Space will make you short and ugly
New research shows that long-endurance space flight will have the side effects of making humans short, overweight, and generally unattractive. Much as floating around with no gravity would be fun for a while, after a while it leads to blood pooling in strange places, bone loss, and other effects.
Right now NASA is recruiting "pillownauts" to stay in bed for long periods of time to mimic the effects of space flight. Hopefully, sometime in the not to distant future we set out on missions long than those achieved 40 years ago.
But the end result - especially if there are generations involved - is not likely to be pretty. Humans may well end up short, blobby, and with really big heads: blood pools in the head without gravity as the heart is built to compensate for the gravity that is no longer there.
So while my dreams of humans colonizing space remain unchanged, unfortunately it looks like we might all be ugly when we do it.
Right now NASA is recruiting "pillownauts" to stay in bed for long periods of time to mimic the effects of space flight. Hopefully, sometime in the not to distant future we set out on missions long than those achieved 40 years ago.
But the end result - especially if there are generations involved - is not likely to be pretty. Humans may well end up short, blobby, and with really big heads: blood pools in the head without gravity as the heart is built to compensate for the gravity that is no longer there.
So while my dreams of humans colonizing space remain unchanged, unfortunately it looks like we might all be ugly when we do it.
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