then love but eventually just learned to tolerate each other.
      If nothing else I saw the old documentary about Mars with Arnold called Total Recall and they had mutants there with three tits so it might not be a total loss either way ...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:08PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:08PM (#686711)

    I am certain that people fell inlove and had crushes throughout human history.
    the fact that we now tie that with marriage is new, yes.
    when they say "reproduction" may be separated from "love", what they mean is that it may not be ok to procreate with the person you love, which is very different from "marriage is unrelated to love". because what routinely happened in the past was that you were married to someone, stable marriage everybody happy, but you had children with someone else, whom you were inlove with; this may have been in secret or common knowledge, it doesn't matter.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:19PM (4 children)

      by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:19PM (#686717) Homepage Journal

      Love != Marriage?

      One always hears this, but is it really true? There is a reason for the emotional attraction that members of one gender feel for members of the other - that did not evolve for no reason, but as a driver for reproduction. While I am not an anthropologist, it seems likely that this is the original connection, and drove the original partnerships. The fact that some human societies later divorced this connection, with forced marriages - frankly, that seems more like an aberration. Our history as a species does not consist solely of the past several hundred years.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:33PM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:33PM (#686837) Journal

        Sorry, but not every society is structured the same way. There are advantages to other structures, as well as costs. Traditionally one alternative is that women lived with the families, and loved outside them. The mother's brother was quite different in importance than the father's brother. He was often more important than the father (who may well have been uncertain).

        This kind of society is called (variously) matri-local or clan. The kids took the name of the family they were born into. Traditional Christianity was very destructive to this kind of society, so I don't know if any are still around. (I'm no anthropologist.) Existing reports seem to say that people were about as happy living that way as living in an extended patriarchal family, and happier (socially) than those living in a nuclear family. But the traditional forms are a lot less mobile.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Weasley on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:52PM

          by Weasley (6421) on Thursday May 31 2018, @05:52PM (#686847)

          I think bradley's point was that love is an evolution created mechanism for social bonding to facilitate the long maturation process of humans that existed long before the concept of marriage. It is an animal instinct.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @09:30PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @09:30PM (#686937)

        Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.

        This I tell you, brother. You can't have one without the other.

        Love and marriage. Love and marriage. It's an institute you can't disparage.

        Ask the local gentry. And they will say it's elementary.

        Try, try, try to separate them. It's an illusion. Try, try, try and you will only come to this conclusion.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 31 2018, @10:12PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Thursday May 31 2018, @10:12PM (#686954)

        Love != Marriage?

        One always hears this, but is it really true?

        Historically, absolutely.

        Take, for instance, the Biblical law that if you rape an unmarried woman, you have to buy off her father and marry her, and you can't divorce her. I highly doubt the rapist loved his victim, since people don't as a rule harm people they love, and I doubt even more that the woman in question is happy with this arrangement either and any love that conceivably develops would be more the result of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else.

        Or consider the long history of arranged marriages, where the conversation could really go something like "Mary, this is Joseph. Joseph, this is Mary." 15 minutes later: "You may now kiss the bride."

        The main evolutionary advantage of emotional partnership as opposed to purely sexual partnership is that you have 2 adults invested in the upbringing of any children rather than just 1. But it was and still is not uncommon for those emotional partnerships to not match the actual parentage of said children, or to have unrelated adults who happened to be around doing the child-rearing.

        The real aberration is that in most of the world today a single marital relationship is expected to provide sexual exclusivity, emotional closeness, romantic love, economic partnership, child-rearing partnership, etc. Both historically and today, it's been quite common for all of those to be split up in various ways.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:09PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 31 2018, @01:09PM (#686713) Journal

    and they had mutants there with three tits so ...

    Hush, you fool!

    If TMB hears that, S/N will lose probably the only mind still capable of withstanding Perl without being damaged more than it already is.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:59PM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:59PM (#686792) Homepage
      Too late - oh no!!!!

      (o)(o)(o)
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01 2018, @05:54PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01 2018, @05:54PM (#687355)

        "I wish I had three hands." -- Him of little imagination.