Audi adults. If you're listening to this show with kids, we just wanted to give you a heads up that we're talking about the birds and the bees today, So decide for yourself if it's time to switch to a different episode of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Giving birth is a truly profound and beautiful experience, but also it really sucks and it's super dangerous. According to UNIEF, there were two hundred and eighty seven thousand maternal deaths in
twenty twenty. That's down from four hundred and forty seven thousand deaths in two thousand, so that's great news, But labor and delivery remain super dangerous. Not all places are equally dangerous, though, A lot of danger is removed when you have access to nearby healthcare, which is why I find myself a little concerned when Elon Musk proposes we send one million people to Mars in the next thirty years. No humans will have ever been quite so far away
from a hospital. And on top of that, Mars is a much harsher environment than Earth, for reasons we'll discuss today. The Martian environment could pose a lot of additional challenges for pregnant moms and their babies. Can moms survived this process and what about their babies? So today we're talking about conception, pregnancy, labor, and subsequent child development in space. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've continued in my family's tradition of being born in one continent, raised in a second, and having a child on a third.
Oh wow, go through the Where did you come from?
I was born in Israel, which technically part of a raised in America, and one of my children was born in Switzerland near the particle collider.
That is very cool. I have no crazy travel stuff like that. I was born in New Jersey, raised in Ohio. Then I went kind of all over the US for a while, but I've pretty much lived on this continent. It's exciting. Oh yeah, and I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and mostly stay here.
All right. Well, then my question for you today, Kelly is where is the strangest place you've ever heard of a baby being born?
So in Antarctica. There's this slice of Antarctica that has three overlapping land claims. So the UK, Chile, and Argentina all claim this chunk of Antarctica, and for geopolitical reasons, there's it seems this desire to have babies on this land chunk, so that if we do ever go back, Yeah,
this is a great story. So if we do ever go back to an era where sort of history matters, and you could say, well, like, yes, there's overlap claims, but we were here doing science and having babies and and so I don't remember which it was, either Argentina or Chile. They flew a pregnant woman out to the middle of nowhere so that she could have a baby.
Who agrees to that? Who agrees to have your birth be part of like geopolitical discussions.
I mean, it's an interesting birth story, but I don't know. And then the other nation to one up them, had a baby conceived and born on their research base, and so there's this like wit zach and I call it counter stork technology or something like instead of yeah and so so, yeah, I think that is the weirdest birth baby birth story I have heard, what about you?
Oh my gosh, that totally tops it.
Now.
I mean I've heard of babies born like in transit in the ocean, like you know, between continents. But I was wondering if babies had ever been born under really difficult circumstances like that. But I have to question, like the moms, like are they really nationalistic? They really want to play a role in these arguments between countries, like literally being upon in global diplomacy. That's crazy to me.
I mean, I I feel like the dad's decisions could have been you know, part of it too. But but yeah, no, I think parents, you know, having kids as part of geopolitical one upmanship is not amazing, is it, TMI. We can delete this if it is to mention that my son was born on Halloween and they were little cat ears over the like blanket on my knees when I was giving birth to my baby because the doctor had dressed up as a cat, and it was a weird experience.
That's not to you, that's awesome.
Yeah, So, you know, I think pregnancy is always a little bit weird, but sometimes it's just weirder than other times.
Well, here's hoping that all of your pregnancies are smooth sailing and do not involve diplomats arguing outside.
So geopolitics, complic and other things that can complicate life are being a difficult environments when you need to give birth, and there's maybe no environment more difficult than space. And today we are tackling a question from a listener we got that was inspired by the episode where we interviewed Erica Nezvold, and here is the question.
Now, Hi, Daniel, ye Kelly. My name is Glenn Rosas. During your recent interview with Eric and Neswold, a question occurred to me. Now, we cannot be an air planetary species, and let's we're able to have babies up there, and we know from our experience on the ISS that micro gravity is not good for human physiology in the long term. So where can babies safely just date and womb away from Earth? Thank you so very much for everything you do.
Well, Kelly. This seems like a pretty basic question about space exploration because I imagine we're not just going to send like one generation of astronauts to colonize the Solio system. Those folks are going to want to have kids, and
we're going to want to perpetuate the species. You know, Elon Musk is always talking about making us multiplanetary, that involves having kids off Earth, right, So I hope that we have like a really solid, well researched answer to this because everybody's rushing into space, right.
Well, I think you can explore space without us having the answer to this question, no problem. And Elon Musk would argue that you could just send something like a million people to space. You don't have to worry about reproduction initially, you can get the whole thing up and going. And he's doing his best to create a million babies to send to Mars. He's still got a little bit
of a way to go, but he's getting there. But you know, I do think that before we send people to settle Space, even if you send a million people there, I've met humans, there's going to be babies, whether you plan on them or not.
A million people are going to want to entertain themselves and making babies. This part of that.
Yes, you told me that, Katrina. Let you know once that in Antarctica there is a lot of these sorts of activities as a way to pass time. Imagine that human behavior will follow us to these other isolated and confined environments.
Yes, because they actually mandate your schedule in that Antarctic Research Station. It's eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and then you have eight hours like you gotta do something. And there's only so many times you can watch the same set of DVDs that are down there. You know, they don't have internet streaming, and so, yeah, people entertain each other. That's right, you know what I mean.
That's right. Card games get boring, you gotta do something else.
So we should know the answer to this question. We should understand whether this is something humans can safely do off Earth, and then we should figure out like how we can figure it out. If we don't have the answer.
I would absolutely agree with you, and I think that for a lot of folks, and for me in particular, when we started researching a city on Mars, we didn't know actually where we stand in terms of our understanding of how reproduction works in space. So let's back up a bit here and ask our audience what do they know? What do they think? Is it safe for humans to have babies on Mars?
I would say main obstacles are psychological, medical, gravitational and radiation exposure is also a problem.
If it's barely safe to have humans on Mars right now, grown adults who are trained to do it. Having babies on Mars doesn't seem super safe or ethical.
Yeah, I think that should be perfectly safe.
My bed is yes, but you may have higher rates of cancers and other bone density issues.
I'm gonna say that you'd be lucky if your children survive the harsh climates and thin atmosphepere that doesn't have breathable air and that has low gravity.
On the surface.
It's not safe for humans to have babies on Mars because it's not safe for all humans to have babies on Earth.
I don't see any reason why not. Yes, it would be dangerous. However, we should have developed a safe as it can be environment for humans to live anyway. So what difference does it make if that human is a little one.
Yeah?
Maybe, I think given that Mars is full of kind of toxic things like heavy metals and other contaminants in the soil, it might be really difficult to bring a child into the world that was healthy.
The more different the Mars environment is from the Earth environment, more likely it is that our offspring will be different. I think we will have to use the precautionary principle and play it safe.
No, it is not safe for humans to have Martian babies.
We are very much custom built for this planet and likely with pore adaptability for another planet.
Of course, it's dangerous for a woman to give birth on Mars.
Mars wants to kill you.
I'm not really sure that it's safe to have babies on Earth. Seem to need an entire hospital at your disposal to be able to do it here. The lower gravity environment may have fit the bones. Other than that, I'm in a.
Lost Ultimately, it probably will prove to be safe. Radiation damage to the parents would be important, and maybe at some point we can re engineer our genes to withstand more radiation. After all, cockroaches do that quite well. Maybe we can borrow their genes.
So a lot of skepticism here. Yeah, folks have been reading your book and listening to us talk about the crazy dangers and the environment of space and realizing how culshy we have it actually here on Earth. Giving birth in Antarctica is probably really safe and comfortable compared to anywhere else in this Solar system.
That's true. But you know, there were also some folks who who felt pretty confident that we would be able to have babies on Mars, no problem. And I should say, right at the beginning, it's totally possible. They're right, We really just don't know. And at the beginning of the space Age, there were a bunch of medical doctors who were concerned that just sending humans up into space we would die. Like if you were essentially in free fall experience and no gravity, you wouldn't be able to swallow,
you'd never be able to eat. It would just be a total non starter. So there is a long history of worrying about things that don't end up being a problem. But I think we have pretty good reason to suspect that some of these things will be problems.
You know, sometimes these problems go away only because you do worry about them. I mean, my Jewish heritage tells me that worrying solves problems, and so, you know, don't be down on people worrying, but less joky. I think it's important to remember that our perspective is constantly shifting, and that it's really hard to put yourself in the
minds of people who knew less about the universe. You know, folks who thought maybe there was life on Mars and who didn't know what space was like because it was before the era of space exploration, and so it's easy to look back on those folks and be like, ha ha, what a bunch of goofs. But remember they really didn't know, And people are going to look back on us in one hundred years and be like, ha ha, what a bunch of goofs. They didn't know xyz. But you know, everybody's just doing their best.
Yeah. Well, and I think a lot of your current experiences do color the way you look either forward or back. You know, like if we were a couple hundred years in the past, anywhere on Earth where someone got pregnant, there'd be a pretty good chance that mom or the baby would die, Like you would be more concerned about it.
But now, at least if you live in the United States, for most people in good areas where there's affordable well, I don't know if there's a lot of affordable healthcare in the US, but where you can access healthcare, you know, you expect that you're going to survive through labor. But that's not even true in a lot of different places
in the world. And so, you know, I think a lot of us don't hear about mothers and children dying often, though of course it still happens, but maybe that makes us think it'll be easier just about anywhere we go.
All right, So we do have some experience in space, right, We've been sending people to space for fifty years or so and even living in space on space stations. What do we know from our experience in space stations about women's bodies and conception and reproduction in.
Space, Well, not a ton. So only fifteen percent of the people who have ever been to space have been women, which, like that percentage surprises me. So we've sent something like seven hundred people to space, so that's still like a fairly large number of individuals and a decent number of women. But they've all been, you know, up there for different amounts of time, doing different kinds of missions, so the
data from all of them isn't necessarily super comparable. And the longest consecutive stay by a woman is three hundred and twenty eight days by Christina Koch. No other woman has stayed up for even a year up until this point, and so we don't have a lot of data on adult women bodies. We do know that bodies in general tend to start falling apart when you're in free fall,
so you're experiencing something like no gravity. And as we've talked about on other episodes, muscles and bones degrade, visions, vision degrades, and we think all these problems are associated with low gravity.
And do we know, even from our limited data, if it affects women differently, Like obviously women's and men's bodies on average are different. Does freefall affect them differently?
That is a great question. It is possible that someone has done that study, and I haven't seen it. I didn't when I was reading like various reviews, I didn't see a lot of you know, people saying things like and bone atrophy is way worse for women or way worse for men. So it's possible we know that, but I don't know.
And the effects that we do know about which ones are maybe most relevant for pregnancy and conception and birth and that kind of stuff.
I think the data related to muscles and bones are particularly concerning so astronauts in general, not necessarily just women, but the entire pool of astronauts that have been studied on this question lose one percent of the bone density in their hip per month. You know, when labor kicks in and you're hoping that your hips are not going
to break like that sounds pretty scary. There's also been a study where they sent rodents to space when they were pregnant, and then they brought them back down to Earth, and those rodents had to do a certain type of contraction twice as much, And the thought was that their muscles degraded in space, so the kind of muscles that they needed for contractions just weren't as strong as they should be. So they were in labor for a lot longer. And any of the women out there who have been
in labor, they can all agree with me. You don't want that to last any longer than it has to, especially if you didn't request the epidural soon enough and you do it naturally.
So the effects in the human body are primarily muscle loss, which is going to impact going into labor. Bone loss, and you need your bones also, don't You need to provide basic building blocks to build your baby. All those ingredients are taken from the woman's body, right, So if you're losing them because of the environment of space, and you're losing them because you're pregnant, that seems kind of dangerous for the mom's health.
Yeah, no, absolutely, that seems dangerous for the mom's health. I mean, so you could send her up there with the right kinds of foods, the right kinds of nutrients. We do know that when you're in freefall, you lose a lot of fluids, So your body is kind of thrown by the fact that a bunch of fluids are so high up in your body, so you end up peeing out a lot of it. We're not really sure what kind of problems that's going to cause. Additionally, you know,
muscles are important for how our cardiovascular system works. They like push back against our blood vessels, and so women who have had cardiovascular problems related to pregnancy might be particularly at risk when they're in an environment where their muscles are even more degraded than usual. So there's a lot of problems that are sort of hinted at by
what we know about what happens on space stations. But no woman who's been to space, as far as we know, has been pregnant or gotten pregnant, and as far as we can find solid evidence for, and Zach and I disagree about, you know, whether or not this has happened. We don't even know if sex has happened in space.
Yet another thing I wonder is, you know, when a woman is pregnant, she's told to have exercise certain ways and eat certain ways in order to you know, counteract some of these effects and support the growth of the baby. And then also when you go to space, you're told
do certain exercises, drink more fluids. Whatever. Do you think any of those instructions disagree, are they in conflict or you know what a pregnant woman in space basically just like do both of those things, like eat lots of protein and make sure you get extra exercise to avoid boring loss.
Yeah, so that's a great question. So I remember when I was pregnant, I was told, you know, like you should exercise a lot, but don't overdo it because if you know, you don't want to for a variety of reasons, you don't want to overdo it. But women or people in space are supposed to exercise something like two to three hours a day every day, and so it might be difficult to balance not overdoing it with making sure
that you're keeping your bones and muscles strong enough. Also, you know, we change our diet in a lot of ways when we get pregnant. So for example, you know, I didn't eat any processed meats because there was some concern of listeria and what that could do. So there were like no turkey sandwiches for me during my pregnancy. It was a massive hardship. But the environment, like you know, the space station is notorious for having like all kinds of weird stuff like growing on the other sides of
the panels. People are more likely to get sort of like weird infections on their skin. Their immune system is already a little bit immunocompromise, so people who have for example, herpes latent herpes virus in their body, like the herpes virus wakes up because the immune system seems to be suppressed in some way. And so you know, these are a lot of things that you could imagine possibly being a problem for the mom or the baby, but we just don't have a lot of a lot of data on any of it.
Well, here's another potential problem. Since we've had children and two continents, we've discovered that the cultural norms for what pregnant women should do are very different. So, for example, here in the US, if you're pregnant and you're having caffeinated coffee, everybody's like, how dare you? That's so bad for you. But if you're in France, everybody's like, one cup of coffee a day, no big deal, It's not that big a deal. But if you have salad, oh
my gosh, they give you the look of death. Right. Salad is because of the risk some lettuce has things growing on it. Like basically, you just don't eat salad, and all kinds of soft cheeses you just don't eat in France when you're pregnant. So the kinds of things that people judge you for are very different different continents. Now, imagine you're in the International Space Station. Do you follow the French rules the American rules? Doesn't matter where you
launch from your citizenship? Like, who gets to judge you about your pregnancy decisions?
I mean maybe everybody gets to judge you, because space is a global humankind activity, you know, And so says if moms aren't getting enough judgment, we can even more in space.
Awesome. Well, let's talk about how you get pregnant. You referenced this. We don't know that anybody's actually ever done that in space, But what do we know about the science of reproduction? Is it possible? Is there anything we know about reproduction that would suggest that it's more difficult or easier or just weirder in space.
So there have been some studies looking at sperm, for example, that have found that, like it was bull sperm move a little bit faster. But there was recently a study that found that sperm sent to space we're sort of behaving weirdly. So, like the data that we have on just about everything related to reproduction in space is really
haphazard and often gives conflicting results. And partly this is because NASA is really queasy about sex and reproduction, and partly that's because they don't want to be spending money and then needing to go in front of Congress to justify why like geckos were having sex in space, like why is that important? And I've asked a bunch of NASA people. I was like, is this is it fair to say that NASA doesn't really want to fun stuff
like this? And they're like, no, absolutely they don't. And so so you'll get studies that manage to get up there because they're sort of studying something else. Related to reproduction in space, and then the reproduction stuff will kind of be a sideshow. But there have been some studies, including one on Earth, looking at cells associated with decidualization. So this is how the uterus prepares for implantation, and it looks like something about gravity is required for this process to go.
Well, so what is the process I'm imagining deciduous trees? Is there some analogy here to what's happening in the lining of the uterus, that's a good question.
So there could be so deciduous trees shed their leaves and the uterus is sort of ripening and thickening and providing more of like you know, sort of blood and food for possible implanted embryo, and then you know, once a month that sheds, And so I hadn't put that together, but way to go, Daniel, That's almost certainly what it means. And maybe gravity is to some extent required for that. Oh and so we could have trouble getting pregnant for starters.
Don't necessarily know that we will, but it's possible. And there's already a bunch of people on Earth who have fertility issues and find it difficult to get pregnant in the first place, and some of those issues I guess could be exacerbated when we get to space.
All right, So say I give you a large budget to answer this question. What experiments would you do and how do you do it in a way that's ethical.
That is a great question, and I'm going to answer it after the break when I take you to the moon. All right. So we talked about some of the problems that have been sort of hinted at by having humans on the International Space Station on how these problems might indicate how reproduction could go in space. And Daniel asked me what experiments I would do to try to figure out if it's safe to have babies in space.
Without worrying about what you're gonna have to say in front of Congress.
That's right. Oh, I don't know that there's any solution for that. Maybe you get a private company to fund these research experiments. That's that's above my pay grade. But if somebody gave me a billion dollars or more, probably more, what I would do is I would either send satellites out past our magnetosphere and start spinning them to create something like Martian gravity. Mars is where most of the space settlement advocates are pushing for us to end up
and so Mars has forty percent of Earth's gravity. We already know that being in free fall and experiencing something like zero gravity is a problem. So if you're in a satellite that's rotating, you could make Martian gravity and you could try to get a handle on you know, does forty percent gravity, for example, remove all of the problems with bone density. Is forty percent gravity enough to keep bones and muscles strong? We don't really know the answer there.
We don't even know the answer to what happens to your bones if you live on Mars for quite a while.
No, nope, nope, no, no, boy. I mean there's Jacks, the Japanese Aerospace Agency. They have a module up on the International Space Station that now has oh the acronym is Mars, but I forget what it stands for. It's got these little wheels where one size has rodents that spin to simulate different gravity regimes, and another side the wheel doesn't spin, so you can see what happens in freefall. And so we now have some systems to start to get a handle on that, but we don't have loads
of data coming from that system. Yet.
All right, so you create the Martian environment in near Earth orbit by using centrivical force. But I want to know what you're going to do in that environment. What experiment is Kelly setting up to answer these sixy questions?
Well, you know, for starters, I would just put like a rodent colony in one, a mouse colony in another, maybe I don't know, a vole colony in the third, and just kind of see like can they survive through multiple generations? And then you know, every once in a while, harvest some of them and look to see if you know, there's anything weird happening with any part of their physiology.
And another reason why you'd want to put them out in orbit, but you know, out past our magnetosphere, is that you could also start to get a handle on how space radiation is impacting their bodies. You know, is that causing mutations that are resulting in problems down the line.
And you're doing this in rodents because you don't care about rodents feelings and whether their babies are mutated, or because rodents are very similar to people in terms of their reproductive systems, or why rodents.
Well, first of all, I'll say that I adopted a rodent as a pet when it was done with some cancer research because I like rodents very much. I think they're very cute.
I had rats as pets. I love them. They're absolutely wonderful.
Are absolutely wonderful. I had one sitting on my shoulder while I was working for a while while I had it. But it's very cute. So rodents are like humans in a lot of ways, but they're also not like humans in a lot of other ways. And so if it worked with rodents, I would feel like, Okay, we've to some extent convinced ourselves that we've gotten over the first hurdle.
And then after that I would say, you know what, probably these satellites are just they're not going to be big enough to do what we need to do next. So maybe the next step is to head to the moon and set up a research station.
The real barrier is ethical, right, Like you wanted the answering humans, but you can't just start with humans. You can't just like put humans there and have them reproduced and see whether the babies come out weird, right, because you can't just make weird babies in your science experiment. But it's okay to do with rats. So how do we get from we can't do this experiment of humans too? We can do this experiment of humans. Do we need to convince ourselves it works on rats and then on dogs,
and then on pigs and then on monkeys. Is there's like a stair step ladder where at some point we feel like this is a reasonable chance to take with people.
Yeah, so that's a great question. And there's not like a global pre existing, you know, step ladder that's been established, Like, first you do this and then you can test it on humans. What I'm proposing is what I would feel comfortable with, and so you know, I'd feel comfortable trying it out on rodents first and then maybe scaling up, like you know, have some dogs at the research station and see how they do. People like having dogs around anyway,
and then send up chippanzees. But of course that is ethically difficult, and so it's not clear how easy it would be for you to get permission to do something like that. But then maybe you could say, Okay, we're gonna have a woman conceive on the moon, and we're gonna check her out every single day, and if anything looks like it's going wrong with mom or the baby,
we immediately bring her back to Earth. So one of the great things about the Moon is it's about three days away, whereas Mars is six months away at best, if you're at the right window where you can leave for it, which only opens every two years. So testing stuff out on the Moon, if something goes wrong, you
can send them back really quick. Also, the Moon has one sixth the gravity of Earth, and so if things go well at one sixth Earth gravity, they're probably going to go great at Martian gravity, which is even higher. That's kind of how I would do it. I'd test things out in satellites and then move to the Moon and sort of slowly scale up until I convinced myself this is safe to do on the Moon. Now we're
ready to start trying it farther out. But what do you think if you were in charge, what would you do?
Oh? Man, This is why I do particle physics, because you don't need IRBs or ethical questions when you're smashing particles together. This is even why I avoided any part of physics that has like immediate applications. You know, my parents worked in weapons programs, and I was like, yikes, that's too complicated morally for me. I really like to separate my research from these moral quests. And even though the more questions are really fascinating, I don't want to
be in charge of making those decisions. And I can't imagine experimenting on my baby like the women you talked about who are willing to give birth in Antarctica. That definitely comes with additional risks, right. I remember when we were having kids, I wanted to absolutely minimize the risk in every direction, because this is your kid's life you're talking about. So I can't imagine saying like, yeah, let's go get pregnant in a place nobody's ever gotten pregnant before.
I just can't imagine being in that place. But hey, everybody's different, you know. Some people want to break barriers, But tell us what is unusual about the Moon's environment, Like you told us about the effects on the human body a free fall, But on the Moon there must be other things that we have to worry about specifically.
Yeah, so let me back up real quick for the ethics issue. And so I agree, this is like a difficult ethical thing to build up to. And you know, the first woman who gets pregnant on the moon, Like, I would not want that to be me, but what I would not let it be me? But uh, But one of the things that I worry about is that space tourism increases, and you know, people get more alone
time when they're up there. I'm worried we're going to get these data accidentally and in a like non consistent way, and so I would love to see us investing in getting some more of these answers in a more consistent way so we can let people know what the risks really are. And I'll note that I also did everything
I could to reduce risk during pregnancy. But I met plenty of people who I would say, like, here's what I think the risks are about giving birth on Mars, and they either thought that I was like over selling the risks. Like one of them said, you know, wombs are a neutral buoyancy tank. Gravity's not going to matter. It'll be fine. I would have babies on Mars. And so there are people who are not wospbags like you and me, and would be willing to do it. But that's not me yet.
No, as long as people know what the risks are and are well informed can make their decisions. But I guess they're ethical issues. They're like, we don't let people make some decisions about their babies, Like we don't let people engineer their babies DNA, Right, just because your parent doesn't mean and you have complete control over the pregnancy and this kind of stuff. So there's some really tricky issues there, even if we have some initial data.
And you know, parents can sign consent forms but their children can't. And we don't actually know that babies who are born on Mars could ever return home. So maybe developing in a lower gravity environment means your body would never be strong enough to survive Earth gravity. But you asked me about the Moon.
Yeah, because I was listening to you say that we could always bring the mom home, she's only three days away. But I was wondering, aren't there some situations where a problem has cropped up which is not reversible just by going back to Earth. What are the particular dangers of getting pregnant on the moon.
Yeah, so this is a tough question. Okay, So say we do get our research station on the moon, and the rodents are doing great on the Moon, so then we know that reproduction at low gravity one sixth of Earth's gravity doesn't cause any problems. We maybe at this point have hopefully already figured out what happens when you're exposed to space radiation and how to shield against that.
Because the Moon has no atmosphere and no planet wide magnetosphere, so all the space radiation hits the surface of the Moon straight on. So hopefully we've figured out radiation shielding, so that's not a problem.
What about the regolith on the Moon. Is there anything weird about that that we have to worry about?
I mean, that is some nasty stuff. So like you probably want mom to stay inside the entire time, you probably want almost everyone to stay inside most of the time. So the problem with the regolith is, and we talked about this in our episode about challenges of working on
the Moon, it is electrostatic, so it clings. It's also really fine pieces that are also super jagged, and so there's concern that if you breathe it in it's going to cause what's called stone grinder's disease here on Earth, where essentially these tiny sharp particles scar your lung over and over again, making it really hard to breathe. So we're going to have to be super careful to make sure that we don't bring any of this into the
habitat with us. And between not going outside often and radiation shielding, which is often in the four of or often proposed to take the form of burying your habitat in this regolith, you're not gonna be going outside much, and we don't really understand the implications of that. So like, yes, there could be some mental health implications of never going outside.
But part of how we extract calcium from food and then incorporated into our bodies is by using sunlight to produce vitamin D. So if you are underground all the time and not getting any sunlight, is that going to mess with your ability to produce your own bones and then to produce the bones in the fetus, We don't know. So maybe you'll have to sit in front of those like full spectrum lights all day long to try to get yourself enough vitamin D so you can make this stuff.
So you'll be nicely tanned.
So you'll be nice. Yeah, I guess that's good. So the moon is sort of like Mars light, Well, I guess it's more extreme in terms of gravity. If things work on the Moon you can have pretty good confidence that a lot of things will be okay on Mars, and if things don't go well, you can get home quickly. But so let's go ahead and head out to So Mars is on average one hundred and forty million miles away,
really far. With current propulsion techniques, it takes six months to get there, and you can only leave every two years when like an orbital when a window opens up in Mars and Earth are and sort of like the right locations as they're traveling around the Sun, so that you could get to Mars as fast as possible. And that means that if you're out there, you are like
on your own. If you need medical equipment, you are not going to be getting a resupply ship, and so there's a lot of planning that you need to do. I was going to ask during Katrina's pregnancy, were there any medication she needs, but maybe you don't want to share that on air.
Yeah, Katrina is type one diabetes, so her pregnancy was considered high risk. And actually when she was pregnant with Hazel, near the end of it, she stayed in lab very late one night and missed the last bus home and she ran to catch it and sprinted at like thirty eight weeks pregnant, and then started feeling out very good, but came home and went to bed. At two o'clock in the morning, she woke up and she was like, something is wrong. So we rushed to the hospital and
something was indeed wrong. She had help syndrome, which can be very dangerous, and the doctor was like, this will kill your wife very soon. But the cure is we just take the baby out. So she had an emergency sea section, and so we were very glad to have excellent medical facilities nearby. And I imagine if you're going to build a colony on Mars and consider having pregnant women there, that you're going to want excellent medical facilities there, right.
Yes, right, And I don't think we've gotten far enough in any of our planning to say, like, Okay, the third rocket is going to be filled with just equipment for sea sections and stuff. But there's a lot of equipment that we need to keep women and babies alive. And that equipment is why we do so well. So you know, I ended up having hypertension for both of my pregnancies. I had to be induced, which meant I needed oxytocin, which needs to be refrigerated at stable temperatures.
There was a study in Sub Saharan Africa that found that a bunch of women were hemorrhaging. So oxytocin is also used not just to induce the contractions that you need to start labor, but all so to cause additional contractions to pinch off blood vessels and stop hemorrhaging if a woman is hemorrhaging at the end of labor, which is the way most women die if they're going to
die in pregnancy. And this oxytocin wasn't working as well in some regions of Sub Saharan Africa, and the hypothesis was that somewhere along the trip that it made to Sub Saharan Africa, the refrigeration broke down and this, like unsteady temperature, caused it to not be as effective.
So it only needs to be cold when you delivered. It needs to never have been warmed up.
Ever, Yes, so you need backup refrigerators. You need to figure out how much oxytocin you need. You need a sea section equipment. You need blood pressure medication and that needs to be shelf stable for as long as it's going to take for resupply to get out there. There's just a lot of stuff that keeps humans alive in western countries that you know. Some people tell me, hey, look, we don't have to bring that stuff with us. There are women who give birth all over the world without
that stuff, And well that's true. I think I think that our lack of ability to provide adequate medical care to women in like remote region isn't good. It's not something we should be bringing with us out into space. We shouldn't be like, oh, we do it there, we'll do it in space too. But I've gotten off track. There's a lot of planting that you need to do. Mars offers a couple unique additional challenges. That regolith on Mars is worse in some ways than that reguleth on
the Moon. And one of the ways that it's worse is that it's laced with perchlorates. These are endocrine disrupting chemicals. They mess with the stuff that your thyroid does, and the Food and Drug Administration warns that for fetuses, being exposed to perchlorates can mess with nervous system developments.
But what are perchlorates? Are they an organic molecule. How they made? Like, why do they exist on Mars not the moon?
The Moon has a lot less of a bunch of things like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus. The Moon just sort of generally seems to be poor and a bunch of stuff. Mars has more stuff available to be reacted with and somehow that results in perchlorates would be my best answer, But do you think you can sort of summarize it.
Well, I'm definitely not a chemist, but perchlorates our combination and oxygen, and I think there is more chlorine in the Martian soil and then the UV hits that and forms these perchlorates. But basically, these things are a simple chemical compound, but they're bad for us. Can you tell us why they're bad? Firms? From like the biological point of view? Why is this thing so dangerous for fetuses?
Sure? So, I believe the answer is that our thyroid there's a iodine that our thyroid collects and uses to make hormones, and perchlorate sort of interrupt the ability of the thyroid to use the iodine to make the hormones that it usually makes, and when that gets disrupted, you get problems with metabolism and nervous system development.
So that sounds especially bad for fetuses.
Yes, yeah. And a reason that this becomes particularly relevant is not just because if you go outside you might accidentally bring it back in if you get regolith on your suit, but also when you grow plants in dirt or soil that has perchlorates, the perchlorates get pulled out
of the soil and go into the plant tissues. So if you're growing your plants in either water that has happened to take up some perchlorates because perchlorates are water soluble, or you haven't gotten all the perchlorates out of the dirt. If you decide that you're going to like be old fashioned and grow your food in the dirt, then you have to be concerned that mom's taking in these perchlorates.
Wow, so mom can't eat any food grown on native Martian soil basically.
Well, so this is where I can hear the space settlement advocates yelling while you're over selling the difficulty. It's water soluble, so you could just bring regulyth in and then rinse RNs, rins insurances, rens, rents, rent rents until it's gone, and then you could grow in it, but now you also have to make sure that you don't have chlorates in your water. And I talked to a friend of mine who's a geologist who works with perchlorates, and I was like, does that sound like just print
RNs rents are insurants? Problem solved? And he goes, I don't know, man. All I can tell you is that I only work with this stuff in fume hoods. That's how nasty it is. I will only work with this if there's a fume hood on. So I would be concerned. Like when we bought our farm, if they had said, well, if you rinse the soil the endercrendisrupt chemicals that are in there, yeah, it'll be fine. You can still grow food for your family, I'd be like, I'm living somewhere else.
So anyway, you're just gonna have to be really careful to make sure that this like pretty nasty toxin doesn't get into your food or water in any way. But let's take a break and then we will talk about what will happen if it turns out that Martian gravity is just not going to work for human reproduction. All right, So what if you get to the moon and you find out that reproduction is just not working at one sixth of Earth's gravity. You know, like moms bones are breaking,
she doesn't have the right muscles for contractions. The baby is just not developing at all, and it's just you know, development for the baby is just not going according to plan.
And this is not outrageous. Right, Basically every human ever conceived and carried and born has been within one G and using the benefit of the Earth's atmosphere, and so there's reasons why evolution may be dependent on it. Right, It wouldn't be ridiculous to discover that these are necessary for humans to conceive in birth successfully, right, right.
Yes, this is the environment we're adapted to. It wouldn't be surprising to me if we needed And so you know, maybe some people would say, Okay, it didn't work on the Moon, but the Moon has one sixth of Earth's gravity. Maybe Mars's forty percent will be enounced. So maybe we go out there and we discover actually, the rodents can't make it work at forty percent either. We talked to some space settlement advocates who are like, well, there's another solution,
maybe you just need Earth gravity. Well, you're pregnant, in which case we can put you on like a banked racetrack and create one g And I puked a lot during my pregnancy. I think I would be puking a lot more under that scenario.
I'm imagining those devices they use to test astronauts for high GI where they like put them in those chairs and then spin them around. And you're saying, no bed rest, You got to sit in one of those things the whole pregnancy, Oh my god, I.
Mean, Or maybe you only need to sit in it at night, like eight you just sleep in it eight hours a day. Maybe that's enough to make you strong enough. Like we just we really don't know. But say, say women decide they don't want to do that, they don't want to spend their pregnancies on a banked racetrack. The rotating space settlement people argue that now they are the only game in town. So these rotating space settlements, they
are these giant structures. They can take a variety of different shapes, but the one that I immediately imagine looks sort of like a bike wheel and it kind of spins and you live around the rim and you can simulate gravity by spinning fast enough.
So you're saying, if it's not possible to have babies in Martian gravity and nobody wants to sit in one of those spinning racetracks, then you basically can't be on the surface of Mars. You have to go up into space and simulate Earth grapt in a space station.
I mean, maybe you could just put on like an incredibly weighted suit on Mars so that you maybe that would keep your muscles and bones strong enough. We just we don't know. I'm saying that it's possible that we will discover there's no easy solution to forty percent Martian gravity, and then the rotating space station people can stand up at the conferences and say we won, we won.
But also you're just talking about the pregnancy itself. What about the development of the kid, right, Like, what if you need gravity to grow up into a normal human being, then this kid's going to be on a racetrack until they're eighteen or up into space.
You can't go back down to Mars, right And so I feel like this is where questions about social issues start to come into play, Like what if some people want to live on the surface of Mars, but moms and children need to live in these rotating space stations. You know what kind of social dynamics does that create? And you know, maybe you only need to live in a rotating space station if the child ever wants the option of returning to Earth. Maybe you can develop on
Mars if you never plan on leaving. Like we just we don't know how this kind of stuff will play out, Like this is the current state of our knowledge.
What a crazy decision you'd have to make for your kids, Like you get to grow up on Mars, but you can never go to Earth. That would be insane.
I mean, Earth is so awesome, Like I mean, I can imagine my family moved from Ireland to New York City, and I can imagine someone being like, well, what if if you're born in New York City but then you never get to go back to Ireland, Like what are you doing to your child?
Well, you should feel responsible for raising your kids in Virginia. I mean, they didn't have a choice in that, right, they have to always tell people they come from Virginia. You settle them with that their whole lives.
They seem very happy, They seem very happy, and in fact, you know when we lived in California, we experienced an earthquake, and I think that would scare Ada quite a bit if she had been a bit older.
She just they just have to learn to ride it out.
You know.
It's fun. It's like a theme park ride.
You know.
She also is I hope she doesn't listen to this episode. She's a little scared of some theme park ride. Me too, Yeah, yeah, no, some of them are intense. When I went to Cedar Point last time, I like the rides that I used to love. Now when I go around the corner, I like, you know, my arms are in the air, I'm screaming, and then I pass out around the corner, which makes me think I'm probably not a good candidate for those banked race tracks either, spend the whole time passed out.
One more reason why you shouldn't go to space.
As if we needed another one.
All right, So we were talking about having moms and maybe even their kids in high G environments near Mars. If we think that it's probably not possible to carry the pregnancy and give birth and maybe raise your kids in Martian gravity.
You could abandon the Mars plan altogether. With and these rotating space stations could go anywhere. So a lot of the places that they're proposed are at like Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull of various objects more or less cancels out, so you don't have to use a lot of fuel to stay in one place. But you know, you could put them near the asteroid belts for resources, or near the moon or whatever. They could go anywhere.
I like your zz top pronunciation of Lagrange points. That's awesome.
Oh now, how am I supposed to say it?
Well? I think it's not named after the town in Texas Lagrange, but probably the French mathematician Lagrange. But you know, maybe I'm wrong.
Oh no, I'm thinking about all the conferences I've been to now where I've said they're wrong. That was good. I also apparently have been saying magnetosphere. It's magnetosphere or something I've been Anyway, I'm an embarrassment to my children and always will be.
No, I'm going to talk about Lagrange gians from now on in particle physics.
Okay, good, Well, your class will be more interesting because of it, I'm sure exactly. But you know, these rotating space stations, it's worth noting they're going to be difficult
engineering challenges, and we haven't built them yet. So, like, you know, if you think about how big the International Space Station is, to make a station that could hold a lot of people and not have to spin so many times that you'd feel sick due to the spinning, you would probably want it so that the wheel of the rotating space station could fit around the International Space Station. So you know, I guess the diameter of the wheel would be the same as the length of the International
Space Station at its widest point. And already the International Space Station is one of the most expensive things that has ever been made, and it's not rotating, and so when you start, you know, thinking about how you're going
to make these, it's going to be tough. Not possible, but it's going to be tough, and it's not the kind of thing that, like, you know, if Musk sends people to Mars and they start reproducing in the next few decades, these sort of rotating space stations might not be available yet so that you could like shuttle them up there to try to save their lives.
But Kelly, I've heard entrepreneurs say with confidence, will have our first rotating space hotel in twenty twenty seven. Are you saying that's over sold?
Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably over sold. I mean I could be wrong. Rotating space hotel by twenty twenty seven really.
Huh m hmmm, okay with great confidence?
Wow, And is it going to be rotating at one g or just providing enough gravity that you're not going to be incomplete free fall?
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know.
I feel like you want at least enough gravity to make sure that, like when you're in the bathroom, everything moves in the direction you want it to. That makes everything cleaner.
Well, maybe they can have a swimming pool at the center of it, like a zero G bubble of water really can float in. That would be amazing.
Did you watch there was a movie with Chris Pratt and Jennifer lawrenceingers, Yeah, where the gravity gave out and the fiction and the water in the pool was anyway, that was a scary scene. But yeah, okay, So maybe we will have tourist hotels by twenty twenty seven. I'm a little skeptical. I don't think they're going to be out at Mars at that point, and I don't think they're going to be big enough to be a permanent
housing structure for thousands of people. I could be wrong, So there's one other place that folks propose if it turns out gravity is a problem. And you are probably well, you know me, so you're probably not going to be surprised what the answer is because I've probably oh yeah, because you were on the call where we interviewed Guermo Sunline for Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. But yes, Venus is the other place where people are proposing.
Venus is the goddess of fertility, right, so oh.
Yes, yes, appropriate, And no one's proposing the surface of Venus.
And why is that, Daniel, Because the surface of Venus is totally inhospitable. It's very high temperature, it's very high pressure. It's crazy like the things we've landed on the surface of Venus have lasted for like minutes or hours before being melted and crushed. It's also like sulfuric acid rain. It's basically not the kind of place you'd want to go, even if you were like the rock. Not to mention a baby.
Anytime I read about Venus, it's always compared unfavorably to Hell, and as being like worse than Hell. But some folks note that if you are up in the atmosphere, there's a part of the atmosphere where you are like above the sulfuric acid clouds and you're experiencing one G and the atmosphere is thick enough to protect you from space radiation. So if you can make a floating environment, then you could have the one G that maybe we're going to
need to have babies. And so you know, I think the humans to Venus people would say, if we think this gravity thing is a serious problem, we should be serious about floating habitats in Venus.
That only makes sense to me if you want to live on Venus anyway, Why otherwise would you go to Venus to have babies, Right, Like, if you're going to colonize Venus. Sure it's nice if you're going to have babies on Venus, but if your goal is to colonize Mars and explore the outer Solar system, doesn't seem to me to me much in advantage to have like a terrible floating place just above Hell that you could also go to to have babies.
Well, so I think they're saying that we just need to find the places in our solar system where we can create self sustaining settlements, and that we haven't been serious enough about considering Venus as one of those places. So this isn't just like a nice place you go during your pregnancy vacation. This is like where humans are going to live out their lives and have families.
Oh, I seem forever, let's move closer to the Sun instead of going out to explore the universe. I don't know, it feels like going backwards to me. Not a big fan of move in Venus.
I mean, I'm not signing up for any of these plans, to be honest. So so I thought maybe we could wrap up by talking about how optimistic I am that we're going to be able to get this research done before the tourists start giving us the answers. And to
be honest, I'm not super optimistic right now. So, as I mentioned, NASA's super squeamish about funding stuff like this, So we're not getting government funding, and it's hard to imagine companies being able to find profitable routes to finding the answers to these reproduction questions.
Well, I know you don't like Elon Musk questions. But do you think Elon's new influence on the government might change that because he's a big proponent of making the species interplanetary, and I know he likes to rush to the sexy bits without necessarily doing all the homework. But do you think like doing studies about pregnancy and childbirth and space could maybe tickle those guys fancy?
I mean, that could be a silver lining. Musk does not seem concerned about these questions. It doesn't seem to me like he would want to be pushing the government to spend a bunch of money to get the answers to these questions. I think he feels like we will go out there and find the answers to these questions when we.
Get there, maybe with tragic consequences.
Yeah, I mean I think that they that Musk and others think that, you know, people like me are way too risk averse. It'll probably be fine, and if not, we'll just let natural selection take care of things, which is of course, like that means a lot of death. It's like a way that hides the fact that lots of death could happen. It would be great if there
were funding. I think there are a couple companies that are trying to study reproduction in space with the hopes that the research will produce patentable technologies that can then be used to pay for like the next step in the process. I hope that works out. It's hard for me to imagine, Like, I don't know. Maybe maybe you do learn something about reproduction of microgravity that produces some technology. That would be great.
But people having babies on Earth in risky environments, you know, people living in the Ukraine near Chernobyl exposed to higher radiation or whatever. Can we do something learning from those experiences those risks people are already deciding to take and extrapolating from there.
I mean, that's a great question. So the radiation and Chernobyl that we would maybe be learned something from is different than the kind of radiation we expect we're going to experience in space, So I don't think you're going to get a lot of great data from that.
What about pregnant stewardesses, because they spend a lot of time at high altitude and they're exposed to more space radiation.
If it turned out that they had more radiation associated issues with their pregnancies, that would be good reason for us to worry. But if they were fine, that wouldn't mean, for example, that things like partial gravity is not going
to be a problem anymore. So there are some environments that give us some insights, but the data are going to be hard to collect in a systematic way, mostly because of ethics associated with, you know, doing experiments with humans like you wouldn't want to send the pregnant stewardess up like more often to see if the extra radiation causes problems.
You and your friend Cap o'hennon have a show on exactly this question, don't you.
Yeah. So she wrote this book called Eve about the evolution of the female reproductive system, and she contacted me and she was like, you know how much reproduction sucks on Earth. I'm like an expert in that, and you're an expert in how awful space is. We should do a show together where we sort of jokingly inform people about that. We could hire some artists to create outfits that sort of imagine ways we might be able to help women have safe pregnancies and labors in this environment.
And we did the show at the MIT Museum, and we're going to do it at the Royal Institute of London on April seventeenth, and we might have a couple other shows in the UK. We were there, so you know, maybe we can all laugh about this problem together.
If you don't have answers, at least we have jokes.
That's right.
The motto of this podcast is well, that's right.
It's you know, the best way I know to live a life.
All right. So let me end by asking you when do you think the first baby's going to be born on Mars? If you had to put a year on it.
So I think the answer is going to depend on geopolitics and stuff like that. I would like the answer to be thirty years from now or something, because I think thirty years would be the right amount of time to sort of biology research can't be rushed in a lot of ways, Like you just you have to live
through the generations that it takes. And you know, if you can successfully have a baby on the moon, you probably want to stay there for a couple of years to make sure they develop, okay, and maybe that they go through puberty. Okay. So I just I feel like we want to do this slowly, but I can also imagine that you know, with Musk's newfound geopolitical clout. If he is able to stay on his timeline, he could have people finding the answer in what I think are
unethical ways much sooner. So I guess I hope the answer is decades.
But do you fear it might just be a few years?
Yeah? Yeah, what do you think?
I think it'd be foolish to predict the future, That's what I think. So I'm curious to see what happens.
I'm curious and scared. So anyway, write your senators and tell them that they should be funding sex and space.
That's right, and let's hope that the first baby's born in space and on Mars are happy and healthy.
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