Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/scott-mark-kelly-twins-space-nasa.html#click=https://t.co/Tr2EtNP2z3

by secfirstmd • 7 years ago

51 50 7 years ago

Maybe the reality is that all the science fiction stories have got it wrong all these times: that we have to genetically engineer different humans to traverse interplanetary (and in the far future, interstellar) distances and to live in alien worlds, so that we have less in common with them, physiologically, than we have with, say, the Cro Magnons.

RobertoG• 7 years ago

That's the subject of many science fiction stories.

Paul McAulie excellent "The mouth of the whale" comes to mind, for instance.

jacobush• 7 years ago

Stephen Baxster IIRC has some weird dolphin like humans living on Titan.

bognition• 7 years ago

This is a major plot point in the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons

narag2• 7 years ago

I imagine interstellar travel with some kind of Matrix-like hibernation. But all the problems with interplanetary are just a matter of stinginess. Low gravity? Make a 2001 style ring. Radiation? Make a big ass ship with enough isolation.

Is that astronomically expensive? Of course. But avoid gravity well. Start building a Moon base with mining facilities, then move to Ceres, and son on.

Current Mars fever is a distraction. We have no idea what Mars gravity could do to babies born there. Do parents have the right to raise their children in Mars? Even if they're viable, they might want to come to Earth and find out their bodies won't resist the gravity. What about waiting for animal tests?

Udo2• 7 years ago

Current Mars fever is a distraction.

Yes, but it's a distraction from doing absolutely nothing at all with humans in space. I agree in a saner world we'd have built a Moon base first, and then moved on from there. But it's apparently not how we as a civilization operate.

Instead we set lofty and slightly impractical goals. If we meet those goals, we usually take two steps back and wait for a few generations. But if we are not successful, we usually never try again.

It's not ideal, but yes, I'd absolutely prefer an ambitious Mars program over nothing at all. And for decades, until recently, nothing at all was where we were comfortable.

We have no idea what Mars gravity could do to babies born there. Do parents have the right to raise their children in Mars?

Historically, we have been very bad at predicting these things, and we usually mispredicted on the side of doom. Yes, there will be a physiological impact, not just on babies, on everybody living there. However, there is no reason as such to assume babies in particular would be unviable there.

Today, parents can and regularly do make decisions about their children's mental and physical health that are absolutely known to be detrimental. For better or worse, we generally accept that children are brought up completely powerless over their lifestyle, their healthcare, their economic situation, their education, their belief system... Compared to that settling on another world with unknown dangers seems at least on par.

I'd wager that a child born on Mars today is way more likely to die of things other than gravity or the lack thereof. We already have animal test data in microgravity.

laHiesh1• 7 years ago

I think it's more likely that we would peruse spinning space habitats to simulate gravity regardless of whether zero gravity has long term and irreversible negative effects on the human body. I don't think it'll be quite necessary to genetically modify anyone.

djsumdog2• 7 years ago

The Expanse series kinda touches on this. In those fictional books, those raised in space (Belters, Luna, etc.) are often taller being raised in lower gravity.

Kim Stanley Robinson also kinda hits on this describing people who are raised on Mars. I highly recommend the Mars trilogy; best Sci-Fi I've ever read.

arethuza• 7 years ago

For interstellar distances I'd go with Greg Egan's Diaspora and Accelerando by Charlie Stross and assume that interstellar distances could only be achieved with uploaded minds - bags of meat and fluid being far too big, slow and delicate for the energies and distances involved.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

Drawing his own blood in zero gravity, for example, was a familiar routine. “I’ve had a couple spills in my time,” Mr. Kelly said. “You just reach out and grab the blobs of blood.”

That paragraph stopped me short. It reads like something from a Heinlein novel.

Klathmon2• 7 years ago

I absolutely love hearing stories from astronauts about how quickly they adapt to microgravity and how easy it is to forget when they come back.

Things like stories of them suddenly letting go of stuff they are holding on earth and expecting it to float there, or reaching out to grab on to a wall to stop themselves while walking down a hallway.

taneq3• 7 years ago

I've heard a couple of similar stories from people who spend a lot of time in VR and forget that the rules don't transfer back. One guy smacked his head into the fridge door trying to look inside it because he forgot that he would actually collide with the door.

TheBeardKing• 7 years ago

I guess outline.com doesn't work on NYT any more. Copy/paste here?

imglorp2• 7 years ago

Just delete all your nyt cookies.

brootstrap• 7 years ago

brilliant, does this work? It makes sense, great little hack

pgrote• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/6N9jR

duxup2• 7 years ago

Do what you got to do, but I'd like to take a moment to say I signed up for an online subscription. Journalism is important and I'm ok with a couple bucks a month to support it.

mises3• 7 years ago

I would rather not support the New York Times. I find their coverage to be overtly biased, and don't think that's worth giving money to.

I think the Wall Street Journal is closest to center: reporting leans left; editorials lean right.

rjf72• 7 years ago

Brave browser + anti-fingerprinting and blocking third party cookies gets rid of 90% of paywalls, including NYT. Blocking scripts gets rid of 9% more and then you're left with 1% that are quite onerous. All these settings are one-click options which can be saved on a per-site basis (if, for instance you'd prefer to allow device fingerprinting by default for some reason) using the lion icon in the top right.

It also now has things like one click instanced tor browsing (e.g. if its necessary to spoof your location for some site) and more. It started out as a nice idea, but has become leagues ahead of every other browser in terms of privacy. It's incidental, and I think poetic, that basic privacy protection ends up breaking paywalls as many are dependent upon tracking users.

sfly• 7 years ago

Have there been precious studies that look at generic changes in astronauts?

This article is great but it feels like everyone mentioned in it is making a lot of statements on an extremely limited sample size.

djsumdog2• 7 years ago

Yea, it's pretty rare to find identical twins, and rarer still to have one of them enter a space program. Hopefully we'll see more volunteer for research like this in the future.

It is certainly a bad sample size, but it's a start.

hFAUST• 7 years ago

Yeah, so far there were just estimations. Even this is still in a wayI mean my gf's father has a twin and they were mirror image of each other but then in less than 5 years both became so different that you can hardly even tell that they are related in any way. If there will be few more twins to repeat this project then a more generic result could be gathered.

everyone2• 7 years ago

His moustache fell off.

winseybash• 7 years ago

It's his twin brother, Mark, who has the moustache: https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/mark-scott-kelly-nasa-ht-jc-...

everyone2• 7 years ago

winseybash doesnt get jokes lol

DJBunnies• 7 years ago

I would expect a body to change after a year of any circumstance.

smeyer• 7 years ago

The point is that it changed in ways different to his twin's body, and some of those changes even reverted once he was back on earth for a while. It's pretty unlikely that this is all just an anomaly and the regular changes of a body over the course of a year independent of the fact he was in space.

VyseofArcadia• 7 years ago

I read his memoir when it first came out. It's mentioned briefly in the NYT article, but I highly recommend giving it a read.

Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same

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