What About Our Martian Colonies?

I see on MedGadget that there could be problems with reproduction in low- or no-gravity environments. It's only fair to note that no one has actually tried to conceive and bear young in zero-g as far as I can tell from other peoples' investigations, but recent experiments with in vitro fertilization in mice suggest that:

microgravity had minimal effects on fertilization. It may prove detrimental to subsequent development, however. Microgravity-cultured embryos successfully reached the two-cell stage and yielded viable offspring upon implantation into female mice, but at a significantly lower rate than their 1G counterparts.

Scientists are planning further experiments at different levels of gravitational pull, so we'll see whether or not the moon or Mars might make good places to develop viable offspring, even if zero-gravity isn't great.

If we're going to send an ever-growing army of the not-dead (by which I mean the living) to colonize the stars, this is important information to have.

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Martian Vacation...FOREVER!

Dangerous Intersection, quoting Lawrence Krauss, wonders if it wouldn't be worth considering, as a means of making a trip to Mars financially feasible, not planning for a return.

Just send some people to Mars and leave them there. Somebody would certainly be willing to go--heck, it's the first trip to another planet, and this opportunity doesn't come up often! Or ever!--but would it be morally acceptable to send them, knowing they were going to die there?

I was thinking how people used to go off on years-long sea voyages chasing whales and such, and often never returned, but there was always the possibility that they might, and the general idea that they at least intended to, which makes it different. There's something awfully final about knowing you're never coming back to an entire planet.

What I would wonder is, whether there's a specific time limit on the mission (we're sending you to Mars and then you have enough food, water and oxygen to gather information for six months, and then 'bye), which is appealing only in a very daring, suicide-mission, my-life-for-discovery way.

If it would instead be something where you could plan on having enough supplies to live out your life on Mars, that's much less alarming. (At least until Space Madness sets in when you're overcome by the unbearable desolation of being millions of miles from everything on Earth.)

It would be kind of lonely, and the living conditions would probably be pretty spare, but people have lived decent lives in spare conditions before. We could just send a few thoughtful introverts who got along OK but didn't need a whole lot of human social interaction, and they could putter around out there and send back reports and meditate on existence and eventually manage each other's bodily remains until finally one lingering hermit closed up the shop and went to bed.

Or possibly they'd all perish in a ghastly fashion, depending on whether or not it turns out Mars is inhabited by secretive subterranean life forms that are just waiting for us to come along and give them an excuse to flip out, as I like to speculate.

Anyway, I'm going to go on record as tentatively supporting the Send Hermit Volunteers to Mars program.

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