Babies in Space? Inconceivable! (Part 1)

this show. Obviously, We've got lots of different episodes. We've talked about things like colonization or you know, just even initial plans to send some intrepid adventurers off to Mars and what that would mean. One of the things that we haven't really talked about is this idea of if we are going to eventually grow beyond our planet and

colonize other places. Presumably unless we find some magic way of traveling, getting from Earth to some other habitable place could take a very long time, like multiple generations of people, right, and unless we have some way of freezing everybody that's actually going to work and not kill them. That means people are going to be living out their lives on some form of spacecraft on their way to a destination. And if you're going to have a generational thing happen.

That means eventually people are gonna be hooking up and having babies. We're talking about making new humans. That's right, Space Odyssey Space. I think it's exactly like the No, no, it's not. I don't think you first get an obelisk um No. Well, we should clarify at the beginning. So are we aware that humans have ever been in space in a family way? The official statement is that NASA

stresses that that astronauts maintain a certain level of professionalism. So, in other words, the official comment is there's nothing to comment on. There's been a lot of um can jecture, but no direct evidence. There was a hoax document going around the internet a while back about NASA testing sex in space, and I think that was defunct. Was it was it? I am actually unaware of this. Was it done in a very straightforward way or was it actually

done kind of like a spoof? Was there any kind of wink wink, nudge nudge kind of thing going I don't know. I haven't read the document myself. I just read about it. It was circulating on the internet a long time ago, and uh, but I think it was a little hoax, somebody was having a bit of fun. Um. Yeah, as far as we know, there's no real way to prove whether or not anybody's actually had sexual intercourse in space.

We think probably not, um, But we definitely know that nobody has been pregnant in space or has had a

baby in space. Yes. And so here's the thing is that this is such a complicated topic that we're going to be tackling that we're actually going to use uh, you know, two episodes to real cover it because there are there are lots of different factors you have to take into consideration when it comes to the idea of of of babies and space in multiple context right, So we want to kind of split this up so we

can really handle both major categories thoroughly, right Sure. And I think a good indication of how complex and kind of weird and squidgy it gets, um is that I can't actually recall any kind of science fiction stories that deal with birth, with with reproduction in space in general. And and this this might be just due to the overall sexism of the industry that's more interested in dudes than it is in ladies, um, and having more dude

characters than lady characters. Um, but I mean, you know, like I recall maybe in something like Highlands, the moon is a harsh mistress. They're being mentioned of women having some babies at some point, which is important because it's a moon colony. But but I mean, other than like Prometheus, I don't recall anyone ever being pregnant in a science

fiction movie. Well, I think you count alien in general. Well, in in whatever science fiction does deal with it, I feel like it's often just taken for granted, like, oh, we figured this out, this is taken care of. Often in those same science fiction elements, they've solved a lot of the problems that we're going to be talking about in these upcoming up They're all walking around on their spacecraft anyway, right, and there's never any indication that there's

harmful radiation that they have to worry about. So those are those are actual, real problems that we have to consider. And here's the thing is that these are things we do have to consider, and being able to figure out these these problems before they manifest in real world tragedy is difficult because how do you create a scientific test for stuff that is ethical? I mean, these are this

is tough, tough topic, you know. Yeah, of course it's not ethical to just like send some pregnant women up there and see what happens, right, or even to fertilize an egg. I mean, there's their ethical questions with that too. Of just the research hasn't really gotten far far long enough yet for for humans to even be a consideration. We've I mean because we've had some some pregnant mammals in space by mammals I mean like rats and mice, um.

But but I don't think that according to what we read, we haven't seen any any evidence of their being conception by mammals in space or of Yeah, so so we've got you know, sending up an animal that is carrying a fetus into space is one thing, and I mean that obviously we would need to know about that as well.

But if you're talking about colonization, I mean every single uh part of going from a planet with earthly gravity out into space and then traveling some distance for some time in space, and then perhaps even landing on another planet. All of these things would play factors into any kind of development. So there's lots of stuff we just don't know.

Now what we do know is that we've got. We're we're looking mainly at two main categories of issues that we need to gather more information about in order to start coming up with solutions to head off any potential problems. And in this episode we're specifically gonna look at radiation. Oh yeah, I would seem that radiation and pregnancy don't mix well, not not in general. Now we should say

that on Earth, all of us experience radiation. We are always a constant radiation and depending upon the kind of stuff that is around you, you might get a little bit more of a dose than someone else. So, for example, if you happen to work in the United States Capital Building, you're getting a little more radiation than someone who's living

in a wooden house. And that's because the granite that actually makes up the Capital Building has trace amounts of uranium in it, not enough for it to actually be a danger, but enough of it to have a higher background radiation than other place that might not have as much uranium around it. Okay, so the average person, just from natural exposure to the world around him or her, gets about three and ten miller rim of radiation annually.

So now we have to say what a miller rim is so RIM stands for orang gin equivalent in Man, And it's really a measure of how much radiation gets absorbed by a biological entity and how that affects that biological entity. So it's not just the raw energy, but it's sort of the effect. Yeah, right, And and this kind of thing gets gets mixed up in the media pretty often because there's actually three different measuring systems for radiation.

You've got how much material emits that's measured in carries or beckerel, how much radiation energy will be absorbed by any given mass, which is measured in a raid or gray, and then this this ram that we're talking about, which can also be measured in um millis siverts. Yeah, that would be the sieverts. Siverts would be the main one.

Rim is the main one. Millisieverts is usually what we talked about, because that's it's in the milli severt range usually for the actual amount of radiation that the average person encounters, uh, you know, and it's a little bit like it's a I think it's a hundred to one milli rim to millie siverts, so it's three miller RIM's being the average that a person would encounter in a

on Earth ends up being three point one millisieverts. So that's how it It's nice that it is easy to figure that out because you don't have to divide by like one eighth or something, right, It's it's all basically metric based. Yeah yeah, so yeah, exactly. It makes it so much easier than having to convert inches to centimeters

or fair Knight disintegrate or something along those lines. So essentially, what you're using this force to kind of determine how much are you, how much radiation are you encountering, and at what point should you start to really be worried. Now, the International Commission of Radiological Protection recommends that people limit exposure to artificial sources of radiation, meaning man made sources of radiation like additional above this exactly to one hundred

miller rim per year. But according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the United States, we tend to get about three hundred and ten miller rim per year, so we essentially we double the amount of miller rim radiation that we're receiving on a yearly basis. However, a lot of that comes from radioactive clown attacks. Just just so, Yeah, some of it comes from things like glowing watch faces.

You know, I'm not even joking with that. That really is a source of radiation, very minor source of radiation. We're not talking something that's gonna you know, you put the watch on and then all the fish in your nearby river have three eyes and I'll turn into blinking. But so the other thing to remember is that you know, harmful doses of this tend to be pretty high. We're talking higher than ten rim and Mellie rim is one one thousand of a rim, so you aren't even approaching

one rim. Even with this background radiation and the typical radiation you would encounter from artificial sources, you're not getting close to that. And you know we're also talking about over the span of a year, not in one encounter, right, So, uh, generally speaking, the amount of radiation we encounter here on Earth tends to be pretty manageable. Also, we've evolved to handle radiation. Our cells repair it themselves after being damaged

by radiation. So as long as you're not exposing yourself to too much for your body to handle, you tend to be all right. This this is dangerous radiation in the sense that is ionizing, So too much exposure could and create some damage on a deeper level, like we're talking DNA level damage. But generally speaking, you're not going to be in too much trouble, uh, in your typical

day to day experience. Some people, like medical professionals who might have to work with things like cat skin machines or X ray machines might have higher doses than others and therefore could run some risks. But you know, like I say, the typical experience is pretty it's pretty nominal. Okay, But let's talk about pregnancy specifically. Okay, what what's the relationship the known relationship between um radiation and health effects on a fetus or a pregnant mother. Well, in general,

h embryos tend to be pretty resilient to radiations. So at least here, right, we're talking about the kind of radiation we normally encounter. Yes, here will make a distinction in a minute, sure, right, the precise numbers are in some amount of dispute. Yeah, I think I think you found ones that were a bit lower than than the overall range that I saw. Specifically, the Health Physics Society where the numbers they were citing were things like around uh twenty rem. You would have to be an excess

of twenty rem to have danger to an embryo. UM. So if you're talking about that, that's twenty thousand millie ram or uh two hundred mills sivert if you prefer that that metric, and that's a lot. Oh yeah, yeah, that's plenty um. I saw numbers from the CDC that they gave a range rather than that kind of solid number of more like five to fifty rem um. So that's five thousand to five. Sorry, I'm really bad at math uh mill ram. But and and with different ranges

as the embryo progresses through different stages of development. Um. Of you know, the possibilities of of failure of the embryota implant during the first couple of weeks would be the main danger that you're looking at for for the next month and a half, there's you know, possibilities of malformations during organ development or something like that. And then uh moving on to the first trimester, like potential for

for growth problems or brain or nerve damage. Um. However, once you get out of that first trimester development, the fetus and the mother are going to go through basically the same kind of danger processes from radiation. Right, So in other words, the baby, the fetus, and the mother are both equally resilient to radiation. So is it that the main danger sort of the pronounced risk of radiation

is more weighted towards the beginning of the pregnancy. Okay, And again it's one of those where it has to be a significant amount of radiation for it to to hit what is considered to be a danger. Keeping in mind that these are all based probabilistically, right, These are all based upon uh, statistically being dangerous, So there are times when lower doses of radiation could result in problems down the line. But you know, you're looking across vast

populations and big studies. These are these are the trends that you see. Okay, So what kind of radiation dangers are we actually looking at from being in space? Well, they are a little different, you know, the ones that we encounter here on Earth. Besides the background radiation might be things like X rays or maybe occasionally gamma raise. But if you're going out into space, you've got some

some other types to worry about. There are charged particles that are trapped in the magnetic field around Earth, so around the ionosphere that can contain quite a bit of energy. Those those you would not normally encounter the ionosphere as it turns out, pretty far away from the surface of the Earth because you've got the stratosphere and the troposphere and the mesosphere in between the ionosphere and Earth. So we don't tend to encounter those charged particles very often

unless we happen to be asked for not. Uh. There's also particles that come from solar eruptions, so occasionally, uh, there you might have a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection from the Sun that can end up shooting out these particles that are incredibly energetic. Those have the potential to do some damage. And then you have cosmic rays. I think this is the big one. Yeah, these could be heavy ions. I mean much heavier than what you would encounter on Earth as far as an ion's concern.

And these can carry massive amounts of energy. They can travel near the speed of light, they can pass right through matters, so they're very difficult to shield against unless you have some sort of magnetic deflection shield because they

are affected by magnetic forces. In fact, if you happen to have be in space during a time where the Sun is really active, you might have more particles to worry about from the Sun, but you're probably gonna have fewer cosmic rays interacting with you because the Sun will actually deflect those rays from its own magnetic forces. But you know, we know that once you go out into space far enough, you are no longer within that protective

magnetic field that the Earth has. In fact, it's a field that is really important to life here on Earth and it's one that we've commented on that Mars does not have. So that's another issue is that you know, Mars would not have the protection that Earth has in this case, or even something in Earth's low orbit like the I S S is definitely within the magnetic sphere. Yeah, so you you know that definitely gets some protection there too. If you're talking about deep space travel, then you suddenly

don't have that protection. Um. You know, these are these are the kinds of particles moving at incredible speeds incredible energy that could do huge amounts of damage on a tiny molecular level, uh in in biological creatures, including messing up the DNA of cells. And causing mutations that our cells might not be able to recover from. Right, And it's a really significant amount of radiation that you could

receive on on one of these deep space sort of trips. Okay, not that Mars is really deep space, but that's the one that people have made out estimates for, especially when people started talking about doing that ridiculous Mars one thing or something, they were still very skeptical about. Sure, but you know, for for a hundred and eighty day ideally timed Earth to Mars trip, the estimate is that you would be exposed to some thirty three RAM. Yeah, that's

that's big, which is which is a bunch um. Several space agencies have actually set a limit of how much radiation from all this kind of stuff. It's it's recommended for an astronaut to receive over the course of their lifetime without unacceptable health risk. And that's about one DRAM. And keep in mind, of course, we're talking about a hundred RAM over the lifetime of an astronaut. Now granted, hundred RAM over the probably the career lifetime of an astronaut. Uh,

Still that's that's a lot of radiation. Um. Yeah, So here's here's some questions like what would this radiation have, what what effect would it have upon someone who is pregnant, And really the answer ultimately is we don't know for sure because we can't we haven't been ethical to test that it would be really bad. Uh So, one idea, of course, is that it would just result in say like embryo mortality or birth defects. The other idea is that it would result in uh, various kinds of sterilization.

So if you have a male and a female, say traveling, and they decide, well, we're in the middle of a space journey, we want to get pregnant now, um, they might have trouble with that because the radiation might affect the male sperm to begin with. There's also been the suggestion that I read in several articles, um, that it would be likely to sterilize a female embryo, so that say, a female child conceived in space during the space journey would have her eggs sterilized so that she couldn't have

children down to just the one generation. Okay, well, we could think about this question in sort of the really long term, the space colonization term, like we've been talking about but sooner in the future. I think this is going to come up in the context which we originally mentioned it in one of our videos, which is that are people going to be able to conceive children as

space tourists say, within the next few decades. I mean, if you want to travel up to a you know, a private space station or an orbiting spacecraft or something like that, would it be safe to conceive a child there or for a pregnant woman to make that journey. Uh. And one of the big questions there is how much exposure is too much? Like is it going to be where just a few days up there is enough to be a serious risk, or or would it need to

be really prolonged exposure? And those are some of the most serious questions right now, and we certainly can are those either. And also those questions are highly dependent upon conditions in space at any given time. So for example, uh, you know, we are not really good at predicting solar events, right We were just not good at predicting when a

solar flare or coronal mass ejection will happen. We're better at being able to at least detect and then predict cosmic radiation, which is why it hasn't been as huge a problem right now because again we've got a lot of people who are at least somewhat protected by a magnetic field, and also we get a little more advanced warning we can maneuver so that we decrease the chances of any kind of UH interaction with cosmic radiation. But

we're not as good at the solar radiation. So it sort of depends upon what's going on out there already, because it's not like we can just point to a figure and say this is how much radiation is out there in space all the time always, because there is no such number. It all depends on lots of other variables. There is, however, an an experiment underway to examine one

aspect of these effects. Some some researchers working with the Japan Areas Space Exploration Agency brought freeze dried mouse sperm

to the I s S in August. These samples are going to hang out there for for three different periods of time and then be brought back to Earth for micro insemination, and that's when you UH inject a sperm directly into an egg um and and the goal here is to figure out the effect of that long term or relatively long term, several periods of months, radiation on fertility rates, on danny, damage on growth and birth rates

of those pieces. So yeah, so this is going to be sort of that first step into learning what these these uh, what the consequences could be obviously, I mean, first step on a very long journey for us to

figure this out. Uh So yeah, I mean it's you know, it's kind of it's interesting that you bring that up about the idea that space tourism is something that could conceivably, for forgive the pun forgive the conceivably happen within a couple of years to maybe a decade, depending upon how long it takes to to build out the infrastructure, especially if talking about something like an extended stay aboard a private space station. That's going to take some time. But

it's something that could happen within our lifetimes. I'm not sure that the research that is necessary to make sure that everything is is safe and finding the best practices for things like conceiving a baby in space are going

to be around at that same time. We're gonna see our ability to do something uh come across faster than our understanding of what all the consequences are, which is always kind of terrifying, right, I mean, in any respect, but when you're talking about human lives, obviously the scale is much larger than you know, other and other instances of not really being or what the stuff you made

is going to do. Okay, Well, so we've established we don't really know what the effects are, but the risks are there and we should be we should be cautious basically about the crossing pregnancy or conception and space. Um, so, what can we do to offset these risks because I mean, in the long term we're probably going to be facing colonization efforts. In the short term, we know that somebody is probably going to want to try this, sure, so

what can we do to make it safer? Well, I mean some some things you can do, like build better shielding for spacecraft for certain types of radiation. Other types of radiation tend to pass through matter like it's nothing. So yeah, so there. So, like the I S S just has pretty plain like plate shielding, right, yeah, with better, better better shielding around um, sleep quarters and places where the crew spends more time than uh, you know, they In other words, there's certain areas of the of the

I s s that have better shielding than others. Yeah. There, but there's also this question about whether, say, metallic shielding like sheets of aluminum, actually also create a risk of their own from secondary radiation where you have an ionizing uh particle hitting the that then transferring the energy to the shielding, which could then become a source of danger. So how might we get around that. I've got one idea, Well,

it's not really my idea. I read about one idea, which is using food and water and poop and p as a shield sounds Legit turns out substances like these actually provide better shielding than metal because something like water is very dense in terms of nuclei, so it's got more atomic nuclei in a smaller area, and apparently this is better at deflecting those cosmic rays were talking about, which just I get the impression they just go through

metal like butter. Yeah. Yeah, but I've heard that. I've heard that bonded hydrogen is actually about the best that we figured out for that kind of Actually, it is much more effective than a lot of the other shieldings that we've come up with. Yeah, so, uh so this idea is just Basically, you surround your spacecraft capsule with organic matter, with with places where you can put water or p or human excrement. In general, all your storage

capacity just in a skin around the ship. So if I said that your spacecraft shield was total crap, that would actually be a compliment. Yeah, it would be a better than made of some metals or I think that language is evolving right here. I'm so proud. Yeah, um, and this this game. It was suggested by so many named Tabor McCallum and an interview with New Scientists in twenty team talking about the Mars inspiration. Uh, I'll call

that the Mars inspiration idea. I probably won't say mission Yeah, not quite yet now, but it seems to be a reasonable suggestion to make. Well, yeah, on the face of it, at least, it seems like, you know, obviously would need some testing to make sure that it was working. But we do know that hydrogen. You know that hydrogen serves as a really good shielding mechanism. So and yeah, it doesn't have to be just water either. You could use a hydrogen based rocket fuel as a as a shield.

The problem would be as you use it, you'd be depleting your shield. So another option in the future, it's one that is not really tested right now, is that you have an active shield like a force field. Uh.

This is I think this idea. Basically The status right now is it would probably work better than any kind of physical shield, But it seems not feasible at the moment to make a system like this, or at least not safe and feasible, because you're talking about creating some sort of electromagnetic field or should be like an electrostatic field or a magnetic field. It would be you'd be using energy to create a force that would repel the

cosmic rays coming in. Now, arguably you could do this in such a way where you only used it whenever you know any any oncoming threat was detected. So that way, well, we we can predict when cosmic radiation is coming towards the Earth. I mean, if you're using it, if you're using those abilities to detect anything that's coming towards you, and then you can activate the shield in time to deflect it, then you wouldn't have quite as much of a drain on your resources. But it's still an energy suck.

I mean, you've got to find a way to replenish that energy. Um, you know, you have to be able to take in more energy than you need to use, knowing that you're gonna lose some in the form of heat no matter what you're doing. So yeah, it's I mean, that's a you know, it's one of those things that we see in science fiction all the time with force fields. This would be a type of force field. But you know, the question remains, where do you get the energy to

create that force field? Yeah? I think I also read just a little bit about how this creating fields like this might create risks for the astronauts of boards. So you might be repelling cosmic rays, but like bombarding the interior with electrons from this field or something, or even if it was just just a simple electromagnetic field, that's still an electromagnetic field. You've got a lot of instrumentation on there that could easily be affected by electromagnetic field.

And you know, they're they're just practical considerations that even if we were able to create this right now, we would say, oh, well, I didn't think about the hammer sticking to the wall like that, you know, or worse. So yeah, I mean so there, Well, there's the other option. Which is just avoid space. Which is not to say that you can never have children beyond Earth. It's just that you'd have to find a place to do it that was safe. The problem is, where's that going to be.

The surface of Mars is not even as safe as the surface of Earth, right. It lacks It lacks the magnetosphere and atmosphere. Atmosphere is not Also, the soil is trying to kill you. Everything of Mars is trying to kill you, except possibly the rover. It might not try to kill It looks pretty friendly, but I think it wouldn't care if it did. No, It's it's kind of the sociopath of space exploration. True neutral. Um yeah, I mean, I mean the moon. The moon isn't that good for

that kind of thing either. Basically, we haven't found another planet or moon or rocky body out in the big wide universe that is going to treat us as well as Earth does. Right. So, the bottom line I think right now is in terms of radiation, we don't have an option that's safe for for outside Earth, uh child bearing. Now.

The hope is that by the time we reach a point where colonization is something we can legitimately consider as in we've we've advanced to the point where we are are reasonably confident that we can make a go of it, whether it's on another body within our solar system, or it's a long term plan that by then we will have solved some of these problems in ways that we possibly can't imagine right now. I mean, there's their developments

that happen in science that are unexpected. They happen occasionally where you know, you don't you don't anticipate it, and it changes everything. So there's the possibility that that could happen. But as it stands right now, it's one of those difficult problems that scientists are looking to tackle, and they're looking to tackle it in ways that don't have these ethical considerations that we'd have to worry about. Yeah, we we don't even understand what all the problems are yet,

is what we're saying, let alone how to solve them. Yeah. Compound that with the fact that there's one big other concern about child bearing in space. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the effects of micro gravity in our next podcast to micro gravity and hyper gravity. Sometimes you give birth on Jupiter YEP. Yep, sometimes you do. Man, it's a tough day. What what what colloquial you are we talking about here, Jonathan? Sometimes

I give birth. Look, we all have our hobbies, al right, guys. That wraps up this episode of forward thinking. In our next episode, we will continue this discussion by looking at the effects of gravity and what we've learned so far about how gravity may or may not influence things like well, the development of an embryo. How viable is our live

offspring that have been conceived in micro gravity. I mean, these are are tricky questions again because we have so little information, but there have been some experiments in this field, so we're gonna talk about that in our next episode. Meanwhile, guys should definitely go to f W thinking dot com. That's the website where we've got all the podcasts, blog post videos and other information about the future and all the kind of stuff we talk about and I'm really

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