Infertility Could Impede Human Space Colonization 360
intellitech writes "The prospect of long-term space travel has led scientists to consider, increasingly seriously, the following conundrum: if travelling to a new home might take thousands of years, would humans be able to successfully procreate along the way? The early indications from NASA are not encouraging. Space, it seems, is simply not a good place to have sex."
Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's cold out there, and dark. Lots of miles between gas stations. It's full of risks and danger. We haven't got what it takes to do this any more. You go.
We'll wait here by the fire where it's warm. You go: to Mars, the Asteroids, the stars. If you make it back tell us your traveller's tales of petroleum seas, of fields of diamonds, of the strangeness men have become Out There. Write if you find life.
One day the Rock will come, or the Flare, or some other thing. In our final moments it will comfort us that Out There are Men, continuing our journey.
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Informative)
Well put. But this article isn't just saying that space is dangerous, it's saying that reproduction is statistically impossible in space without better shielding. That's useful information, not scare-mongering.
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, no - if you RTFA, it IS fear mongering. ...you'd think by now people might be a little leery of pronouncing the impossibility of something as far as humanity is concerned. Using the same source logic behind their title, one might have stated unequivocally in 1700 "Why humans will never fly", because, barring technological advance, we couldn't do it then.
It's not saying that cosmic rays make reproduction difficult or impossible without better shielding...the title of the article is "Why infertility will stop humans colonising space".
Making such a categorical statement is idiotic. Or an exercise in sensationalist headline-writing.
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The sad thing is there has yet been any sort of long-term study of mammalian reproduction in space of any kind. A whole lot of theories and speculation, but absolutely nothing in terms of actual results or hard data to suggest that it may be a problem.
The speculation about radiation is a legitimate issue, and reproduction on the part of people who have either gone through radiation therapy or have been involved with nuclear "incidents" (Chernobyl and Hiroshima). The effects upon human reproduction certain
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What kind of crack are you smoking?
A: We have no mechanical womb. A single pair of humans is limited to producing in the low double digits of children assuming it is the mother dedicates her entire life to being pregnant.
B: one woman does not have billions of eggs, unless you have magically solved the telomer problem cloning won't help either for the long term.
C: the problem as the article suggests is that the eggs of a female fetus will be sterilized in the later half of pregnancy. That is to late to abort
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B. You didn't answer the telomere question. Cloning "ages" the DNA. You can only clone a cell a fixed number of times before it reaches the end of its "shelf life".
C. You're completely missing the point on this. It's not a moral issue about when to terminate a pregnancy, but one of ending up with a non-sterile female for the nex
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:4, Informative)
Here I was, planning on moderating, but alrighty then.... In response to your concern about eggs...
A quick Google search to refresh my memory found that we already know how to turn stem cells into eggs/sperm [stanford.edu]. We have already used that technology to restore fertility in mice. [guardian.co.uk] And we know how to make stem cells from skin [washingtonpost.com], which, because it regenerates, has an essentially limitless supply, as long as the subject is still alive.
You're right, we still don't have a viable artificial womb. You're also right about the sterilization of the females and males. But see the articles I linked above. If the technology pans out, then it doesn't really matter that the children born in space would be sterile, because we would be able to produce eggs and sperm from their skin, and use those to artificially impregnate them.
We still need to work on an artificial womb, but your concerns B and C have already been addressed by science. :)
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There's little preventing pre-fertilized eggs, handily frozen, from being toted on a 'mission'. You might imagine that sending along other people's DNA would also help keep DNA diversity very wide, considering the small number of sex partners. In vitro fertilization has become trivial. Storing a wide variety of eggs with a known genome and characteristics is also becoming trivial.
Once you get the after glow, just pop one in the cervix and have a nice 9months and decades of fun!
Of course, when we go into som
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Billions? We're not fruit flies. Even if Gen1 produces 20 females who all start reproducing at age 12 (obviously this biological thought experiment ignores social bounds) and also produce 20 more females, you're "only" at 64m people in Gen7. Who, by the way, are all retarded from all the inbreeding.
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So why aren't you dead now with all of the radiation in the environment pounding down upon you at this very instant?
If the presumption is that the radiation hazards are present when in a space suit trying to run around during an EVA while a solar flare is hitting.... I'd agree that is a really stupid thing to do. Trying to put together a spacesuit that holds back all radiation is a hopeless task.
On the other hand, people live and work around nuclear fusion reactors all of the time where radiation levels in
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Informative)
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.
Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
- JFK, at Rice University, 7/12/1962 [hbci.com]
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Thank you. What a great speech.
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
My thoughts on how far we have come is this, my Grandfather was beaten by his dad for suggesting that man would go to the moon after reading some books, and those books where of course thrown out.
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Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:4, Funny)
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Your great-grandfather sounds like a dick.
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:4, Funny)
Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.
Damn creationists...
Re:Bad things COULD happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lovely speech. But it's sobering to remember that when it was given, putting a man on the moon was 7 years in the future. Now it's nearly 40 years in the past. At least as far as human space travel is concerned, that breathtaking pace has come to a grinding halt.
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Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Space is a great place to have sex. It may not be a great place to reproduce, but that is a different matter.
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In any case, this is something that various space agencies might do well to consider...while I'm sure it's possible to have sex in space, and (for the men) to climax, and thus be able to inseminate a woman, it seems it would be more difficult to a) get to that point, and b) keep the 'guys' in a place where they can do their work. The other area of concern that warrants examination is the interpersonal relationships of any pairs that would exist in space, and any potential fallout if things go wr
Home on LaGrange (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of something I read a *long* time ago:
Oh, give me a locus
Where the gravitons focus
Where the three body problem is solved
Where microwaves play, down at 3 degrees K
And the cold virus never evolved.
Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects
We possess, so it seems
Two of man's greatest dreams
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
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At least when they get there they'll have finished Kama Sutra 2.0 (or maybe 3.0 for high frame-dragging environments)
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Cleaning up afterward may not be so great
Lack of imagination (Score:5, Insightful)
The article presupposes that we'll be limited to our present thin-walled spacecraft propelled by chemical rockets. There are other options: we don't even need new technology per se. Something like Project Orion [wikipedia.org] would permit the construction of a craft heavy enough to have effective shielding.
I'm reminded of this famous quip from Napoleon:
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
Don't dismiss FTL (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an embarrassing set of experiments [wikipedia.org] that simply won't go away that imply physics isn't as local as relativity would suggest.
Before someone tells me that "absolute simultaneity does not exist", let me point out that there's nothing in our current knowledge of physics against the existence of *one* specially privileged inertial frame having absolute simultaneity, provided that all other inertial frames are relative.
At least for me, it's easier to believe in one inertial frame that allows FTL transportation or communication than to believe in something that makes the universe suddenly grow by 78 orders of magnitude [wikipedia.org].
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Superdeterminism seems to be the most parsimonous way out of Bell's theorem. It's a depressing result, in a way, but it's the one that requires the least "spooky action at a distance" in the universe. Modern physics just dashes all our dreams.
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Horation Caine:
Yes, but if you lie down with the Devil
*Sunglasses*
you wake up in Hell
YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!
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The point is that this "privileged" inertial frame is not special. We can make any other inertial frame the "privileged" one, that is, any of the other inertial frames can replace it
That's the theory, but Bell's inequality seems to indicate otherwise. When a quantum entangled system with two separated particles collapses, these are two space-separated events that occur simultaneously. In which reference is this collapse simultaneous? That's an important question for which relativity does not have an answer.
The "every frame is equal" principle is not a physical rule, it's just an interesting symmetry, brought by the fact that light speed is constant for every observer. It does not precl
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The entanglement doesn't need to collapse simultaneously, it just needs to collapse consistently
There are experiments with entangled particles separated by more than ten kilometers that seem to indicate simultaneous collapse. If not, you could perform separate measurements on each particle and violate the uncertainty principle.
I see no reason to expect that all quantum entanglement in the universe collapses simultaneously in a common reference frame.
We know that every entanglement must collapse simultaneously in some frame, because measuring polarization in two different directions gives different results if the particles are entangled. Which frame is that? It need not be the same frame for all entanglements, but in each ca
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/xeni/272469365/ [flickr.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's why space colonization is important. If we can't hold it together here on earth, having settlers elsewhere will ensure that humanity continues to exist somewhere, and that the cultural contributions of everyone who's lived won't be forgotten.
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Huh! Yes, if we can't hold it here on Earth, let's seed other planets with the same primate-quarrellings culture, then we can enjoy hating each other at interplanetary scale.
So how do you fix the problem? Living in space should help. It requires a greater degree of cooperation in order to survive than living on Earth does.
"Living in space" and "solving the problem of getting along on Earth" are, on my opinion, orthogonal; they may even have 1 point of intersection, but at most one (getting along just enough to start exploring the space and establish at least one self-sufficient colony). Afterward, no warranties in regards with how the people in colony will "get along" or how they'll regard the Earth.
Re:Laughable (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd suggest breaking the problem into two parts:
1) That human kind may someday soon disappear.
2) That all life on Earth will eventually disappear.
Getting humans out of our solar system will take ages. Colonize the moon first. Create factories so more can be done in space (less requirements for launching from Earth).
But first, get _life_ off of this planet. Send some organisms, plants, rats, stuff that is hardy off to Titan or Mars and get something going. That way even if Earth is destroyed, at least there is life somewhere else that can evolve or at least live.
Tired, random thoughts... hope you get the gist of it.
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interesting idea, adding some vegetation/microbes to mars might make it a more friendly place (not sure about the atmospheric conditions, but some oxygen producing plants cant be a bad thing can they?)
I wonder if we have anything here on earth that would survive (or even thrive) in martian conditions, but i guess the lack of liquid water is one hell of a hurdle
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I hardly think... (Score:5, Funny)
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Can we go together? [bestuff.com]
Au Contraire (Score:4, Funny)
Women would be unable to become pregnant? On the contrary, it sounds like space is a GREAT place to have sex.
Re:Au Contraire (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, it's not space = sterility. (Score:2)
It's "if you have crappy shielding, you'll likely kill the fetus".
The solution is simple. Better shielding in such transit vehicles, as well as good shielding once at the destination.
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Wow. No coffee yet eh?
The issue is that insufficient shielding allows for greater amounts of radiation to penetrate the cabin areas of said transit vehicle.
Ergo, the issue is actually insufficient shielding.
At that point, the solution presents itself quite nicely. More/better shielding.
space sex (Score:5, Informative)
Space, it seems, is simply not a good place to have sex.
The quoted text doesn't really give any reason not to have sex in space - though several for why it is a bad idea to try and have a baby.
Terrible Article, Serious Issue (Score:5, Informative)
As soon as astronauts enter the zero gravity environment they start losing bone mass. Exercise doesn't help - based on spiral CT (so-called QCT) studies which measure bone loss in trabecular bone as well as cortical bone, the problem of bone loss is twice as bad as was once suspected.. it appears the trabecular bone you lose in spaceflight doesn't come back. That is, It may be permanently lost. As for reproduction, experiments with mice done by Russia were inconclusive (as so much of Russian space medicine is) but indicated that the embryo has trouble embedding. So where the article says "try not to get pregnant", there's most likely no chance of that anyway.
That's zero-g, what about partial gravity? The only data we have is from Apollo and no-one stayed on the Moon for long enough - or knew what to look for - to get conclusive results. When people ask "could humans colonize the Moon or other planets?" the answer has to be that we don't know. We'll probably not know conclusively until humans go there with the intention of staying, and making a new generation.
Now stop and think about that for a minute. If your idea of people-in-space is NASA astronauts then I hope you find this suggestion as distasteful as I do. In our modern world governments should not be sending anyone anywhere with orders to reproduce - it just seems a little totalitarian doesn't it? Maybe China will do it. Personally, I'd rather see free men and women go out to the frontier and populate it.
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I find the idea of bone-loss fascinating because treating bone-loss negatively it assuming the bone would hold up to Earth's gravity, which it won't. But the colonist aren't coming back to Earth. Whether this loss affect the production of blood, etc I don't know. But on a spaceship for 1000 year, we might evolve into something else that "can" live on non-earth-like planets. Isn't that cool?
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Now stop and think about that for a minute. If your idea of people-in-space is NASA astronauts then I hope you find this suggestion as distasteful as I do. In our modern world governments should not be sending anyone anywhere with orders to reproduce - it just seems a little totalitarian doesn't it?
Uh, what? Astronauts volunteer willingly. If there are no astronauts who want to go, I'm sure NASA would cancel the mission, but astronauts are usually more eager to push the envelope than NASA is.
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Re:Terrible Article, Serious Issue (Score:5, Insightful)
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Every deep-space ship in any self-respecting sci-fi movie seems to have a rotating part. Not because it looks cool. But because centripetal force is a very accurate and perfectly sufficient for all practical purposes simulation of earth gravity. 50m radius from axis of rotation, 2.25s per rotation, and you have a neat 1g. And due to 1st Newton's Law and no air friction, it needs only to be started once and requires no power to keep turning.
What we don't know — because we have no data at all — is how little gravity (or equivalent acceleration) is required to maintain a safe level of bone mass. The earth-bound bed-rest experiments don't really cut it because the body remains under gravity the whole time, even if from an unusual direction. Could we survive long-term on lunar levels of gravity? Or if not that, martian levels? If so, it makes building such centrifuges much simpler (less force, less material, less mass, less to launch,
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Actually there's a treatment which as far as I remember was developed for earthbound people with bone mass problems which may also work in low G or freefall.
It boils down to a vibrating surface you're strapped to or sit on and the vibrating stresses your bones a little to encourage bone growth.
Re:Terrible Article, Serious Issue (Score:5, Interesting)
The coriolis effect on the inner ear would make any astronauts in such a centrifuge permanently nauseous and disoriented. You need a _much_ large diameter to get a good enough approximation of linear gravity..
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That's zero-g, what about partial gravity?
I'd rather take the partial gravity of 1G than the FULL gravity of a singularity. But that's just my personal preference, YMMV.
Exercise doesn't help - based on spiral CT (so-called QCT) studies which measure bone loss in trabecular bone as well as cortical bone, the problem of bone loss is twice as bad as was once suspected.
Nah, that's not true- you're vastly oversimplifying things. Aerobic exercise doesn't help much, and we already know that from studying people on Earth who have low bone density problems. The critical factor is stress on the bones- stress builds density. In space, no gravity means no stress, so it's not directly the lack of gravity which is the issue, but the lack of stress.
Simulatin
Zing. (Score:2)
Space Shielding/Chastity Belt (Score:2)
Wouldn't the simple (yet uncomfortable solution) be to create a space chastity belt with extra shielding to protect the gametes during travel. You only need to protect a much smaller area.
And when it comes to failed fetuses, isn't that a self solving problem? Damaged sperm and eggs probably won't make it. But the healthier ones will have a better chance of fertilizing. And so what if you have a larger percentage of miscarriages? That is simply nature sorting life out. All you need are 2-3 healthy babi
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Interesting idea. In that case, perhaps we should send an all lesbian female crew to increase total child bearing potential.
Gravity (Score:2)
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The problem with interstellar travel is that you don't get to bring much of the environment that you need to survive. Unless, of course, you take a whole planet. That is, naturally, the best way to engage in such travel...
Or: Cosmic rays may impede generation ships (Score:2)
Unshielded ships may make female fetuses infertile by killing their eggs. This is no big deal if we're colonizing, say, Mars, as it's only a 6 month trip. If we had a generation ship going to Alpha Centauri this may be a problem, but that doesn't tie into Hawking's assertion that we need to colonize space. This is because colonizing another solar system before colonizing other bodies in our own solar system would be asinine. By the time we've colonized every planet and moon we can set foot on, we'll have th
the article quote seems inaccurate (Score:2)
Here's another problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting medical issue with radiation, but there are other issues with reproduction in space:
1) How do you get people to WANT to shag? The spaceship ain't gonna be big, and there's something called the Westermarck Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect#Westermarck_effect [wikipedia.org] (Hey how do I put in a link with with just "Westermarck Effect" highlighted as the link?)
2) What's a fair way to divide up the shagging opportunities? On Earth, we seem fine with letting unattractive people go unpaired, but on a spaceship, presumably everyone is needed for something. It might be hard to get motivated if you're not getting any.
Re:Here's another problem (Score:5, Informative)
Hey how do I put in a link with with just "Westermarck Effect" highlighted as the link?
Write full HTML for the link, e.g. The Westermarck effect [wikipedia.org] is done by typing "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect#Westermarck_effect">The Westermarck effect</a>. ;-)
You can do quite a lot in this way, e.g. bullet points, italics. If shashcode doesn't like what you've done' it'll strip it.
Try hitting the "Quote Parent" button to get a lump of HTML to play with
Mars is not "thousands of years" w=away (Score:2)
Also most of the radiation that is the problem is from the sun. Once a starship is underway, that will be pretty low. And it will have lots of shielding, probably megatonnes of water will b
Godwin's law compels me (Score:2)
From TFA: "Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."
Replace planet Earth with Germany and space with Russia, and you have almost a verbatim translation of Hitler's justification for operation Barbarossa.
If I could I would remind the speaker than in the long run, there is no survival, no matter how many worlds we infest.
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If I could I would remind the speaker than in the long run, there is no survival, no matter how many worlds we infest.
Oh really? Are you entirely sure of that?
And of course, a sci-fi reference [wikipedia.org]...
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Oh, I know why, perhaps it's because that is one of the single most asinine equivalencies I have ever heard drawn in the history of stupid commentary. Don't try to equate space travel with Nazi-like ambitions of world domination. That's just fuck
StarTreck "science" (Score:2)
Bad wording (Score:2)
It's not the "having sex" that is the bad idea. It's "trying to have offspring" that may be problematic.
Send embryos (Score:3)
If the voyage will be centuries long (or longer!) duration as is what we can expect for interstellar travels in the forseeable future, send embryos. They can be reliably frozen for long periods of time and, being very small, could be well shielded. Of course this presumes some sort of artificial womb (perhaps a placenta grown from thawed out stem cells?) and then artificial "parenting" system to guide, protect and educate the young until adulthood (now THAT would be a real test of applied psychology!).
I seem to remember coming across this idea in a later edition of one of Arthur C. Clarke's books, "The Songs of Distant Earth". SPOILER ALERT. The earth based civilization, having determined that the sun would explode in 1000 years starts sending many of these "seeding" probes to suitable star systems in the hopes that a few would survive. Despite the long odds against them (particularly because the human infants who are raised by machines grow up severely maladjusted) some survive and eventually develop flourishing colonies. Centuries later, shortly before the sun's demise the earth civilization discovers a way to harness the zero-point energy(?) and is able to send huge ships that can travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light (even so, the crew and colonists are still put into suspended animation). One of these ships suffers a breakdown near a previously established colony and puts in for repairs.
Magnetic Shielding (Score:2)
I did a little research into this for a Mega Joule Plasma discharge reaction vessel shielding in case of various particles or fields were generated. Didn't want to go sterile or alter my brain. Here is a few links. I had a PDF from 1960 that was like 600 pages detailing various ideas for the future of space travel and the huge amounts of Tesla required. Like if the magnetic field were to be able to collapse then the space ship would melt and implode. Can't seem to find the link right now.
http://engineering.
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In Space.. (Score:2)
No-one can hear her scream.
No sex in space? (Score:4, Interesting)
In fairness, TFA says only space isn't necessarily the greatest place to make babies. Inhabitants of the United States may be surprised to learn that some people have determined sex has a rather significant recreational component.
Magnets? (Score:2)
Earth's shield from cosmic radiation is its magnet field. What strength of magnetic field would you need to generate to protect a long-distance spacecraft? I'm aware that it's probably so strong it would induce cancer and cause mechanical and electrical failures on the spacecraft itself, but I'm just curious...
Does anyone know?
HAL.
Re:Magnets? (Score:5, Informative)
There's two types of ionising radiation to worry about: ions and photons.
Ions are hugely damaging but poorly penetrating. A helium nucleus won't get past a piece of paper, for example, while a proton is stopped by a modest thickness of aluminium. They're charged, so a magnetic field will divert them. If the Earth's magnetic field wasn't there, they wouldn't get past the atmosphere anyway, but they would start to erode it. It'd be similar on a spacecraft. You don't need a magnetic field to protect the occupants, but you'd be exposing the ship's hull and outboard systems to (perhaps non-trivial) radiation damage.
Photons are not as damaging but are much more penetrating. Your old-fashioned X-ray is the classic demonstration. Our atmosphere protects us from those by absorption. You can use a kilometer of gas, or a foot of lead. Either way that means carrying a lot of mass which can be a problem for a space mission. A poster above observed that colonists would be carrying resources like water that they could use as a shield though.
Not sure we have the *resources* for this... (Score:2)
SETI message!! (Score:2)
Begging for a slashdot poll (Score:2)
Seriously - '62-mile high' club sounds forced. A decade ago, I ran an informal poll at a launch vehicle company I worked for. The choices were:
I'll come back and post the top three winners later. I will say that I was surprised by the winner.
well... (Score:2)
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Our only hope is to create engines capable of pushing our vessels to high speeds as in 0.9c upwards. Let time dilation take care of the rest.
Hideous waste of energy. At 0.9c, you've put more energy than the rest mass energy of whatever you've accelerated to 0.9c. For example, at current energy price ($0.10 per kWh), I get that it'd cost around $6 billion [google.com] to accelerate 1 kilogram to 0.9c.
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Simple solution: all men work in engineering, all women work on the bridge. No direct access from one to the other. Couples have private cabins with a door into each section. This way, all women can socialise with each other and all men can socialise with each other, but each man only socialises with one women and vice versa. No jealousy, no sneaky visits to the med room etc.
But the men still get to fantasise about what the womenfolk are up to with each other....
HAL.
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I think you mean "solar system" and not "galaxy". The nearest galaxies are millions of light years away, meaning even with the best possible technology (travelling at approximately the speed of light, in other words) we would take millions of years to get there.