
Are Humans Fit for Space? A ‘Herculean’ Study - dsr12
https://www.wired.com/story/are-humans-fit-for-space-a-herculean-study-says-maybe-not/
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varjag
Interesting how our understanding of risks change. I have that Soviet
illustrated pop science book about space travel. Published in 1955 - two years
before Sputnik - the main concern it had was the harm of microgravity. Huge
unknown at the time, there were fears that humans would not able to function
properly in weightlessness, so all the designs of orbital stations were with
centrifugal gravity.

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.)

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jrumbut
Which one? Is it online anywhere?

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anonymfus
>Is it online anywhere?

[http://www.flibustahezeous3.onion/b/167460](http://www.flibustahezeous3.onion/b/167460)

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philwelch
At some point we're going to have rotating, shielded space stations that are
much safer than living in 0g aluminum tubes.

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.

~~~
daenz
We need to figure out how to live together before we live together in space.
Imagine how easy it would be to damage or destroy a relatively flimsy man-made
habitat that everyone literally depends on to survive.

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edgyquant
That isn't going to happen tho. People will be living in space way before they
figure out how to get along because getting along is something that humans
will never do: maybe what ever species we evolve in to might but that is
surely thousands of years in the future.

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ars
The drive to compete is what causes progress, and not getting along is an
inevitable side effect of that.

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.

~~~
ben_w
For these purposes, all we need is to get rid of (or at the very least
properly control) violent tendencies. We don’t need to make it so everyone’s
singing religious rock songs around a fake camp fire to celebrate everyone
getting a participation medal in cooperative soccer.

~~~
ars
But violence is the same as disagreement plus enforcing your opinion.

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.

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ben_w
My bosses have never needed violence to enforce their opinions, and I have
never needed to resort to violence against them when working relationships
have turned sour.

And ridding the action is all that is necessary for us to not die from civil
disorder in a space settlement.

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keiferski
This is only because the (threat of) violence has been outsourced to the
state. Imagine that there is no state monopoly on violence [1] and your boss
pays you directly in food, which you need to survive. Suddenly he refuses to
pay you and you face starvation. Now you’re pretty likely to resort to
violence.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence)

~~~
ben_w
I’ve mostly avoided needing to involve the state, too. My personality is more
of “compete by being better” and I regard violence (and regulatory capture) as
cheating.

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.

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melling
This reminds me of the discussion from 5 years ago after the Virgin Galactic
crash.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540405](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.”

~~~
njarboe
That is what SpaceX is doing. Their manned and unmanned spacecraft systems are
similar now (Falcon 9 + Dragon/Crew Dragon) and will be the same with the next
system (Super Heavy + Starship). Hopefully the Starship will begin unmanned
launches in 2020 as planned and get a good number of launches under its belt
so that manned launches can start soon. With Starship SpaceX won't be
constrained by NASA safety requirements. They will have the NASA approved Crew
Dragon to launch NASA astronauts while they can use the Starship to launch
anyone who decides that the Starship is safe enough for them. There is even a
low probability that Starship will be launching people before Crew Dragon
starts launching people, which would be a real blow for NASA, but would really
point out the problems of a safety first attitude for technological progress.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Safety first attitude? The space shuttle exploded with all crew lost, twice.
Crew dragon exploded on one of its tests. Boeing test went tits up.

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.

~~~
ryanmercer
>Safety first attitude? The space shuttle exploded with all crew lost, twice

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.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Everyone knew the vehicle was wonky and that makes it even more egregious,
it's not an excuse. It should have never stayed in service for as long as it
did.

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.

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LatteLazy
A more interesting question is how can humans be modified to be fit for space
and other planets?

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...

~~~
HenryKissinger
Not realistically, no. For example

> 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.

~~~
zbentley
> 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

That assumes that the 60/40 split had anything at all to do with genetics.

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throwawayhhakdl
Definitely. It would be surprising if genetics affected almost any of these
problems tbh. Much more likely is that the damage arises in a poisson ransom
process or whatever and we have little recourse

~~~
jacobush
Also, IMHO it’s a bit arrogant to believe we know the best traits. Humans are
complicated systems. Maybe halfblind, motion sick and paranoid people are
better at surviving out there than happy contempt people never bothered when
the centrifuge breaks down. Or whatever. I agree that the best brute force
test is to just put a lot of people up there and see what happens. The best
survivors might not be the obvious candidates.

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neurobashing
Beltalowda sabe what inyalowda sa-sa, que si?

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.

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nabla9
Longest continuous period in space is just 1.2 years. Almost all human testing
is yet to be done before we know if the Mars mission is possible without
rotational gravity and heavy and expensive radiation shielding. Nobody knows
how much gravity on Mars surface (0.38 g) or on the Moon surface (0.17g) helps
with the problems and recovery.

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.

~~~
sandworm101
Which is why we should be doing tests in earth orbit at mars gravity (using
rotational/tethered structures).

~~~
nabla9
Not in the budget I'm afraid.

If you start building rotational structures and getting experience, the price
is similar to a spaceship with rotational gravity.

~~~
sandworm101
Two capsules and a rope.

~~~
nabla9
Plus completely new procedures for operating in artificial gravity, safety
measures, prototypes, startup, tests, exercises, docking procedures, ... Soon
we are talking about big money. If you want to move inside capsules you need
to balance and deal with vibrations etc.

~~~
sandworm101
Gemini did tether experiments.

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mirimir
It'd be far more efficient if we could abstract human consciousness from the
meat machinery.

~~~
ben_w
We don’t know how much we don’t know about consciousness works yet.

~~~
mirimir
True.

But then, that's pretty much the same for building starships.

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mensetmanusman
These guys are heroes for putting their bodies throug this much testing for
mankind.

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jeisc
Homo sapiens are not suitable for the purpose of life in space, homo sapiens
may someday create an intelligent life form which will be adapted for a long
life in a zero gravity vacuum and radiation filled environment.

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binichgross
tldr no

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themagician
I doubt humans will ever live beyond earth. I can’t see how it’s possible.
Lack of gravity, lack of pressure, excessive radiation. We’d literally need
antigravity and magical force fields to sustain what we consider “human”.

A few generations off Earth and humans won’t even be humans anymore. We will
become aliens ourselves IF we manage to survive.

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hoorayimhelping
Antigravity is provided by rotating a cylinder along it's longitudinal axis.
It's very simple stuff.

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.

~~~
themagician
Forget costs. Where are you even going to get the materials for that at scale?

Sounds good for a space ship or small space station. How do you make that work
for thousands of people?

~~~
nine_k
Moon is close by, has plenty of sunlight, aluminum and apparently iron ores,
some water. It all is at a reasonable gravity that allows to safety operate on
the surface, but cheaply launch a lot into earth orbit, even using
electromagnetic catapults that don't require a propellant.

