Space: The Final Form of Birth Control?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 3:42PM At the World Science Fiction Convention we had a discussion at one of the parties about barriers to human colonisation of space. One of the concerns I raised was about the ability of humans to have children off Earth. While we have lots of examples of humans adapting to some fairly extreme conditions on the planet, we also have evidence that such evolutionary changes took time and a lot of adaption.
I was even concerned if it was feasible for impregnation to occur in microgravity.
My concern, apparently, is unfounded, the research shows that fertlisation occurs reasonably easily in Mammals, the problem, it seems, is that Mammal embryos are sensitive to gravitational variation and don't divide naturally in simulated micro-gravity.
The full article is over at Wired. Fascinating stuff and something we need to do a lot more research on.
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Reader Comments (2)
More of a comment than a question, but it seems to me that we have a lot of missing data. We know what happens (in general) to mammals in zero gee, and we know a lot about mammals in 1 gee. We have really no idea what fractional gee does. Would, for example, 1/6 gee provide enough directionality for embryos?
Or for that matter, would 1/6 gee provide enough gravity to avoid the bone loss seen in microgravity? We don't know.
True, and all good questions - we're going to need a lot of general research on this stuff before we start sending out colonies.