Drug resistant bacteria found on ISS mutating to become functionally distinct

As far as living on other planets goes: there is gravity. What we don't know is how much gravity we need. We could answer this with a space station with spin gravity by trying different rotational velocities and monitoring the health effects.

The Moon has about 1/6 Earth gravity. Is that enough? We don't know. Mars has a little over 1/3.

Long duration space flight probably needs spin gravity too. There are two ways to do it. One is a torus shaped spacecraft. The other is two spacecraft and a tether where once they insert themselves into their cruise transfer orbit they link, extend the tether, and start orbiting each other in a spin configuration. People could go between the ships if necessary by following the tether, though this would probably only be done when strictly necessary due to the risks.

There's a calculator online for spin gravity based on what we currently know about human tolerance for the Coriolis effect:

https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/

It's not too bad. There are various workable sweet spots. Playing around I find one at 20 meter radius and 0.66g (2/3) gravity. It looks like you can't get much smaller than 15 meters diameter without ill effects, but we actually don't know. We need to try this to see what humans can actually adjust to.

The simplest test short of a centrifugal station would be to put two capsules or Starships in orbit and tether them and experiment with different tether lengths and rotational velocities.

Edit: actually there's a third way to do gravity on long duration flights. If you watched/read The Expanse you saw it. Accelerate to the midpoint, flip, decelerate to the destination. Unfortunately that requires insane physicsts' nightmare propulsion systems like the fusion engines in The Expanse that we do not have and won't have for the foreseeable future unless there are some crazy fusion breakthroughs.

So this is another area where bringing down cost of pound to orbit is highly impactful. If that becomes cheap, it becomes feasible to build in orbit crafts (orbital stations, ships, etc) sufficiently large to support human-friendly habitats. Should Starship+Superheavy succeed, it will be a significant step forward in this regard since it can put the interior volume of the ISS in orbit in a single launch, and perhaps in a few decades use of resources mined from asteroids could become a consideration.

I guess the answer could be that the sideways motion will drive you crazy due to coriolis forces? See 6 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxeMoaxUpWk

But they can just substitute windows with monitors that compensate for the view.

Incidentally, the viewscreens on Star Trek etc. always had the ship right side up, so they probably compensated exactly in this way :)

Question is: will it mutate into something which is no longer drug resistant? And is there any compelling reason for it to do so?

Space travel involves humans in an inescapable environment, without access to many medical therapies, and with potentially compromises immune systems! [0]

Seems like a strange choice.

Future news: "Drug resistant bacteria impossible to purge from Starship Mars Flyby 1. Sick astronauts turn strange color, sweat strange substance. Want to come home, but have 90% of their journey ahead. Fearing their novel infection, NASA tells them "Don't come back!", sends them erroneous course corrections. Bacteria researchers from 2024 experiment, jubilant at this dramatic evidence of their success, request more funding and astronauts."

[0] https://www.popsci.com/science/space-immune-system-t-cell-ge...

Other planets are… kind super-duper terrible. Space itself is even worse.

2. That's your own interpretation of the word. The actual definition of extraterrestrial life is life that did not originate on earth.