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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. This is definitely not as big a problem as some people make it out to be. I mean, imagine this being posted to Ask HN tomorrow:

"Hello, this is the director of NASA. We need two programmers for an upcoming Mars mission. No remote options, sorry, you must actually go to Mars. For reasons, you must be castrated before the mission, among many other preparations. There is a 1/100 chance of death,and a 4/100 chance of return to Earth without landing on Mars. The remaining 95/100 scenarios involve being among the first humans to establish a beachhead for the species on another planet. Please email your résumé to careers@nasa.gov. 20 years of jQuery preferred."

Do you think they would have any trouble filling that spot?

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> Do you think they would have any trouble filling that spot?

Outside of joke candidates? Yes, probably.

I think people here tend to underestimate not only people's willingness to live (see the Challenger accident and the resulting scandal), but also their the importance of fulfilling their basic needs.

Beside, castration doesn't make you uninterested in sex as it's not a purely hormonal driven desire.

This is a perfect example of how screwed up some people's view of sex is. We are talking about PERMINENTLY AND SEVERELY MUTILATING SOMEBODY just so we can dodge having to deal with a basic, healthy aspect of humanity.

That is just plainly, disturbingly, fucked up.

I agree that many people have an inappropriate attitude towards sex. And I am not saying that castration is even a solution in the first place - as the other commenter pointed out, that wouldn't really fix the psychological issues that we're trying to solve. Keeping one person or several people sane and agreeable in a tightly confined chamber for months or years is a hard problem, and not just because of the biological life support systems.

But I was proposing this drastic action as an example of the drastic solutions and risks we could take for these missions. I was not proposing it just to deal with the "problem of sex", I am saying that we can consider crazy actions so we can FREAKING COLONIZE ANOTHER PLANET.

And yes, I see the irony in starting a colonization operation with castrated astronauts. Obviously, it would be a while before the colony was self-supporting for air, water, and food, much less self-populating.

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