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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)
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday May 31 2018, @06:27PM (4 children)
> 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.
Researchers from the "Have sex standing to avoid pregnancy" school ?
Seriously a dumb statement. Gravity is at most a marginal parameter in getting pregnant, and definitely something third-trimester women would love not having to deal with (including the 7-month pregnant girl still doing better than me at the climbing gym). The baby is just floating around anyway, and some weird women deliver in the not-so-G environment of a pool.
Raising a kid in low gravity is likely to be a major change, because of the lack of stress on the bones. But the pregnancy itself, I don't buy it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @04:28PM (3 children)
>Gravity is at most a marginal parameter in getting pregnant
Oddly enough, that seems to be false. Lots of species appear to have difficulty reprodcing in orbit. As far as I know we're not really sure *why* since your orientation with respect to gravity appears to have no real effect, but that's what the experiments show. And even when conception is successful, the odds are much worse that it will proceed all the way to a healthy birth.
At least some of that is probably due to the high-radiation environment, but from what I've heard it's believed that microgravity itself plays a roll as well. My own completely unsubstantiated guess where conception is concerned, is that gravity might be used as a navigational aid by sperm - i.e. they use it like a compass to help them maintain a straight(ish) path while swimming, and end up more likely to swim in circles without it. It's also possible that gravity plays a role in maintaining the proper hormonal balances, etc. in the female's body during gestation, and thus its absence creates a less hospitable environment. We also know that being in orbit can have an effect on even single-celled organisms - salmonella and others become hyperactive in orbit. So even at a cellular level gravity appears to have an effect. It may be that that hyper-virulence is partially responsible for reproductive problems as well: an embryo still has to fight off infection even if (in mammals), it's the mother's immune system doing most of the work. Boost the virulence of pathogens, and you tilt the playing field against the developing embryo.
At any rate, at present I haven't heard of any hard data to as to how much of the effect is due to gravity versus radiation, so it's pretty much all speculation until we either do some orbital centrifuge experiments. If reproduction works substantially better in a centrifuge, we'd know at least some level of "gravity" is probably important, and could experiment further to determine the reproductive effectiveness vs. acceleration curve. If it doesn't then we know... not a whole lot really, as a centrifuge introduces some additional confounding factors.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 01 2018, @05:16PM (2 children)
Even if what you say is correct and not overblown or undertested, Mars is not the ISS, it has a third of the Earth's gravity.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 01 2018, @05:57PM (1 child)
Absolutely. I'm all for giving it a shot, especially since any orbital experiments would have to be on humans to have any certainty of being relevant to humans, and it'd be unethical to do such experiments knowing that the radiation would cause problems regardless. Better to collect the data as a side effect of people doing other things for unrelated reasons.
I was mostly pointing out that gravity does seem to play a roll, despite common sense to the contrary. In the end it will all come down to the shape of the reproduction-versus-acceleration curve - my money would be on getting most the benefit from a fraction of the gravity, and that even the Moon would provide sufficient acceleration for reproduction to be successful enough (even on Earth, the majority of conceptions result in spontaneous abortion before the mother is even aware she's pregnant).
And even if it turns out you do need near-Earth gravity for a high pregnancy success rate, centrifugal "maternity wards" would almost certainly solve the problem.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 01 2018, @06:38PM
"This time she's pregnant for sure, she's throwing up all over the place"
"Jim, we know you're eager to be a dad, and happy you got laid twenty minutes ago, but maybe you should slow down the centrifuge a bit before she passes out."