Are Humans Fit for Space? A ‘Herculean’ Study
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DNA at that point was barely discovered and genetics remained a pariah science under CPSU for years.
(The book also refers to space pilots as astronauts, not cosmonauts, and describes polar caps and channels on Mars. Wild.)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1955-Traveling-in-Space-M-Vasilev-R...
There's also an expanded post-Sputnik edition of it I think.
It appears to be "Into Space" by V. Sevastyanov, however I could only find pictures of the cover by searching for "В космос" В. Севастьянова.
Front: https://images.app.goo.gl/M51TCVL35gabKREH7
Back: https://images.app.goo.gl/bdLAZTJ9iVbm1q596
I've been wondering for years if it was a valuable collector's item, but now due to the magic of Google Lens, I guess it's not.
The real question is whether the effects of subnormal gravity are safe. If not, Mars isn't likely to work out and we'll instead have to build rotating habitats.
Any species that gets along perfectly either has telepathy (or some sort of unfakeable hormonal equivalent), is some kind of hive/single individual, or is stagnant.
You obviously can't get rid of disagreement. And enforcing your opinion is the bedrock of change.
So I don't believe it's possible to get rid of the desire for violence without stagnation.
You can certainly get rid of it in action, but the desire is still there, just suppressed.
And ridding the action is all that is necessary for us to not die from civil disorder in a space settlement.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an anarchist — I agree that state monopoly on violence would be spontaneously recreated if it was removed. I’m also a lot more dubious about the political future than about the technological future.
But, that’s beside the point: I’m saying that we could, plausibly, have social and political structures that suppress our violent tendencies and in so doing make it not ridiculously unsafe to live in a fragile space habitat.
This is not without precedent, as we are less violent now than we were a mere few hundred years ago, and have managed this with little in the way of actual evolution.
That isn't all that far fetched, both the USSR and the United States looked at various options for space weapons. Traditional firearms like the TP-82 carried by the soviets and various options were looked at for new weapons by both sides like the 'Soviet laser pistol' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_laser_pistol
There are some documents out there like "The Meanderings of a Weapon Oriented Mind When Applied in a Vacuum Such as the Moon" (just Google the title, click the link you trust) that show various other types that we know were looked at.
The Soviets even put an autocannon on the Salyut 3, and even fired 20 rounds on orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz#Defense_measures
Technology is not the problem, space economics is.
If you store the station's water supply between the interior and exterior walls, you get a decent amount of shielding that way, and you need the water anyway so it's no extra mass. Alternatively, you could capture a near-earth asteroid and just tunnel your space station into it, using the material inside the asteroid for construction material.
I suspect any program to capture a near-earth asteroid and construct a station with artificial gravity would be approximately the same cost as a Mars mission.
If we are going to Mars in next 30 years it's going to be some other path.
The guest claimed that as part of a CIA project in his teens, he was on mars via teleportation and saw a young Barack Obama there. It's pure unsanity and obviously not fake but it's a hell of a rabbit hole to go down purely for amusement. The sad part is, at least from my impression, the guest really believed that he had been part of these alleged (fantastical) events. Here are some articles about it:
https://www.wired.com/2012/01/obama-mars/
https://www.inverse.com/article/6741-remembering-that-time-t...
The amusing thing is though there are FOIA documents from the CIA that mention Mars as a remote viewing target, for example this one https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
So who knows, maybe the CIA has really had a legitimate interest in Mars at some point, they've taken interest in far stranger things (maybe they took too much of their own drugs from MKUltra).
This is a cool idea. Maybe you could get the whole thing spinning and have really efficient gravity generation due to its mass.
This'd at lest let us know there is life out there with the same problem, right?
I really wonder if that's part of the checklist for 'an odd object in space which we should investigate further' ..
BTW, the recently discovered extra-solar asteroid also had quite some rotation IIRC.
It's really not. It's not a far leap from "aluminium tube in space" to "slightly larger radius aluminium tube in space rotating along its axis surrounded by liquid hydrogen".
We don't need some magic force field to shield against radiation - water has already proven it can do this. Liquid hydrogen is an even better shield and it's something we currently have the technology to use.
As I said. Technologically possible. Plans or the budget are not there.
Even if money falls from the sky tomorrow this kind of stuff takes decades no matter who is doing it, spaceX or NASA.
And this has all been clearly chosen as a development sequence that leads to them being a space trucking company, so those “decades” plural have already start.
But if it takes two more decades, so what? The points, pro and con, still stand. Technologically achievable, but no clear economic reason as yet.
Most of innovation and commercial activity will be focused around lunar habitation and infrastructure, by the looks of it.
First get your liquid hydrogen (and any other similar solutions) into orbit.
I used to be (in the 70s) gung-ho for space colonies, but really the economics simply don't make sense with anything like current drive technologies, or indeed any in the foreseeable future. In my opinion, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that putting intelligent living organisms into space for their lifetimes is simply far, far too difficult.
Who knows if SpaceX will price their launch capabilities at that price though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540405
What I said then still stands:
“ Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly. In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.”
Rarely does a year go by without a rocket crashing or blowing up. If you want to blow up metal fine, but when it comes to people I find your attitude unhelpful.
2 lost out of 135 missions. That's what, a 1.48% failure rate? In a spacecraft that was kinda wonky given things like the fact each shuttle had nearly 3,000 FRCI tiles (each one present a possible failure point).
Launching into space with rockets will always be dangerous, you're strapping your cargo (human or otherwise) to one or more bombs and saying "please blow up in the way we want and not all at once".
Even if someone develops magical anti-gravity, there would always be the chance that it would fail and you'd drop out of the sky with no means of propulsion or that something would go wonky and part of the craft would suddenly implode. Even a space elevator would have risks.
You seem to think 1.5% is an acceptable failure rate? Then what is too high in your mind, 50%?
Imagine we did have large scale space infrastructure/ spacestations / lunar colony, astronauts would have to fly that vehicle several hundred times in their career. No-one would survive till pension. We've had rockets for like 70 years now, it should not be a gamble whether you will survive.
I was curious about the statistical risk here, so I crunched some numbers.
There are approximately 230 million licensed drivers in the United States alone¹, versus approximately 560 astronauts². So let's do the math here:
18 space deaths / 560 astronauts¹ = 3.214%
1,850,000 US automotive deaths² / 230,000,000 US licensed drivers³ = 0.804%
50,000,000 worldwide automotive deaths⁴ / 1,200,000,000 worldwide drivers⁵ = 4.167%
So by US automotive safety standards, space travel has a long ways to go in terms of fatality reduction, whereas by global safety standards space travel is approximately on par.
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¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name
²: https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ (your link), assuming the 37,000 per year is constant
³: https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-dr...
⁴: Assuming - again - a constant 1 million deaths per year over 50 years
⁵: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-world-population-k..., which assumes that there is at least one person capable of driving per registered vehicle in the world; this is almost certainly a drastic underestimation, since it doesn't factor in passengers at all.
Typically astronauts will have less than 10 flights, whereas a driver could have 10,000 trips in a car.
You and I will never leave earth, let alone the solar system. But a colony ship with a 1000 year nuclear battery, a huge computer, a massive sample of biological samples and some raw materials could go to another star system. Once there it could build something that would thrive locally (their gravity, their o2 levels, their radiation and temperatures). Something with a similar enough brain to humans...
> 40 percent of the astronauts who lived on the International Space Station suffered some sort of damage to their eyes, including optic disc edema, globe flattening, and folds in the choroid, the blood-filled layer between the retina and the white sclera.
In order to modify humans not to experience these effects in space, you would need to take those 60 percent of astronauts who did not suffer these effects, have them reproduce, check that their children inherited the right genes (i.e. the genes that insulate them from these effects), wait for those children to grow, train them as astronauts, send them into space, check for any other health effects, bring them back to Earth, make those people who do not experience adverse optical effects have children of their own who are immune to other health effects of exposure to microgravity, check that these children have all the right genes, etc. Rinse and repeat over generations. Forced evolution, basically.
Gene therapy would dramatically expedite the process, but you need to first identify which genes protect astronauts from xyz health effects of long-term exposure to microgravity, and then modify the genes of your astronaut candidates to fit the right genetic profile. You must also avoid nasty side effects. If the procedure you used to tweak the genes of your astronaut to prevent bone density loss, for example, results in the astronaut having a higher likelihood of developing a cancer, you must find another way to protect the astronaut from bone density loss without increasing his likelihood of developing a cancer.
A more "brute force" approach would be to send a large cohort of randomly selected humans into space, say 10,000, have them spend a few months in orbit, monitor them for any adverse health effects, and select those few (if any) who did not experience any side effects to be the parents of a future, genetically enhanced, astronaut corps. While everyone else is crippled to various degrees by their stay in space.
This is equivalent to what Plato advocated. His solution to the problem of people not willingly going along with it was for the state to keep it a secret. He was a bit more of a fascist than most people recall.
That assumes that the 60/40 split had anything at all to do with genetics.
Wouldn't it be better to keep them there? Those that survive/thrive get to breed and rinse and repeat. Keep them in space their entire lives, generation after generation and evolution would produce a space-faring capable group of humans.
In all seriousness, the bit about “a new species of spacefaring hominins” is more-or-less what The Expanse posits. Belters are not Inners, beyond culture.
Simulated Mission where astronauts spends 9 months on ISS, few months in moon (or short visit on earth) then another 9 months on ISS would tell something. Radiation is not as bad as in the Mars trip, so it would be safer than the eventual Mars mission.
If you start building rotational structures and getting experience, the price is similar to a spaceship with rotational gravity.
Validation testing with humans must be achieved somehow.
In the early days of flight people were taking huge risks, many died. But we went from no flight at all, to landing on the Moon in one lifetime. I think it's okay to take risks, as long as everybody involved knows about them and does it voluntarily.
But then, that's pretty much the same for building starships.
A few generations off Earth and humans won’t even be humans anymore. We will become aliens ourselves IF we manage to survive.
Not sure why we need force fields. If you meant radiation shielding, liquid hydrogren or even water is a fine radiation shield. Life evolved on earth in shallow seas before there was an ozone layer.
All of the things you mentioned are possible, but very expensive today. The reason we wouldn't live beyond earth is because people just accept that it's too hard and too magical.
Sounds good for a space ship or small space station. How do you make that work for thousands of people?
That's not antigravity, it's just Coriolis Force.
I thought it is a bit weird, but then I though thata US still uses imperial units, which 100x weirder, so I didn't check further. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯