• Question: if some people where to go to space and a female gave birth would the child be able to live,because it would adapt????

    Asked by dentrenator to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 13 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Humans are designed by evolution for gravity, so I bet there would be long term problems for people living their entire life in space. They might be fine in space, but never able to come back to Earth (I think I once read a SciFi novel which played with that idea).

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Wow, I don’t really know.

      In actual fact our bodies are pretty good at adapting to being in space. We don’t really know what happens to use over long periods, the longest anyone has been in space in /total/ is a couple of years and a few months in one go.

      But no one knows what would happen to our reproductive systems in space. It would probably be really difficult to give birth as you would keep floating off! But I would like to think the baby would adapt to life in space!

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      One big problem for people living in space is that their bones get brittle so they have to exercise a lot. A baby developing in space doesn’t get that chance, so I expect it would not be very healthy when born. So no, I don’t think it would easily adapt.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      In evolution, things don’t adapt as quickly as one generation – it usually takes many thousands of generations in a specific environment, and lots of tiny changes to an organism to allow it to adapt. So if the change in the environment is too sudden, then its most likely that humans wouldn;t be able to keep up and would probably not survive.

      But we can modify our environment enough so that even if people went into space, they could create artificial gravity and artificial atmospheres, so they can replicate earth-like conditions. Then, over many generations, space babies would become more and more able to cope with the conditions of space.

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