Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Familes in space

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Can humans safely have babies in space? Daniel and Kelly talk about what we know about human health in space, and our prospects for starting families there. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Howdy, adults. If you're listening to this show with kids, we just wanted to give you a heads up that we're talking about the birds and the bees today. So decide for yourself. if it's time to switch to a different episode of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Giving birth is a truly profound and beautiful experience. But also, it really sucks. And it's super dangerous. According to UNICEF, there were 287,000 maternal deaths in 2020.

That's down from 447,000 deaths in 2000, so that's great news, but labor and delivery remain super dangerous. Not all places are equally dangerous, though. A lot of danger is removed when you have access to nearby health care. Which is why I find myself a little concerned when Elon Musk proposes we send one million people to Mars in the next 30 years. No humans will have ever been quite so far away from a hospital. And on top of that, Mars is a much harsher environment than Earth. For reasons we'll discuss today, the Martian environment could pose a lot of additional challenges for pregnant moms and their babies.

Can moms survive this process? And what about their babies? So today, we're talking about conception, pregnancy, labor, and subsequent child development in space. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. particle physicist, and I've continued my family's tradition of being born in one continent, raised in a second, and having a child on a third. Oh, wow. Go through the, where did you come from?

I was born in Israel, which is technically part of Asia, raised in America, and one of my children was born in Switzerland near the particle collider. That is very cool. I have no crazy travel stuff like that. I was born in New Jersey, raised in Ohio. Then I went kind of all over the U.S. for a while, but I've pretty much lived on this continent. It's exciting. Oh, yeah, and I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and mostly stay here. All right. Well, then my question for you today, Kelly, is where is the strangest place you've ever heard of a baby being born? So in Antarctica, there's this slice of Antarctica that has three overlapping land claims. So the UK, Chile, Argentina all claim this chunk of Antarctica.

And for geopolitical reasons, there's, it seems, this desire to have babies on this land chunk so that if we do ever go back, yeah, this is a great story. So if we do ever go back to an era where sort of history matters and you can say, well, like, yes, there's overlapping claims, but we were here doing science and having babies. And so I don't remember which it was either Argentina or Chile. They flew a pregnant woman out to the middle of nowhere so that you. she could have a baby. Who agrees to that?

Who agrees to have your birth be part of, like, geopolitical discussions? I mean, it's an interesting birth story, but I don't know. And then the other nation to one up them had a baby conceived and born on their research base. And so there's this, like, wait, Zach and I call it counter-stork technology or something like instead of, yeah. And so, so, yeah, I think that is the weirdest baby birth. story I have heard. What about you? Oh my gosh. That totally tops it. I mean, I've heard of babies born like in transit in the ocean like, you know, between continents. But I was wondering if babies had ever been born under really difficult circumstances like that. But I really have to question

like the moms. Like are they really nationalistic? They really want to play a role in these arguments between countries, like literally being a pawn in global diplomacy. That's crazy to me. I mean, I feel like the dad's decisions could have been, you know, part of it too. But, but yeah, no, I think parents, you know, having kids as part of geopolitical one-upmanship is not amazing. Is it TMI? We can delete this if it is.

To mention that my son was born on Halloween and there were little cat ears over the, like, blanket on my knees when I was giving birth to my baby because the doctor had dressed up as a cat and it was a weird experience. That's not TMI. That's awesome. Yeah, so, you know, I think pregnancy is always a little bit weird, but sometimes it's just weirder than other times. Well, here's hoping that all of your pregnancies are smooth sailing

and do not involve diplomats arguing outside. So geopolitics, complicate life, and other things that can complicate life are being in difficult environments when you need to give birth. And there's maybe no environment more difficult than space. And today we are tackling a question for, from a listener we got that was inspired by the episode where we interviewed Erica Nesvold. And here is the question now.

Hi, Daniel and Kelly. My name is Glenn Roses. During your recent interview with Eric Nesvold, a question occurred to me. Now, we cannot be an air planetary species unless we're able to have babies up there. And we know from our experience on the ISS that microgravity is not good for the human physiology in the long term. So where can babies safely gestate in the womb away from Earth? Thank you so very much for everything you do. Well, Kelly, this seems like a pretty basic question about space exploration because I imagine we're not just going to send like one generation of astronauts to colonize the solar system.

Those folks are going to want to have kids and we're going to want to perpetuate the species. You know, Elon Musk is always talking about making us multi-planetary. That involves having kids off earth, right? So I hope that we have like a really solid, well-researched answer to this because everybody's rushing into space, right? Well, I think you can explore space without us having the answer to this question, no problem. And Elon Musk would argue that you could just send, you know, something like a million people to space. You don't have to worry about reproduction initially.

You can get the whole thing up and going. And he's doing his best to create a million babies to send to Mars. He's still got a little bit of a way to go, but he's getting there. But, you know, I do think that before we send people to settle space, even if you sent a million people there, I've met humans. There's going to be babies, whether you plan on them or not. A million people are going to want to entertain themselves and making babies as part of that, yes. You told me that Katrina let you know once that in Antarctica there is a lot of these sorts of activities as a way to pass time. And I imagine that human behavior will follow us to these other isolated and confined environments.

Yes, because they actually mandate your schedule. at Antarctic Research Station, it's eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work. And then you have eight hours like, you've got to do something. And there's only so many times you can watch the same set of DVDs that are down there. You know, they don't have internet streaming. And so, yeah, people entertain each other. That's right. You know what I mean.

That's right. Card games get boring. You got to do something else. So we should know the answer to this question. We should understand whether this is something humans can safely do off Earth. And then we should figure out, like, how we can figure it out if we don't have the answer. I would absolutely agree with you. And I think that for a lot of folks, and for me in particular, when we started researching a city on Mars, we didn't know, actually, where we stand in terms of our understanding of how reproduction works in space.

So let's back up a bit here and ask our audience, what do they know? What do they think? Is it safe for humans to have babies on Mars? I would say main obstacles are psychological, medical, gravitational, gravitational, and, And radiation exposure is also a problem. If it's barely safe to have humans on Mars right now, grown adults who are trained to do it, having babies on Mars doesn't seem super safe or ethical.

Yeah, I think that should be perfectly safe. My bet is yes, but you may have higher rates of cancers and other bone density issues. I'm going to say that you'd be lucky if your children survive the harsh climates and thin atmosphere. that doesn't have breathable air and that has low gravity on the surface. It's not safe for humans to have babies on Mars

because it's not safe for all humans to have babies on Earth. I don't see any reason why not. Yes, it would be dangerous. However, we should have developed a safe as it can be environment for humans to live anyway. So what difference does it make if that human is a little one? Yeah, maybe. I think given that Mars is full of kind of toxic things like heavy metals and other contaminants in the soil, it might be really difficult to bring a child into the world that was healthy.

The more different the Mars environment is from the Earth environment, the more likely it is that our offspring will be different. I think we will have to use the precautionary principle and play it safe. No, it is not safe for humans to have Martian babies. We are very much custom-built for this planet and likely with poor adaptability for another planet. Of course it's dangerous for a woman to give birth on Mars. Mars wants to kill you. I'm not real sure that it's safe to have babies on Earth. You seem to need an entire hospital at your disposal to be able to do it here.

The lower gravity environment may affect the bones. Other than that, I'm gonna lost. Ultimately, it probably will prove to be safe. damage to the parents will be important, and maybe at some point we can re-engineer our genes to withstand more radiation. After all, cockroaches do that quite well. Maybe we can borrow their genes. So a lot of skepticism here. Yeah, folks have been reading your book and listening to us, talk about the crazy dangers and the environment of space and realizing how cushy we have it actually here on Earth. Giving birth in Antarctica is probably really safe and comfortable

compared to anywhere else in the solar system. That's true. But, you know, there were also some folks who felt pretty confident that we would be able to have babies on Mars, no problem. And I should say right at the beginning, it's totally possible they're right. We really just don't know. And at the beginning of the space age, there were a bunch of medical doctors who were concerned that just sending humans up in the space, we would die. Like, if you were essentially in free fall experiencing no gravity, you wouldn't be able to swallow, you'd never be able to eat. it would just be a total non-starter.

So there is a long history of worrying about things that don't end up being a problem. But I think we have pretty good reason to suspect that some of these things will be problems. You know, sometimes these problems go away only because you do worry about them. I mean, my Jewish heritage tells me that worrying solves problems. And so, you know, don't be down on people worrying. But less jokey, I think it's important to remember that our perspective is constantly shifting and that it's really hard to put yourself in the minds of people who knew less about the universe, you know, folks who thought maybe there was life on Mars and who didn't know what

space was like because it was before the era of space exploration. And so it's easy to look back on those folks and be like, ha, ha, what a bunch of goofs. But remember, they really didn't know. And people are going to look back on us in a hundred years and be like, ha, ha, what a bunch of goofs. They didn't know X, Y, Z. But, you know, everybody's just doing their best. Yeah. And I think a lot of your current experiences do color the way you look either forward or backwards. You know, like if we were a couple hundred years in the past, anywhere on earth where someone got pregnant, there'd be a pretty good chance that mom or the baby would die. Like, you would be more concerned about it. But now, at least if you live in the United States,

for most people in good areas where there's affordable, well, I don't know if there's a lot of affordable health care in the U.S., but where you can access health care, you know, you expect that you're going to survive through labor. But that's not even true in a lot of different places in the world. And so I, you know, I think a lot of us don't hear about mothers and children dying often, though, of course, it still happens. But maybe that makes us think it'll be easier just about anywhere we go. All right. So we do have some experience in space, right? We've been sending people to space for 50 years or so and even living in space on space stations. What do we know from our experience in space about women's bodies and conception and reproduction in space?

Well, not a ton. So only 15% of the people who have ever been to space have been women, which, like, That percentage surprises me. So we've sent something like 700 people to space. So that's still like a fairly large number of individuals and a decent number of women, but they've all been, you know, up there for different amounts of time, doing different kinds of missions. So the data from all of them isn't necessarily super comparable. And the longest consecutive stay by a woman is 328 days by Christina Koch. No other woman has stayed up for even a year up until this point. And so we don't have a lot of data on adult women bodies. we do know that bodies in general tend to start falling apart when you're in free fall. So you're experiencing something like no gravity. And as we've talked about on other episodes, muscles and bones degrade, visions, vision degrades. And we think all these problems are associated with low gravity. And do we know, even from our limited data, if it affects women differently? Like, obviously, women's and men's bodies, on average, are different.

Does free fall affect them differently? That is a great question. It is possible that someone has done that study, and I haven't seen it. I didn't, when I was reading, like, various reviews. I didn't see a lot of, you know, people saying things like, and bone atrophy is way worse for women or way worse for men. So it's possible we know that, but I don't know. And the effects that we do know about, which ones are maybe most relevant for pregnancy and conception and birth and that kind of stuff? I think the data related to muscles and bones are particularly concerning.

So astronauts in general, not necessarily just women, but the entire pool of astronauts that have been studied on this question, lose 1% of the bone density in their hip per month. You know, when labor kicks in and you're hoping that your hips are not going to break, like that sounds pretty scary. There's also been a study where they sent rodents to space when they were pregnant, and then they brought them back down to Earth,

and those rodents had to do a certain type of contraction twice as much, and the thought was that their muscles degraded in space, so the kind of muscles that they needed for contractions just weren't as strong as they should be, so they were in labor for a lot longer. And any of the women out there who have been in labor, they can all agree with me. You don't want that to last any longer than it has to, especially if you didn't request

the epidural soon enough and you do it naturally. So the effects on the human body are primarily muscle loss, which is going to impact going into labor, bone loss, and you need your bones. Also, don't you need to provide basic building blocks to build your baby? All those ingredients are taken from the woman's body, right? So if you're losing them because of the environment of space and you're losing them, because you're pregnant, that seems kind of dangerous for the mom's health. Yeah, no, absolutely. That seems dangerous for the mom's health. I mean, so you could send

her up there with the right kinds of foods, the right kinds of nutrients. We do know that when you're in free fall, you lose a lot of fluids. So your body is kind of thrown by the fact that a bunch of fluids are so high up in your body. So you end up peeing out a lot of it. We're not really sure what kind of problems that's going to cause. Additionally, you know, muscles are important for how our cardiovascular system works. They like push back against our blood vessels. And so, women who have had cardiovascular problems related to pregnancy might be particularly at risk when they're in an environment where their muscles are even more degraded than usual. So there's a lot of problems that are sort of hinted at by what we know about what happens on

space stations, but no woman who's been to space, as far as we know, has been pregnant or gotten pregnant, and as far as we can find solid evidence for, and Zach and I disagree about, you know, whether or not this has happened, we don't even know if sex has happened in space yet. Another thing I wonder is, you know, when a woman is pregnant, she's told. to have exercise certain ways and to eat certain ways in order to, you know, counteract some of these effects and support the growth of the baby. And then also when you go to space, you're told do certain exercises, drink more fluids, whatever. Do you think any of those instructions disagree? Are they in conflict? Or, you know, would a pregnant woman in space basically just,

like, do both of those things, like eat lots of protein and make sure you get extra exercise to avoid bone loss? Yeah, so that's a great question. So I remember when I was pregnant, I was told, you know, like, you should exercise a lot, but don't overdo it because if, you know, you don't want to, for a variety of reasons, you don't want to overdo it. But women or people in space are supposed to exercise something like two to three hours a day every day. And so it might be difficult to balance not overdoing it with making sure that you're keeping your bones and muscles strong enough. Also, you know, we change our diet in a lot of ways when we get pregnant. So, for example, you know, I didn't eat any processed meats because there was some concern of, hysteria and what that could do. So there were like no turkey sandwiches for me during my

pregnancy. It was a massive hardship. But the environment, like, you know, the space station is notorious for having like all kinds of weird stuff like growing on the other sides of the panels. People are more likely to get sort of like weird infections on their skin. Their immune system is already a little bit immunocompromise. So people who have, for example, herpes, late in herpes virus in their body, like the herpes virus wakes up because the immune system seems to be suppressed in some way. And so, you know, these are a lot of things that you could imagine possibly being a problem for the mom or the baby, but we just don't have a lot of data on any of it. Here's another potential problem. Since we've had children in two continents, we've discovered

that the cultural norms for what pregnant women should do are very different. So for example, here in the U.S., if you're pregnant and you're having caffeinated coffee, everybody's like, how dare you. That's so bad for you. But if you're in France, everybody's like one cup of coffee a day, no big deal. It's not that big a deal. But if you have salad, oh my gosh, they give you the look of death. Salad? Salad? Yes, because of the risk. Some lettuce has things growing on it. Like, basically, you just don't eat salad and all kinds of soft cheeses. You just don't eat in France when you're pregnant. So the kinds of things that people judge you for are very different on different continents. Now imagine you're in the International Space Station.

Do you follow the French rules, the American rules? Does it matter where you launch from, your citizenship? Like, who gets to judge you about your pregnancy decisions? I mean, maybe everybody gets to judge you because space is a global human kind activity, you know? And so as if moms aren't getting enough judgment, we can increase it even more in space. Awesome. Well, let's talk about how you get pregnant. You referenced this.

We don't know that anybody's actually ever done that in space. But what do we know about the science of reproduction? Is it possible? Is there anything we know about reproduction that would suggest that it's more difficult or easier or just weirder in space? So there have been some studies looking at sperm, for example, that have found that, like, I think it was bull sperm, move a little bit faster. But there was recently a study that found that sperm sent to space were sort of behaving

weirdly. So, like, the data that we have on just about everything related to reproduction in space is really haphazard and often gives conflicting results. And partly this is because NASA is really queasy about sex and reproduction. And partly that's because they don't want to be spending money and then needing to go in front of Congress to justify why like geckos were having sex in space. Like, why is that important? And I've asked a bunch of NASA people as like, is this, is it fair to say that NASA doesn't really want to fund stuff like this? And they're like, no, absolutely.

They don't. And so you'll get studies that manage to get up there because they're sort of studying something else related to reproduction in space. and then the reproduction stuff will kind of be a sideshow. But there have been some studies, including one on Earth, looking at cells associated with decidualization. So this is how the uterus prepares for implantation. And it looks like something about gravity is required for this process to go well. What is the process?

I'm imagining deciduous trees. Is there some analogy here to what's happening in the lining of the uterus? That's a good question. So there could be. So deciduous trees shed their leaves. And the uterus is sort of ripening and things. and providing more of, like, you know, sort of blood and food for a possible implanted embryo. And then, you know, once a month, that sheds. And so I hadn't put that together,

but way to go, Daniel. That's almost certainly what it means. And maybe gravity is to some extent required for that. And so we could have trouble getting pregnant, for starters, don't necessarily know that we will, but it's possible. And there's already a bunch of people on Earth who, you know, have fertility issues and find it difficult to get pregnant in the first place. And some of those issues, I guess, could be exacerbated when we get to space. All right, so say I give you a large budget to answer this question, what experiments would you do, and how do you do it in a way that's ethical? That is a great question, and I'm going to answer it after the break when I take you to the

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that have been sort of hinted at by having humans on the International Space Station on how these problems might indicate how reproduction could go in space. And Daniel asked me what experiments I would do to try to figure out if it's safe to have. have babies in space. Without worrying about what you can have to say in front of Congress. That's right. Oh, I don't know that there's any solution for that. Maybe you get a private

company to fund these research experiments. That's above my pay grade. But if somebody gave me a billion dollars or more, probably more, what I would do is I would either send satellites out past our magnetosphere and start spinning them to create something like Martian gravity. Mars is where most of the space settlement advocates are pushing for us to end up. And so Mars has 40% of Earth's gravity. We already know that being in free fall and experiencing something like zero gravity is a problem. So if you are in a satellite that's rotating, you could make Martian gravity. And you could try to get a handle on, you know, does 40% gravity, for example, remove all of the problems with bone density? Is 40% gravity enough to keep bones and muscles strong? We don't really

know the answer there. We don't even know the answer to what happens to your bones if you live on Mars for quite a while? No, nope, nope, nope. I mean, there's Jacks, the Japanese Aerospace Agency. They have a module up on the International Space Station that now has, oh, the acronym is Mars, but I forget what it stands for. It's got these little wheels where one side has rodents that spin to simulate different gravity regimes and another side the wheel doesn't spin so you can see what happens in

free fall. And so we now have some systems to start to get a handle on that, but we don't have loads of data coming from that system yet. All right. So you'd create the Martian environment in near Earth orbit by using centrifugal force. But I want to know what you're going to do in that environment. What experiments is Kelly setting up to answer these sexy questions? Well, you know, for starters, I would just put like a rodent colony in one, a mouse colony in another, maybe I don't know, a vole colony in the third and just kind of see like can they survive through multiple generations and then, you know, every once in a while harvest some of them and look to see if, you know, there's anything weird happening with any part of their physiology. And another reason why you'd want to put them out in orbit but out past our magnetosphere is that you could also start to get a handle on how space radiation is impacting their bodies.

You know, is that causing mutations that are resulting in problems down the line? And you're doing this in rodents because you don't care about rodent's feelings and whether their babies are mutated or because rodents are very similar to people in terms of their reproductive systems or why rodents? Well, first of all, I'll say that I adopted a rodent as a pet when it was done with some cancer research because I like rodents very much. I think they're very cute. I had rats as pets. I love them. They're absolutely wonderful. I had one sitting on my shoulder while I was working for a while I had it. But it's very cute. So rodents are like humans

in a lot of ways, but they're also not like humans in a lot of other ways. And so if it worked with rodents, I would feel like, okay, we've to some extent convinced ourselves that we've gotten over the first hurdle. And then after that, I would say, you know what, probably these satellites are just, they're not going to be big enough to do what we need to do next. So maybe the next step is to head to the moon and set up a research station. The real barrier is ethical, right? Like you want to the answer in humans, but you can't just start with humans. You can't just like put humans there and have them reproduce and see whether the babies come out weird, right? Because you can't just make weird babies in your science experiment, but it's okay to do with

rats. So how do we get from we can't do this experiment of humans to we can do this experiment of humans? Do we need to convince ourselves that works on rats and then on dogs? And then on pigs and that on monkeys, is there like a stair step ladder where at some point we feel like this is a reasonable chance to take with people? Yeah. So that's a great question. And there's not like a global preexisting, you know, step ladder that's been established. Like first you do this and then you can test it on humans. What I'm proposing is what I would feel comfortable with.

And so, you know, I'd feel comfortable trying it out on rodents first and then maybe scaling up like, you know, have some dogs at the research station and see how they do. People like having dogs around anyway and then send up chimpanzees. But of course, that is ethically difficult. So it's not clear how easy it would be for you to get permission to do something like that. But then maybe you could say, okay, we're going to have a woman conceive on the moon. And we're going to check her out every single day. And if anything looks like it's going wrong with mom or the baby, we immediately bring her back to Earth. So one of the great things about the moon is it's about three days away, whereas Mars is six months away at best,

if you're at the right window where you can leave for it, which only opens every two years. So testing stuff out on the moon, if something goes wrong, you can send them back really quick. Also, the moon has one sixth the gravity of Earth. And so if things go well at one sixth Earth gravity, they're probably going to go great at Martian gravity, which is even higher. That's kind of how I would do it. I'd test things out in satellites and then move to the moon and sort of slowly scale up until I convinced myself, this is safe to do on the moon. Now we're ready to start trying it farther out. But what do you think?

If you were in charge, what would you do? Oh, man, this is why I do particle physics because you don't need IRA. B's or ethical questions when you're smashing particles together. This is even why I avoided any part of physics that has like immediate applications. You know, my parents worked in weapons programs and I was like, yikes, that's too complicated morally for me. I really like to separate my research from these moral questions, even though the moral questions are really fascinating. I don't want to be in charge of making those decisions. And I can't imagine experimenting on my baby. Like the women you talked about who are willing to give birth in Antarctica, that definitely

comes with additional risks, right? I remember when we were having kids, I wanted to absolutely minimize the risk in every direction because this is your kid's life you're talking about. So I can't imagine saying like, yeah, let's go get pregnant in a place. Nobody's ever gotten pregnant before. I just can't imagine being in that place. But hey, everybody's different. You know, some people want to break barriers. But tell us what is unusual about the moon's environment. Like you told us about the effects on the human body of free fall, but on the moon there must be other things that we have to worry about specifically. Yeah.

So let me back up real quick for the ethics issue. And so I agree this is like a difficult ethical thing to build up to. And, you know, the first woman who gets pregnant on the moon, like I would not want that to be me. But what I would not let it be me. But one of the things that I worry about is that as space tourism increases and, you know, people get more alone time when they're up there, I'm worried we're going to get these data accidentally and in a like non-consistent way. And so I would love to see us investing

and getting some more of these answers in a more consistent way so we can let people know what the risks really are. And I'll note that I also did everything I could to reduce risk during pregnancy. But I met plenty of people who I would say, like here's what I think the risks are about giving birth on Mars.

And they either thought that I was like overselling the risks. Like one of them said, you know, wombs are a neutral buoyancy tank. Gravity's not going to matter. It'll be fine. I would have babies on Mars. And so there are people who are not whispags, like you and me and would be willing to do it.

But that's not me, yeah. No, as long as people know what the risks are and are well-informed can make their decisions, but I guess there are ethical issues there. Like, we don't let people make some decisions about their babies. Like, we don't let people engineer their baby's DNA, right? Just because your parent doesn't mean you have complete control over the pregnancy and this kind of stuff. So there's some really tricky issues there, even if we have some initial data. And, you know, parents can sign consent forms, but their children can't.

And we don't actually know that babies who are born on Mars could ever return home. So maybe developing in a lower gravity environment means your body would never be strong enough to survive Earth gravity. But you asked me about the moon. Yeah, because I was listening to you say that we could always bring the mom home. She's only three days away. But I was wondering, aren't there some situations where a problem has cropped up, which is not reversible just by going back to Earth? what are the particular dangers of getting pregnant on the moon? Yeah, so this is a tough question.

Okay, so say we do get our research station on the moon and the rodents are doing great on the moon. So then we know that reproduction at low gravity, one sixth of Earth's gravity, doesn't cause any problems. We may be at this point have hopefully already figured out what happens when you're exposed to space radiation and how to shield against that because the moon has no atmosphere

and no planet-wide magnetosphere. So all the space radiation hits the surface of the moon straight on. So hopefully we've figured out radiation shielding. So that's not a problem. What about the regolith on the moon? Is there anything weird about that we have to worry about? I mean, that is some nasty stuff. So, like, you probably want mom to stay inside the entire time.

You probably want almost everyone to stay inside most of the time. So the problem with the regalith is, and we talked about this in our episode about challenges of working on the moon. It is electrostatic, so it clings. it's also really fine pieces that are also super jagged. And so there's concern that if you breathe it in, it's going to cause what's called Stone Grinders Disease here on Earth, where essentially these tiny sharp particles scar your lung over and over again,

making it really hard to breathe. So we're going to have to be super careful to make sure that we don't bring any of this into the habitat with us. And between not going outside often in radiation shielding, which is often in the form of or often proposed to take the form of burying your habitat, in this regolith, you're not going to be going outside much. And we don't really understand the implications of that. So, like, yes, there could be some mental health implications of never going outside. But part of how we extract calcium from food and then incorporate it into our bodies is by using sunlight to produce vitamin D. So if you are underground all the time and not getting

any sunlight, is that going to mess with your ability to produce your own bones and then to produce the bones in the fetus? We don't know. So maybe you'll have to sit in front of those like full spectrum lights all day long to try to get yourself in a vitamin D so you can make this stuff. So you'll be nicely tanned. So you'll be nice. Yeah. I guess that's good. So the moon is sort of like Mars light.

Well, I guess it's more extreme in terms of gravity. If things work on the moon, you can have pretty good confidence that a lot of things will be okay on Mars. And if things don't go well, you can get home quickly. But so let's go ahead and head out to Mars. So Mars is on average, 100. 40 million miles away, really far. With current propulsion techniques, it takes six months to get there. And you can only leave every two years when like an orbital, when a window opens up in Mars and

Earth are in sort of like the right locations as they're traveling around the sun so that you could get to Mars as fast as possible. And that means that if you're out there, you are like on your own. If you need medical equipment, you are not going to be getting a resupply ship. And so there's a lot of planning that you need to do. I was going to ask during Katrina's pregnancy, were there any medication she needs, but maybe you don't want to share that on air. Yeah, Katrina has type one diabetes, so her pregnancy was considered high risk. And actually, when she was pregnant with Hazel, near the end of it, she stayed in lab very late one night and missed the last bus home. And she ran to catch it and sprinted at like 30 weeks pregnant. And then started

feeling not very good. But came home and went to bed. And at 2 o'clock the morning, she woke up and she was like, something is wrong. So we rushed to the hospital. And something was indeed wrong. She had help syndrome, which can be very dangerous. And the doctor was like, this will kill your wife very soon. But the cure is we just take the baby out. So she had an emergency C-section. And so we were very glad to have excellent medical facilities nearby. And I imagine if you're going to build a colony on Mars and consider having pregnant women there that you're going to want excellent medical facilities there, right? Yes, right. And I don't think we've gotten far enough in any of our planning to say like, okay, the third rocket is going to be

filled with just equipment for C-sections and stuff. But there's a lot of equipment that we need to keep women and babies alive. And that equipment is why we do so well. So, you know, I ended up having hypertension for both of my pregnancies. I had to be induced, which meant I needed oxytocin, which needs to be refrigerated at stable temperatures. There was a study in sub-Saharan Africa that found that a bunch of women were hemorrhaging. So oxytocin is also used not just to induce the contractions that you need to start labor, but also to cause additional contractions to pinch off blood vessels and stop hemorrhaging if a woman is hemorrhaging at the end of labor, which is the way most women die if they're going to die in pregnancy. And this oxytocin

wasn't working as well in some regions of sub-Saharan Africa. And the hypothesis was that somewhere along the trip that it made to sub-Saharan Africa, the refrigeration broke down and this like unsteady temperature caused it to not be as effective. So it only needs to be cold when you delivered. It needs to never have been warmed up ever. Yes. So you need backup refrigerators. You need. You need to need to figure out how much oxytocin you need, you need a C-section equipment, you need blood pressure medication, and that needs to be shelf-stable for as long as it's going to take for a resupply to get out there. There's just a lot of stuff that keeps humans alive in Western countries that, you know, some people tell me, hey, look, we don't have to bring that stuff

with us. There are women who give birth all over the world without that stuff. And while that's true, I think that our, like, lack of ability to provide adequate medical care to women in, like, remote regions isn't good. It's not something we should be bringing with us out into space. We shouldn't be like, oh, we do it there. We'll do it in space too. But I've gotten off track. There's a lot of planning that you need to do. Mars offers a couple unique additional challenges. That regolith on Mars is worse in some ways than that regolith on the moon. And one of the ways that it's worse is that it's laced with perchlorates. These are endocrine disrupting chemicals. They mess with the stuff that your thyroid does. And the food and drug administration warns that for

fetuses being exposed to perchlorates can mess with nervous system development. But what are per chlorates? Are they an organic molecule? How are they made? Like, why do they exist on Mars and not the moon? The moon has a lot less of a bunch of things like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus. The moon just sort of generally seems to be poor in a bunch of stuff. Mars has more stuff available to be reacted with and somehow that results in perchlorates would be my best answer. But do you think you can sort of summarize it? Well, I'm definitely not a chemist, but perchlorates, are a combination of chlorine and oxygen, and I think there is more chlorine in the Martian soil, and then the UV hits that and forms these perchlorates. But basically these things are a simple

chemical compound, but they're bad for us. Can you tell us why they're bad for us from like the biological point of view? Why is this thing so dangerous for fetuses? Sure. So I believe the answer is that our thyroid, there's an iodine that our thyroid collects and uses to make hormones and perchlorate sort of interrupt the ability of the thyroid to use the iodine to make the hormones that it usually makes. And when that gets disrupted, you get problems with metabolism and nervous system development. So that sounds especially bad for fetuses. Yes. Yeah. And a reason that this becomes particularly relevant is not just because if you go outside, you might accidentally bring it back in if you get regolith on your suit, but also when you grow plants in dirt or soil that has

preclorates, the perchlorates get pulled out of the soil and go into the plant tissues. And so if you're growing your plants in either water that has happened to take up some perchlorates because preclorates are water soluble, or you haven't gotten all the preclorates out of the dirt, if you decide that you're going to like be old fashioned and grow your food in the dirt, then you have to be concerned that mom's taking in these perchlorates. Wow. So mom can't eat any food grown on native of Martian soil, basically. Well, so this is where I can hear the space settlement advocates yelling, well, you're overselling the difficulty.

It's water soluble, so you could just bring regalith in and then rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse until it's gone. And then you could grow in it. But now you also have to make sure that you don't have chlorates in your water. And I talked to a friend of mine who's a geologist who works with perchlorates. And I was like, does that sound like just rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, problem solved. And he goes, I don't know, man.

All I can tell you is that I only work with this stuff. fume hoods. That's how nasty it is. I will only work with this if there's a fume hood on. So I would be concerned. Like when we bought our farm, if they had said, well, if you rinse the soil, the endocrine disrupting chemicals that are in there, it'll be fine. You can still grow food for your family. I'd be like, I'm living somewhere else. So anyway, you're just going to have to be really careful to make sure that this like pretty nasty toxin doesn't get into your food or water in any way. But let's take a break. And then we will talk about what will happen if it turns Turns out that Martian gravity is just not going to work for human reproduction.

Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane. with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this. Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close.

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She doesn't have the right muscles for contractions. The baby is just not developing at all. And it's just, you know, development for the baby is just not going according to plan. And this is not outrageous, right? Basically every human ever conceived and carried and born has been within 1G and using the benefit of Earth's atmosphere. And so there's reasons why evolution. may be dependent on it, right? It wouldn't be ridiculous to discover that these are necessary for humans to conceive and

birth successfully, right? Right. Yes, this is the environment we're adapted to. It wouldn't be surprising to me if we needed. And so, you know, maybe some people would say, okay, it didn't work on the moon, but the moon has one sixth of Earth's gravity. Maybe Mars's 40% will be enough. So maybe we go out there and we discover actually the rodents can't make it work at 40%

either. We talked to some space settlement advocates who are like, well, there's another solution. Maybe you just need Earth gravity while you're pregnant, in which case we can put you on like a banked racetrack and create 1G. And I puked a lot during my pregnancy. I think I would be puking a lot more under that scenario. I'm imagining those devices they use to test astronauts for high G where they like put them in those chairs and then spin them around. And you're saying no bed rest. You've got to sit in one of those things the whole pregnancy.

Oh my God. I mean, or maybe you only need to sit in it at night, like eight, you just sleep in it, eight hours a day. Maybe that's enough to make you strong enough. Like, we just, we really don't know. But say, say women decide they don't want to do that. They don't want to spend their pregnancies on a banked racetrack. The rotating space settlement people argue that now they are the only game in town.

So these rotating space settlements, they're these giant structures. They can take a variety of different shapes, but the one that I immediately imagine looks sort of like a bike wheel and it kind of spins and you live around the rim and you can simulate gravity by spinning fast enough. So you're saying if it's not possible to have babies in Martian gravity and nobody wants to sit in one of those spinning racetracks, then you basically can't be on the surface of Mars. You have to go up into space and simulate Earth gravity in a space station. Maybe you could just put on like an incredibly weighted suit on Mars so that you, maybe that would keep your muscles and bones strong enough?

We just, we don't know. I'm saying that it's possible that we will discover there's no easy solution to 40% Martian gravity and then the rotating space station people can stand up at the conferences and say, we won, we won. But also you're just talking about the pregnancy itself. What about the development of the kid, right? Like, what if you need gravity to grow up into a normal human being? Then this kid's going to be on a racetrack until they're 18 or up.

into space. You can't go back down to Mars. Right. And so I feel like this is where questions about social issues start to come into play. Like, what if some people want to live on the surface of Mars? But moms and children need to live in these rotating space stations. You know, what kind of social dynamics does that create? And, you know, maybe you only need to live in a rotating space station if the child ever wants the option of returning to Earth. Maybe you can develop on Mars if you never plan on leaving. Like, we just, we don't know how this kind of stuff will play out. Like, this is the current state of our knowledge. decision you'd have to make for your kids. Like, yeah, you get to grow up on Mars, but you can never

go to Earth. That would be insane. I mean, Earth is so awesome. Like, I mean, I can imagine my family moved from Ireland to New York City, and I can imagine someone being like, well, what if you're born in New York City, but then you never get to go back to Ireland? Like, what are you doing your child? Well, you should feel responsible for raising your kids in Virginia. I mean, they didn't have a choice in that, right? They have to always tell people they come from Virginia. You saddled them with that, their whole lives. They seem very happy. They seem very happy.

And in fact, you know, when we lived in California, we experienced an earthquake. And I think that would scare Ada quite a bit if she had been a bit older. She just, they just have to learn to ride it out, you know, it's fun. It's like a theme park ride. You know, she also is, I hope she doesn't listen to this episode. She's a little scared of some theme park ride. That's fair. Me too.

Yeah, yeah. Some of them are intense. When I went to Cedar Point last time, I like the rides that I used to love, Now when I go around the corner, I like, you know, my arms are in the air. I'm screaming and then I pass out around the corner, which makes me think I'm probably not a good candidate for those banked racetracks either. Spend the whole time passed out. One more reason why you shouldn't go to space.

As if we needed another one. All right. So we were talking about having moms and maybe even their kids in hygiene environments near Mars, if we think that it's probably not possible to carry the pregnancy and give birth and maybe raise your kids in Martian gravity. You could abandon the Mars plan altogether, and these rotating space stations could go anywhere. So a lot of the places that they're proposed are at, like, Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull of various objects more or less cancels out, so you don't have to use a lot of fuel to stay in one place. But, you know, you could put them near the asteroid belts for resources or near the moon or whatever.

They could go anywhere. I like your ZZ top pronunciation of Lagrange points. That's awesome. Oh, no. How am I supposed to say it? Well, I think it's not named after the town in Texas, Lagrange, but probably. probably the French mathematician Lagrange, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Oh, no.

I'm thinking about all the conferences I've been to now where I've said that wrong. How, how, how, how, how. That was good. I also apparently have been saying magnetosphere, it's magnetosphere or something. I've been, anyway, I'm an embarrassment to my children and always will be. No, I'm going to talk about Lagrangians from now on in particle physics. Okay, good. Well, your class will be more interesting because of it, I'm sure.

But these rotating space stations, it's worth noting they're going to be difficult engineering challenges, and we haven't built them yet. So, like, you know, if you think about how big the international space station is, to make a station that could hold a lot of people and not have to spin so many times that you'd feel sick due to the spinning, you would probably want it so that the wheel of the rotating space station could fit around the international space station. So, you know, I guess the diameter of the wheel would be the same as the like length of the International Space Station at its widest point. And already the International Space Station is one of the most expensive things that has ever been made. And it's not rotating. And so when you start, you know, thinking about how you're going to make these, it's going to be tough. Not impossible, but it's going to be tough. And it's not the kind of thing that like, you know, if Musk sends people to Mars and they start reproducing in the next few decades,

these sort of rotating space stations might not be available yet so that you could like shuttle them up. there to try to save their lives. But Kelly, I've heard entrepreneurs say with confidence, we'll have our first rotating space hotel in 2027. Are you saying that's oversold? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's probably oversold. I mean, I could be wrong. Rotating space hotel by 2027, really, huh? Mm-hmm. Okay. With great confidence. Wow. And is it going to be rotating at 1G or just providing enough gravity that you're not going to be in complete free fall? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I feel like you want at least enough gravity to make sure that like when you're in the bathroom, everything moves in the direction you want it to. That makes everything

cleaner. Well, maybe they can have a swimming pool at the center of it, like a zero G bubble of water. Everybody can float in. That would be amazing. Did you watch, oh, there was a movie with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Passengers. Yeah, where the gravity gave out. I've seen all the science fiction. And the water in the pool was, anyway, that was a scary scene. But yeah, okay, so maybe we will have tourist hotels by 2027. I'm a little skeptical. I don't think they're going to be out at Mars at that point. And I don't think they're going to be big. enough to be a permanent housing structure for thousands of people. I could be wrong. So there's one other place that folks propose if it turns out gravity is a problem. And you are probably,

well, you know me. So you're probably not going to be surprised what the answer is because I've probably, oh yeah, because you were on the call where we interviewed Guillermo Sunline for Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. But yes, Venus is the other place where people are proposing. Venus is the goddess of fertility, right? Oh, yes. Yes. Very appropriate. appropriate. And no one's proposing the surface of Venus. And why is that, Daniel? Because the surface of Venus is totally inhospitable. It's very high temperature. It's very high pressure. It's crazy. Like the things we've landed on the surface of Venus have lasted for like minutes or hours before being melted and crushed. There's also like sulfuric acid rain.

It's basically not the kind of place you'd want to go even if you were like the rock, not to mention a baby. Anytime I read about Venus, it's always compared unfavorably to hell and as being like Worse than hell. But some folks note that if you are up in the atmosphere, there's a part of the atmosphere where you are like above the sulfuric acid clouds and you're experiencing 1G and the atmosphere is thick enough to protect you from space radiation. So if you can make a floating environment, then you could have the 1G that maybe we're going to need to have babies. And so I, you know, I think the humans to Venus people would say,

if we think this gravity thing is a serious problem, we should be serious about floating habitats in Venus. That only makes sense to me if you want to live on Venus anyway. Why otherwise would you go to Venus to have babies? Right? Like if you're going to colonize Venus, sure, it's nice if you're going to have babies on Venus. But if your goal is to colonize Mars

and explore the outer solar system, doesn't seem to me to me much advantage to have like a terrible floating place just above hell that you could also go to to have babies. So I think they're saying that we just need to find the places in our solar system where we can create self-sustaining settlements and that we haven't been serious enough about considering Venus as one of those places. So this isn't just like a nice place you go during your pregnancy vacation.

This is like where humans are going to live out their lives and have families. Oh, I see. Forever. Let's move closer to the sun instead of going out to explore the universe. I don't know. It feels like it's going backwards to me. Not a big fan of moving to Venus. I mean, I'm not signing up for any of it.

these plans, to be honest. So I thought maybe we could wrap up by talking about how optimistic I am that we're going to be able to get this research done before the tourists start giving us the answers. And to be honest, I'm not super optimistic right now. So as I mentioned, NASA's super squeamish about funding stuff like this. So we're not getting government funding. And it's hard to imagine companies being able to find profitable routes to finding the answers to these reproduction questions.

Well, I know you don't like Elon Musk questions. but do you think Elon's new influence on the government might change that? Because he's a big proponent of making the species interplanetary. And I know he likes to rush to the sexy bits without necessarily doing all the homework. But do you think like doing studies about pregnancy and childbirth in space could maybe tickle those guys fancy? I mean, that could be a silver lining. Musk does not seem concerned about these questions. It doesn't seem to me like he would want to be pushing the government to spend a bunch of money to get the answers to these questions.

think he feels like we will go out there and find the answers to these questions when we get there. Maybe with tragic consequences. Yeah. I mean, I think that they, that Musk and others think that, you know, people like me are way too risk averse. It'll probably be fine. And if not, we'll just let natural selection take care of things, which is, of course, like that means a lot of death.

It's like a way that hides the fact that lots of death could happen. It would be great if there were funding. I think there are a couple companies that are trying to study reproduction in space with the hopes that the research will produce patentable technologies that can then be used to pay for like the next step in the process. I hope that works out. It's hard for me to imagine. Like, I don't know.

Maybe you do learn something about reproduction and microgravity that produces some technology. That would be great. What about people having babies on Earth in risky environments? You know, people living in the Ukraine near Chernobyl exposed to higher radiation or whatever. Can we do something? Learning from those experiences,

those risks people are already deciding to take and extrapolating from there? I mean, that's a great question. So the radiation in Chernobyl that we would maybe be learning something from is different than the kind of radiation we expect we're going to experience in space. So I don't think you're going to get a lot of great data from that. What about pregnant stewardesses because they spend a lot of time at high altitude and they're exposed to more space radiation? If it turned out that they had more radiation associated issues with their pregnancies, that would be good reason for us to worry. But if they were fine, that wouldn't mean, for example, that things like partial gravity is not going to be a problem anymore. So there are some environments that give us some insights, but the data are going to be hard to collect in a systematic way, mostly because of ethics associated with, you know, doing experiments with humans.

Like, you wouldn't want to send the pregnant stewardess up, like, more often to see if the extra radiation causes problems. You and your friend Campo-Hannon have a show on exactly this question, don't you? Yeah, so she wrote this book called Eve about the evolution of the female reproductive system. And she contacted me and she was like, you know how much reproduction sucks on Earth. an expert in that and you're an expert in how awful space is we should do a show together where we sort of jokingly inform people about that. We could hire some artists to create outfits that sort of imagine ways we might be able to help women have safe pregnancies and labors in this environment. And we did the show at the MIT Museum and we're going to do it at the Royal Institute

of London on April 17th. And we might have a couple other shows in the UK where we were there. So, you know, maybe we can all laugh about this problem together. If we don't have answers, at least we have jokes. That's right. The motto of this podcast is well. That's right. It's, you know, the best way I know to live a life. All right.

So let me end by asking you, when do you think the first baby is going to be born on Mars if you had to put a year on it? So I think the answer is going to depend on geopolitics and stuff like that. I would like the answer to be 30 years from now or something because I think 30 years would be the right amount of time to sort of, Biology research can't be rushed in a lot of ways. Like you just, you have to live through the generations that it takes. And, you know, if you can successfully have a baby on the moon, you probably want to stay there for a couple years to make sure they develop okay. And maybe that they go through puberty, okay.

So I just, I feel like we want to do this slowly. But I can also imagine that, you know, with Musk's newfound geopolitical clout, if he is able to stay on his timeline, he could have people finding the answer in what I think are unethical ways much sooner. So I guess I hope the answer is decades. But do you fear it? might just be a few years. Yeah, yeah.

What do you think? I think it'd be foolish to predict the future. That's what I think so. I'm curious to see what happens. I'm curious and scared. So anyway, write your senators and tell them that they should be funding sex and space. That's right. And let's hope that the first babies born in space and on Mars are happy and healthy.

See you next week. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it.

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