Near-weightlessness “causes [sperm] to flip around, to go upside down.… They don’t really know which way is up or down,” Nicole McPherson, a study co-author and a biologist at Adelaide University in Australia, tells the Guardian’s Tory Shepherd. The cells do “not really understand or know which direction they’re going in.”
I would worry also about proper bone and muscle development in utero. I think even under lunar gravity this should concern us. I remember reading in my youth about chickens raised in centrifuges having larger and more developed hearts and legs. I would worry about the opposite problem with babies carried and born in below 1 G environments.
I remember reading some 30 to 40 years ago that once people are no longer born on Earth, they will no longer be humans. The person writing that did not go into detail, but this is just one way that might evidence itself. In the juveniles of Robert Heinlein that I read, he pretty much ignored the issue of gravity differences beyond minor differences. He had young men from Ganymede in (I think it was) the Space Cadet Academy who, after a few months of feeling heavy, had adapted completely, and people traveling from Earth to Venus to Mars with no problems. I expect that he was more interested in other aspects of his thesis that drove the stories.
ReplyDeleteThe issues this study clearly will have greater concerns than what any Science Fiction writer wanted to write about.