Long periods in zero gravity impair astronauts' immune system. Astronauts experience skin rashes and upper respiratory symptoms from mild to difficult during long-duration spaceflights.
New bacteria in a closed environment with immune-compromised people can be life threatening if they can't get back to the Earth.
Pneumonia in space could kill. Gravity is used to clear lungs. Postural drainage https://www.physio-pedia.com/Postural_Drainage positions help to keep lungs clear. Astronauts drowning in their own fluids one after another would kill long range manned missions for NASA.
It seems easy to prevent a disease found on the ISS from infecting deep space missions; just don't link the two up. Maybe those other missions will develop their own strains in time, but with fewer people coming and leaving it should be easier to keep the spacecraft clean and healthy by starting out that way. Also the ISS has been occupied for 23 years with this issue only becoming apparent recently, so that seems like a pretty good run.
It seems that microgravity itself increases resistance. Bacteria show enhanced growth, increased virulence, higher resistance to antibiotics, and increased biofilm formation in microgravity.
ISS is not special. Strains found on earth did not evolve into drug resistant variants. E. bugandensis is multi-drug resistant resistant on Earth variants too.
You can use quarantine to guard against many virus infections, but bacteria that always gets into space with humans is persistent threat. It's annoying when near Earth, but Mars missions must learn how to deal with emergencies.
It's almost certainly because the microbiome of the station and occupants rarely changes.
You see a similar weakening of the immune system in people who obsessively disinfect their homes. Our immune system needs to be exposed to stuff constantly.
We evolved to fit the environment of our gravity well like a glove. There's a lot that just doesn't work optimally without the envelope of gas exchange, temperature ranges, nutrient inputs, and standard gravity we have on earth.
This is why I find the idea of humans colonizing the galaxy ridiculous. It won't happen unless we change our bodies substantially. We're just animals. Animals fit to the conditions of earth. (But quite honestly, it'll likely be machine intelligences that inherit the stars instead of us with our biological shortcomings.)
Space stations need spin gravity for long duration use.
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:
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.
Yeah if we had some kind of unlimited propulsion systems, the Expanse trajectory would be optimal in so many ways. Forget about transfer orbits - just point at the target and burn.
The Expanse subreddit has a lot of people doing math on such things.
AFAIK the Epstein drive from The Expanse is pretty much at the edge of known physics in terms of being plausible, with a few additional caveats.
The biggest of these is that IRL those ships would have to have large heatsinks. Even if the drive were phenomenally efficient you're going to have a minimum of hundreds of megawatts of waste heat to radiate into space to avoid melting the ship.
The second one is that the drive itself would be a deadly weapon. Those scenes in The Expanse where they fire up the drive near other ships or near space stations? Nope, not unless you want to fry everyone on board with X-rays. You wouldn't fire up a drive anywhere near anything you didn't want to cook with hard radiation.
This last point is known as Jon's Law in space engineering and sci-fi: any sufficiently powerful space drive is also by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
The way I see it, it’s a matter of creating suitable environments for humans in space. For the most part, that’s perfectly achievable even with current technology; the primary bottleneck is quantity of building materials, as human-friendly habitats are by necessity large and complex (space for centrifugal gravity, plus room to move around for mental health, plus space for all the requisite air process facilities and such).
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.
In Star Trek they had gravity plating, so that defined which way is down.
Needless to say, we have no idea yet how that would even be possible :) So, for now, the question is whether we can still do it without such a solution.
I think we are within grasping range of genetic engineering humans to eliminate a lot of the more “interesting” bits of biology, but we are waiting for the commercial requirements to be there before really making things happen.
How do you genetically engineer a resistance to fluid in the lungs, or radiation exposure, or whatever all the other interesting ways to die in space are?
Imagine all the suffering caused by failed attempts, people living their whole life with bad lungs so a privileged few can get a little closer to their space fantasy. I wouldn't want to be born into that experiment
Unfortunately bacteria reproduce and evolve much faster than we can, so for practical purposes we likely can't really genetically engineer our way out of this
It would probably only take one or two generations to adapt, if the offspring dies before reproductive age - evolution is cruel, but it can be effective.
I wonder if a small scale centrifuge (think hospital bed on an office chair) could be useful to flush out the liquid content of the lungs every few hours?
Space is a big issue, to subject the person's whole body to the force in the same direction you'd need it to be at least 2x larger around than the tallest person you're going to send through it which AFAIK isn't possible anywhere on the ISS at the moment. BEAM may have had just enough space before it was converted to a cargo module.
That's why I was suggesting just an office chair and a hospital gurney - to flush out the lungs, you probably don't need to worry about making the whole person experience uniform spin gravity, just shake it out of the lungs!
You could maybe have them kneel on a spinning platform instead but I think you would still want their head on the same side of the rotation axis as their feet for example. Also I wonder how long you'd need to do this to allow the body to properly clear the built up fluids.
Not a biologist so not sure if this is reasonable, but seems it might be cool to compare the evolution of them in space and on earth and then try to understand what stressors caused what adaptations? Maybe it could be an interesting way to understand the evolutionary process more. Either way, I suppose we need to figure this stuff out if we're going to become multiplanetary. Super cool research, here is the paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10960378/pdf/40...
Quite. It sounds like they only got there in the first place because normally astronauts are given half their bodyweight in antibiotics to prevent exactly this from happening. And it did. Except for the drug resistant ones.
Question is: will it mutate into something which is no longer drug resistant? And is there any compelling reason for it to do so?
Of all the strains of bacteria that we might give an opportunity to optimize for space survival, why would we pick something that is a threat to humans.
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."
> Of all the strains of bacteria that we might give an opportunity to optimize for space survival, why would we pick something that is a threat to humans.
These bacteria were not intentionally brought to the ISS, they hitched a ride in/on the crews and colonized the station. From the paper [1]:
We obtained 211 assembled genomes, annotated as E. bugandensis, from the publicly available National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI) GenBank sequence database [20]. Among these genomes, 12 were isolated from three different locations aboard the ISS during the first Flight of the MT-1 mission: four from the Air Control (AC) samples, one from the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED), and seven from the Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC). Additionally, one metagenome-assembled genome (MAG) was recovered from the WHC samples.
Well, we can either pretend it didn't happen and ignore it, or do the opposite and study it well so that one day we understand what makes them so efficient at dealing with X rays and existing drugs.
I mean they're studying the bacteria, not "optimizing them for space travel".
And... the bacteria which are a threat to humans are exactly the ones we are interested in studying, because knowing more about them helps us figure out how to make them be less of a threat to humans.
Perhaps their mechanism for “drug resistance” also resists damage from cosmic rays or similar space adaptation — and the drug resistance is merely a side-effect.
That article is so low on detail! There's basically just this statement:
> Study findings indicate under stress, the ISS isolated strains were mutated and became genetically and functionally distinct compared to their Earth counterparts. The strains were able to viably persist in the ISS over time with a significant abundance. E. bugandensis coexisted with multiple other microorganisms, and in some cases could have helped those organisms survive.
The bacteria changed (how, why, can we see?), they survived in space (plainly the original bacteria also survived long enough to evolve), and possibly adapted/coexisted with other (unnamed) microorganisms.
And then they were brought back to earth to be studied.... That too surely impacts the study of 'bacteria in space'.
I've skimmed this, it makes no sense to me. There are some graphics. There are things like this:
> The ISS genomes exhibited an average of 4568 genes, a significantly higher count than the average of 4416 genes found in the Earth genomes.
Yes, 4568 is a significantly higher count than 4416. But if I took samples of this bacteria from different countries, would I see a similarly significantly different count? I've no idea.. is this even significant without this sort of comparison?
I watched the video too. This really is just a bunch of stock footage, with the same info as the linked NASA article.
Do others find this info to be compelling of anything? It seems that this could be a PR piece of some sort, for 'space science'. I don't get the significance.
No, The whole thing starts when they launch a rocket outside of our atmosphere to collect samples and then it comes back down.
That bacteria basically evolves to consume energy and evolve to different forms of energy. Like at first it is pulling apart minerals in rocks to eventually pulling plastic bonds apart. Eventually it becomes harmless because energy is abundant on Earth and it seems to be intelligent as it evolves very quickly, and it only kills people in the early evolutions (by accident) and doesn't end up killing the scientists in the lab. Or the rest of life on earth.
Imagine that, life in different environments evolving and adapting to fit those environments... Someone should propose a theory about this, they could call it the Theory of Evolution.
The amount of free “capital” (if you will) for maintaining life that you get on Earth is truly enormous. The mind strains to imagine the costs of building and maintaining all that somewhere that has almost none of it, and is very far from Earth.
Other planets are… kind super-duper terrible. Space itself is even worse.
Oh crap, only problem though is the only observable science we've done on this kind of evolution left E.coli to remain as E.coli after 75000 generations (Lenski experiments), leaving no clue about how the simplest known living cell with some 400+ genes (at ~1k bases each roughly speaking) arose, unfortunately.
But let's just call this evolution and pretend that it explains something of the goo-to-you type of evolution most people think about when talking about evolution!
The prefix extra- just means beyond/outside. It lives outside Earth (Terra) so it's extraterrestrial. Though if you said it's not diverged enough to be a separate species that would be a better objection.
> The actual definition of extraterrestrial life is life that did not originate on earth.
While I would not consider something that evolved on a space station around Earth as extraterrestrial, this seems a bit restrictive. This would rule out any life evolving from Earth material on Mars brought by a rover as extraterrestrial even million years later. Also, if we discovered life came from an asteroid, we might have to consider ourselves as extraterrestrial with such a definition.
I'm reading that book right now for the second time. It's even better than The Martian. It's kind of in the same spirit as Delta-V or Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. Sci-fi with some of the details worked out.
Long periods in zero gravity impair astronauts' immune system. Astronauts experience skin rashes and upper respiratory symptoms from mild to difficult during long-duration spaceflights.
New bacteria in a closed environment with immune-compromised people can be life threatening if they can't get back to the Earth.
Pneumonia in space could kill. Gravity is used to clear lungs. Postural drainage https://www.physio-pedia.com/Postural_Drainage positions help to keep lungs clear. Astronauts drowning in their own fluids one after another would kill long range manned missions for NASA.