Scientist Says NASA Must Study Space Sex

Velcroman1 writes "NASA has always been tight lipped on the subject of sex in space — which makes people all the more curious. How would it work? Has anyone done it before? Can a child be conceived in zero-G? With few animal tests (and virtually no human testing), there's been next to no scientific analysis of the issue. Until now. The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue detailing the mission to Mars, which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled Sex on Mars, Dr. Rhawn Joseph from the Brain Research Laboratory in California discusses everything from the social conditions that would push astronauts to have sex to the possibility of the first child being born on another planet. Such an infant would be the first real Martian — at least by nationality, the researcher pointed out. 'On Mars, the light's going to be different, the gravity will be different, it's a completely different atmosphere,' he said. 'So if you put an infant on Mars, they would adapt to varying degrees of the new environment. And after several generations, you'd have a new species,' he said."

semen is much lighter than males

[antifoidulus]

If the objective were really to populate another planet wouldn't it make more sense to send a bunch of fertile women and a bunch of semen instead of males? The semen would be a lot lighter(big deal when you are talking space travel), require less resources to keep alive etc. Furthermore you could increase genetic variability by having semen from a bunch of males without increasing the number of people sent. Seems like we really are unnecessary guys :P

Infrastructure?

[damn_registrars]

I have a hard time imagining that we would be willing or able to develop the infrastructure for children to grow up on Mars anytime soon. It is one thing to send (adult) astronauts to Mars, they can wear the same sized space suit pretty much until they die. But if you send a child (or a pregnant woman) to Mars, the growing child will need far more of everything in order to survive. I understand that space suits are not exactly cheap to manufacture here on earth - can you imagine trying to make on one Mars? And if a child on Mars grew at anywhere near the rate they grow on Earth, the wait time to ship a new suit from Earth would likely be completely unacceptable.

And that says nothing about the piles of diapers, or the need for something resembling a proper education, or proper pediatric care and nutrition...

I just don't see it being reasonable to have children on Mars until we have a sizable established population of adults there for a reasonably long time. And at that, we might want to wait until we have figured out the round trip (although a long car ride with a child can be infuriating - I can't imagine what interplanetary transport would be like!).

Re:hmm...

[KiloByte]

TCP wouldn't work, but replacing it is damn straightforward[1]. With that done, even regular http would work, although it would suck due to needing several round trips for referenced CSS/images/subframes/whatnot. The latter is also quite obvious -- many of us could whip up a primitive but working proxy in an hour.

If bandwidth isn't a concern, it might be better to do a whole-site wget rip and send it in one go.

[1]. Nearly all complexity in TCP is due to handshaking, retransmissions and adjusting the window. With no handshaking possible and terabyte windows, you can throw most of that away. Adding generous Reed-Solomon codes over the whole message and possibly retransmitting just damaged blocks would be obvious goodies to add, but that's still nothing compared to the mess that current TCP is.