# The ethics of bearing and raising children in micro-gravity



## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

For the past month or so I have been posing to space scientists, entrepreneurs, and one astronaut what I believe is a key ethics question regarding space exploration and colonization, but have received no answers. So I’m posing it to this forum. This is a paraphrasing of what I have been putting in my as yet unanswered emails:

As a science educator and writer, I have been keenly interested in space exploration and colonization since I got up before dawn as a nine-year-old to watch Alan Shepard get launched into space. 
My specific interest in our current efforts and near-future plans in space have to do with a particular ethical position/question I have regarding space exploration and colonization. I would like to know your thoughts on this ethical question as an (astronaut, space entrepreneur, space scientist, especially with your specialized knowledge of human DNA and genetics), and as human beings with your eyes on the skies. 
(This section varies with the specific person I’m asking. Here I’m asking you Sci-fi writers.)

As simply as such a complex question can be put, it is this:
Knowing that being born and raised in a gravitational field that is 17% (the moon) to 38% (Mars) of the one in which humans took billions of years to evolve is physically damaging, *is it ethical to conceive, bear, and raise children on Mars or on the moon? *If done, it would be, by definition, without these children’s consent that their physiology and genetics would be unalterably changed—including genetic changes that could be passed down to future generations, even if such persons chose to go through the arduous (and possibly impossible) task of returning to earth gravity?

Anyone else considered this question in their writing? Any thoughts on why I’m getting no response from those I’ve contacted with this question? 
NASA currently has very little on its public websites on sexuality in space, let alone child-bearing, saying only that there has officially been NO sexual activity in any of their spacecrafts or on the ISS as of yet. They are under surveillance 24/7, so this is probably true, but it simply cannot continue to be so.
Missions to Mars will last _*years. *_Musk and others are already putting money into colonization—which more than implies human breeding off-planet.  Plans are being made in many companies, agencies, and countries. This question and it’s ethical considerations MUST be addressed soon, imo. 
What do you Sci-fi writers think?


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## Droflet (Mar 14, 2021)

*'officially *been NO sexual activity in any of their spacecrafts or on the ISS *as of yet*.' 
I'll get to your question shortly. But first, what???? Who are they trying to kid? If anyone had the chance of zero G sex they would jump at it.  Cough, so to speak. To me, it is inconceivable that after all of these decades, no one has, ah, engaged in such activities. Rant ends. 

Now to your question. It is one that has never occurred to me to ask, either from a logistical or ethical viewpoint. This might be why you have received such a deafening silence to your correspondence. Is it ethical? Hmm. I would need to do significantly more research into what the corporations and NASA have in mind. Do they plan to build a permanent base? Multigenerational? How big will it be? Enough room to house a hundred families or only a few? 
There are those who ponder the same issues on Earth. Oh, good Lord, how many times have I heard from a disgruntled teen the words, 'I didn't ask to be born.' To which my answer (jokingly, of course) is, 'Well, it's not too late to sew you into a sack and drop you in the river.' Some people believe that the creation of sentient life is a very serious and even sacred step for any of us to contemplate. I suppose they have a point. Yet, procreation is sewn into our DNA. Even gay people want to have a family. Boy, Michael, I think you've opened up a giant can of worms, with this one. 
I've read, probably, hundreds of SF books about colonization and this issue has never been raised.  Mentioned in passing, but not in depth. Except for Stranger in a Strange Land. All right then, there a probably a lot more, but ethics, unless I fell asleep during the read, was a minor if not trifling component to the story. 
Okay, enough of my babbling on. Bottom line: I don't know. Glad to be of assistance to you. This one's too tough for me to get my meager brain around. Hope you get some replies. Especially from those lying sods at NASA.


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## Dave (Mar 14, 2021)

Michael Bickford said:


> Anyone else considered this question in their writing? Any thoughts on why I’m getting no response from those I’ve contacted with this question?


So, two questions here. The first, I can't you help with, but I do see parallels with the debates over human cloning and IVF and Mary Helen Warnock wrote much about the ethics of that, and she was an adviser on ethics to the UK government. I expect you are familiar with her books, but if not, that might be a start.

For the second question, I would expect that it isn't something that they have thought about very deeply and so are unwilling to put themselves on the record for you. Scientists are just normal people, not philosophers, so as for most people, they generally think in terms of whether something "is" possible and not much about whether it "should be" possible. There is always a question of "drawing a line" but often that line is crossed before anyone has realised it even existed. I'm thinking here of the quote from Oppenheimer, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'.

You are entirely correct that it is something that will need to be tackled before we colonise space, but it might be that the question is avoided right until events actually demand it. If we "had" to leave Earth to avoid some catastrophe then there would be no question. If we are doing it for exploration and the advancement of science then that is entirely different, but even so it will be avoided until there is no alternative.


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## tinkerdan (Mar 14, 2021)

With as much as they have worked with studies in trying to determine the effects of space on the human body[remember they employed a set of twins, one staying on the earth while the other spent an extended period in space, just to have data]; I'm fairly certain they have given it a lot of thought, especially considering that they are planning missions to the moon and Mars for extended time.  I think the reason they haven't answered yet is because they might not have enough information about such extended exploration and they wisely have decided not to share any speculation they have had.

Understanding that this is much more different than when people built ships and began to explore and try to find out where the ends of he earth were without sailing off the edge... 

Back then they didn't consider colonization until the discovered bodies of land out there and eventually came across the new world.

It seems the first 'colonies' will in part be the litmus test for affect--discovering how our bodies might or might not adapt and how much time we can push the limits before a person's body will make it impossible to return and it seems those questions would need answering before any thought about real long term colonization.

However, I think that the notion of a child not having given consent to this is a bit egregious in the sense that they never have had a consent from pre conception to birth.  There is just no way to ask the for consent so I think that that's a non issue and overreaching. It would be a lot to ask all participants to be sterilized not too mention perverting the purpose of colonization. Though I would suppose that pre-colonization exploration might include such a mandate while they study this and have some definite parameters to offer the real colonists on the matter.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

Thank you for you thoughtful response.
I guess my intent is to push for it to be addressed now—before the damaged bodies and lives of children are the impetus for such a discussion and after-the-tragic-fact decision-making. Teaching kids in non-profits and public schools all my adult life has made me sensitive to adult actions that thoughtlessly—and needlessly—damage children. And I am somewhat relentless if I think I’m right about something ready, and though I’m hoping to be proven wrong here, the biology and the physics are all to familiar to me, so I don’t think I am.


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## paranoid marvin (Mar 14, 2021)

Is saying that there has not 'officially' been any sexual activity the same as saying it hasn't happened unofficially? I'm sure that there are a number of things that have been tried out in zero-grav/space that haven't found their way into official record logs (it can't be serious science stuff 24/7 for them).

I guess from a fictional point of view we've had Superman portrayed as having super powers because of the differing gravity from his home planet of Krypton. But in real life? Presumably the inception/gestation would remain unaltered, but who knows? 

My assumption was that colonisation would require facilities to be built on other planets that would correspond with those on Earth; you would assume that children brought up in such surroundings would have a similar physiology to that of those being born on Earth, but until it is put to the test we wouldn't know for sure.


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## Jo Zebedee (Mar 14, 2021)

Luna by Ian McDonald might be worth a look at in terms of the changes a lunar basis might have


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## paranoid marvin (Mar 14, 2021)

If it was proven that it was dangerous/harmful to children born or raised away from Earth, it would make the whole concept of colonisation (other than for scientific/industrial purposes) impractical and unethical. The whole point of families procreating and increasing/renewing the population of a planet is central to concept of colonisation. 

But as I mentioned above, unless Earth-like conditions can be replicated in constructions built on other planets, colonisation will never be practical. The real issue is if we find another planet that has liveable conditions without the need for residing inside pressurised environments.

But from a personal point of view, I cannot see any possibility of 'normal' human habitation off-Earth anytime in the forseeable future.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

SO nice to get some responses on this.
Thank you!

Yeah, I hear you on “no sex in space yet” from NASA, but when you think of the situation up there, I think there are physical, logistical, emotional, and, most glaringly _*privacy *_issues that are huge obstacles to intimacy. Oh, sure our heroic space gals a guys have undoubtedly (but subtly) jerked off in their zero-g sleeping bags, but actual sex would be videoed, listened to, and had it’s  biotelemetry recorded in real time. They are NEVER completely un-surveilled when they are up there. So, I’m thinking, unless there have been some pretty calculated efforts that have remained completely secret, that NASA is pretty much correct.

I know there are similar-seeming issues with sexuality and raising kids here on earth that go back millennia, but when we enter this new environment we are entering territory that is more fundamentally different than any we have entered before As a species, and as examples of life on earth itself. There is NO historic president.

As an analogy, think of conducting experiments with children’s growth and development here on earth. A proposal for even experiments that could yield valuable data, such as how children develop speech, or disease immunity, would be summarily rejected if they involved possible damage of any kind to the children studied. It is a long-standing “difficulty” in research into child development and other psych and bio areas that you can’t just study human children like you can, say, volunteering adult prisoners—and that, too, is ethically fraught. So-called “Wild Child” studies have yielded tons of useful data over the years, and you can bet many behavioral scientists would love to duplicate such studies (secretly, they’d never say it out loud), but you just can’t! You must wait for someone to deprive a child of key nurturing elements criminally in order to observe and learn from the consequences. Think of the accidental discoveries famously made when Alexis St. Martin‘s stomach was left open for observation. Yet we can’t do such invasive studies even with consenting adults. And children are even more off-limits!

Yet, unless this issue is raised soon, we seem to be actively planning to conceive, bear, and raise children in micro-gravity that we KNOW is damaging. If people are even living on Mars in shifts of a few years duration this will happen unless extraordinary controls are in place. LOTS of women get pregnant during their stints in military service of two to four years. 

I‘ve read the twin studies involving Mark and Scott Kelly and the details are chilling. In the course of only one year In zero g, Scott’s telomeres on the ends of his chromosomes deteriorated to the point where they feared he had suffered permanent genetic damage. His recovery—after being born and raised at 1 g—was difficult and tenuous. They still aren’t certain that he won’t suffer problems as he ages. Think of the damage had he been born and raised there!

OK, so I’m on this campaign and I’ll cool out for a moment.
I am so very happy and appreciative to have smart, thoughtful people to talk with about this. 
Thank you!
Artists are leading the way, as usual!
Write on!


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

Thanks for the response.

Good reference suggestion! I'll give that a look.
And an apt quote from Oppie. He had the pressure WWII on him to *not *to consider—aloud, at least—the moral consequences of what he and his team were doing until the deed was before them suddenly and with dramatic finality. I fear that the damage and dire consequences what humanity is doing now will be felt, at first, only as a trickle of damaged individuals for whom it will be too late. There is nothing yet nearly as compelling as a world war pushing micro-gravity colonization—we are not abandoning the earth-ship yet—so I think some insistent questioning now and some organizing around this question may save lives in the future.
The sub-text of what I am asking is why we need social colonization of Mars and the moon when robotics can exploit the resources more efficiently and obviate this difficult question. With evolving gravity-simulating technologies for large structures in zero-g space, we can have the advantages of off-earth emigration and colonization without these new, potentially disastrous ethical and bio-genetic difficulties. We, as a species, just have to *decide *what our future will be instead of just letting it happen according to the profit and ego-driven dreams of the few.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

It's not serious science 24/7, but they are under surveillance 24/7. I'm imagining two astronauts trying to get in a secret quickie in the zero-g toilet, and I am not convinced even that has happened. And even if some hanky-panky has slipped under the radar, or that NASA and JPL monitors have "looked away" as two astronauts have committed the forbidden act (and it is *official forbidden*) before the mics and cameras, say, in the dark, that does not alter the main question I'm asking. The fact that we can't stop astronauts from having sex even when it is difficult and unauthorized makes it seem even more obvious that if we colonize micro-gravity environments *under normalized human social conditions *that we *will *have to deal with the ethics of subjecting children to the consequences of our actions. So it needs careful consideration and planning *now.*


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

Jo Zebedee said:


> Luna by Ian McDonald might be worth a look at in terms of the changes a lunar basis might have


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

Jo Zebedee said:


> Luna by Ian McDonald might be worth a look at in terms of the changes a lunar basis might have



Noted! Thanks.
Leave it to SCI-fi writers to address the hard issues!


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 14, 2021)

Thank you for the response!

The proof of micro-gravity damage is already out there in the NASA files. See the Kelly twins study.

And, yes, *not *socially colonizing Mars, the moon, or any other micro-gravity environment is what I'm advocating. Use robotics only to exploit their resources.

It is also not a consideration within the foreseeable future—the next few hundred years, imo—that we have some now-unknown, distant alt-earth to colonize that will have the same gravitational conditions we have evolved in. In fact, my opinion of that whole line of thought is that those locations are too distant to be of any relevance to our social and biological evolution for possibly many millennia, if ever.

Plans for large structures that will simulate 1 g are already being invested in and tested by such companies as Orbital Assemblies. This is the direction of off-world emigration I am suggesting for ethical reasons and for the long-term genetic health of our species.

Send your doubts to the likes of Musk and the people, companies, and government agencies of several nations who are already planning on colonizing the moon and Mars. I think they will overcome the difficulties, but create new ones. Those are what I'm trying to bring up for discussion.


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 14, 2021)

Michael Bickford said:


> Is it ethical to conceive, bear, and raise children on Mars or on the moon?



It seems a little premature to ask the question now when we're only just beginning to learn about the effects of long-term exposure to the conditions in space. Asking whether it's ethical presumes we have clearly defined arguments that are both for and against - but so far as I'm aware neither is currently being developed.

In which case, are you asking these questions simply because you want an audience for them, or are you writing this into a story (we are a science fiction and fantasy community after all).


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## .matthew. (Mar 14, 2021)

It seems to me that these same questions can be asked of many people on Earth. We don't (as a general rule) forcibly sterilise or prohibit anyone from having children. Even many incarcerated criminals can arrange for their sperm to be taken to spouses in the outside world - not sure about women's prisons but I suspect there would be a way there too.

We also allow children to be born with crippling genetic illnesses and allow those who are almost certain to pass them on to do so at their discretion. Same with poverty. I see no fundamental difference in that than in allowing space colonists to do so.

Also remember that colonisation has always been a dangerous endeavour and had such safeguards for unborn children existed then, the world would be a vastly different place today.

It is a risk (almost a certainty) but great achievement almost always comes with a great cost in human lives and suffering.

Overall, I'd say it would be more unethical to interfere at all.


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## Saiyali (Mar 14, 2021)

Just on the matter of ISS staff being err _found out_, don't they they have their biometrics being monitored continuously? IMO sexual activity would be pretty obvious with live feeds of pulse, blood pressure, breathing rate and skin temperature...

On a personal note, I'm not sure how horny I'd necessarily feel, inside a tiny bubble of air, floating in the vacuum of space.


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## tinkerdan (Mar 14, 2021)

All of the below:


Saiyali said:


> Just on the matter of ISS staff being err _found out_, don't they they have their biometrics being monitored continuously? IMO sexual activity would be pretty obvious with live feeds of pulse, blood pressure, breathing rate and skin temperature...
> 
> On a personal note, I'm not sure how horny I'd necessarily feel, inside a tiny bubble of air, floating in the vacuum of space.


Could be better than an aphrodisiac for some people.


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 15, 2021)

The question of sex in space is a distraction - the opening post is about raising kids in low-g environments. But I don't think there's any serious argument that we should be doing this at the moment, especially with the limited understanding we have on the effects on human biology in general in those environments.


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## Saiyali (Mar 15, 2021)

I think The Expanse has a reasonably astute take, in that Belters become very much second-class people in part because they can't live in full planetary gravity. They develop new, zero-g physiologies that make them stand out wherever they are. In those stories, racism seems obsolete, but this physiology becomes a new marker for discrimination and exploitation. Depressingly,  this is where I believe it would lead in reality. And quickly, no more than a few generations.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

Brian G Turner said:


> It seems a little premature to ask the question now when we're only just beginning to learn about the effects of long-term exposure to the conditions in space. Asking whether it's ethical presumes we have clearly defined arguments that are both for and against - but so far as I'm aware neither is currently being developed.
> 
> In which case, are you asking these questions simply because you want an audience for them, or are you writing this into a story (we are a science fiction and fantasy community after all).



Thank you for responding!
There is quite a bit of evidence of the damage done by long-term exposure to micro-gravity to body systems and genes. More will be known as people spend more time away from earth in micro gravity and other unique space conditions. My main point is that finding out about this probable damage by exposing children to it is unethical. Adults have full volition to take on the risks of this kind of experimental exploration. Children do not. 

Participating in a discussion on this does feed into my writing. As soon as I get my 30 comments in I’ll be posting pieces of a novel I am writing. Set 100 - 150 years in the future, I want it to be as un-fantastical as possible—as pure a speculative piece as I can make it based on science as it is now and the directions it seems to be going.  Extrapolation of future environments in space depend on the near-term view upon which that extrapolation is based. I’m not getting much from the agencies I’ve contacted so far, so I thought I‘d ask creative thinkers of Sci-fi what they think.  

I am leading with what I think about this as a kind of provocation to engage. I do know colonization plans are being made for Mars and the moon, and I know that NASA is aware of possible physiological and psychological problems these explorers and, within a few years, colonists, will have to endure, both while deployed, afterward, and in the eventuality of long-term settlement. And I know that full data sets can‘t be analyzed until we  send crews and colonists out there and collect their health data. I also know human‘s proclivity to reproduce and that the very nature of colonization in the past been one that has included growing the colonial population once there. So it seems like a natural question to consider: just because we can raise kids in micro gravity and other space environment conditions that could be problematic, should we? Would it be fair to those children raised under historically unique conditions? We would be conducting an experiment on them merely by bearing them and raising them in those condition. Would that be ethical? I think not. 

In the world of my novel, there are strict sanctions against conceiving, bearing, and raising children on Mars or on the moon. That restriction has a bearing on the plot and the characters and I want to see what current thinking is about it as I write on. 
People here have been very forthcoming and I am grateful.
Can’t wait to submit to some actual criticism!


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

Brian G Turner said:


> The question of sex in space is a distraction - the opening post is about raising kids in low-g environments. But I don't think there's any serious argument that we should be doing this at the moment, especially with the limited understanding we have on the effects on human biology in general in those environments.



Yet plans are being made for colonization without a discussion of the ethical considerations of raising children there. Are we talking about a new kind of colonization that does not include procreation? With mixed groups of young people working on colonial, Mars or the moon for even a few years at a time, someone’s gonna get pregnant. What with waiting for orbital windows to open, it could be up to a year or two process to come back from Mars. And if we are really going to colonize wouldn’t we make provision for eventual pregnancies and births? What are the ethical considerations of this? Should we conduct such experiments with children’s lives is all I’m asking. 
I’m writing a novel in which these considerations are key, so I’m interested in a wide variety of thoughts on the subject. 
thanks for responding!


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

Saiyali said:


> I think The Expanse has a reasonably astute take, in that Belters become very much second-class people in part because they can't live in full planetary gravity. They develop new, zero-g physiologies that make them stand out wherever they are. In those stories, racism seems obsolete, but this physiology becomes a new marker for discrimination and exploitation. Depressingly,  this is where I believe it would lead in reality. And quickly, no more than a few generations.



thank you for responding! 
Precisely the outcomes I think we need to anticipate. Somewhere along the line in the Expanse world, previous to the story, the first children born in micro gravity were essentially experiments. In the Expanse they do not deal with how this came about. In my novel I am most interested in this moment of decision for the human race. Should we begin this experiment on our children? would it be ethical, morally right, to do so? If we think not, as I do, how can we prevent it from happening? Or will moral and ethical considerations take a back seat to other considerations? Or will it “just happen” because of some kind of colossal neglect of our responsibility to the health of our children—something that has been primary for past cultures—and since we are now aware of possible longer-term, even permanent damage to our genetics, it seems like this responsibility to our progeny becomes even more critical because the damage will not be restricted to just a transitional generation, but may be transmitted to countless generations in the future. we could be releasing an evil genie with no lamp to put it back into.


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## Toby Frost (Mar 15, 2021)

Well, if you had a child and didn't feed it properly, there would come a point where that was no longer a matter of parental choice and became child abuse. If you raised a child so that it couldn't survive on most colonised worlds, that could arguably be close, depending on what was expected in its life.

Democracies will probably have different points at which they consider a crime to have been committed and intervene. So if by bringing up your child in low-gravity you ruin their chances of working/living on Earth, the individual nation may have different views. Basically, what does the country think that every child ought to be able to do? And then there would the social group and traditions of the people around you rather than just the law. I could imagine laws requiring citizens to take exercise to ensure that they could still function on Earth, perhaps with deportation if refusal continued.

There's also the issue of whether you can realistically ban people from conceiving children in a large, city-type colony (rather than a research station, oil rig etc). I could imagine that you might have a no-pregnancies clause in a fixed-term contract of service, but it's hard to feel that it would work as the basis for a whole lifetime off-world.

Of course, a dictatorship would just do what it wanted to its citizens, and individual misery wouldn't matter compared to the alleged benefits to the people, the race or whatever. "The Glorious People's Republic requires you to live on the moon! Congratulations!"


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## .matthew. (Mar 15, 2021)

Michael Bickford said:


> Would it be fair to those children raised under historically unique conditions? We would be conducting an experiment on them merely by bearing them and raising them in those condition. Would that be ethical? I think not.



Unique yes... but not unprecedented. Most of humanity has been born into a negative environment. Even more so when you consider colonisation. Take the colonisation of the Americas, where families set out into the wilderness with nothing more than a few tools and maybe a covered wagon, into a place where disease, famine, infant mortality - and at the time native raids - were almost guaranteed. There is even a history of entire settlements disappearing.

If we considered ethics the human race would never go anywhere.

Now, it seems clear that you've already made up your mind on your side of things and you have a reasonable point... but the question should be instead framed morally. If you or anyone else doesn't want to do it, that's a choice based on a personal moral code. However, if a couple wants to move into space and start a family, that is nobody's business but their own and labelling it as unethical would only delay advancement - much like stem cell research and gene editing today.




Toby Frost said:


> Well, if you had a child and didn't feed it properly, there would come a point where that was no longer a matter of parental choice and became child abuse. If you raised a child so that it couldn't survive on most colonised worlds, that could arguably be close, depending on what was expected in its life.
> 
> So if by bringing up your child in low-gravity you ruin their chances of working/living on Earth, the individual nation may have different views.


That is a good point, and neglect would obviously be an issue to deal with. Although, with such limited resources and routines and everything else required to survive in space, I doubt that neglect would even be possible.

Regarding the jobs though, it doesn't make much sense. If you look at education today, most people aren't trained to work everywhere even in a single country - is that abuse?

It would be fairer to compare it to different countries. I couldn't work in China or India or France or Norway or anywhere that doesn't speak English... Does that mean it demonstrates an unjust, unethical upbringing?

We are born into the life we are given and we make the most of it to the best of our abilities or luck.


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## Toby Frost (Mar 15, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> It would be fairer to compare it to different countries. I couldn't work in China or India or France or Norway or anywhere that doesn't speak English... Does that mean it demonstrates an unjust, unethical upbringing?



Well, no, although it might be unreasonable for your employer to expect you to drop tools and work there, or face the sack. Learning languages is generally down to schools, which means the state in some form. I think (in the UK at least) it would be unreasonable for an employer not to tell an employee very early on, perhaps before the job commenced.

My suspicion is that, in a fairly realistic near-future society, goods on an off-world colony would be closely rationed, and there would be an unavoidable level of governmental and/or corporate control, if only to stop the year's supply of beer being drunk in the first three months or something. In a far-future society or a more fantastical one, you might end up with the kind of semi-libertarian society like that of Firefly, but I suspect that to begin with, it would be pretty regimented out of necessity.


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## Venusian Broon (Mar 15, 2021)

Interesting discussion. I think colonising Mars is a bit of a red herring. Or at least, I think it'd be a mistake to go for it aggressively. Governments have plans to put manned bases I'm sure, and Mr Musk (no doubt after smoking a fat doobie) put a grandiose image of millions on Mars but I think everything will be slow to materialise. Bases will be scientific for exploration of the planet from the start and probably for a long time, and the resources that they will use will be expensive or hard won. Having a 'colony' in the sense of interpid independent farmers working hard and raising families, say, would be uneconomic and unworkable, never mind unethical. I'm thinking more like the Amundsen-Scott base at Antartica rather than Jamestown 1607. 

Of course I could be way off in the pace of technology that might aid interplanetary exploration (However, I am somewhat cynical, as we get promises all the time from tech-optimists who are invariably far too soon or like Fusion, we are always '50 years' away from the crucial breakthrough) 

But I said Mars was a 'red herring' and my reasoning was that I am now a much bigger fan of building O'Neil cylinders for the long long-term future of exploration and living outside Earth. The main reason is that the process of trying to terraform Mars is astronomically vase and even if we had all the right tech in place to actually achieve it, it going to be a very slow process of change. Just not a place for a thriving colony. Furthermore why escape one gravity well to maroon yourself on another one? 

Need more space - build a nice big O'Neil Cylinder - hell, let's start making a Dyson swarm! Problems with microgravity? No problem, design it to give near 1g. Want to hop on a spacecraft and travel places? No problem, we are not stuck deep in a gravity well. There will be bases on the Moon and other worlds, but they would remain temporary quarters for visitors rather than permanent cities. (I think  ) There, I don't have your problem...well, not the micro-gravity problem.

With regards to SF and Mars colonisation, I assume you've read the trilogy _Red/Green/Blue Mars_ by Kim Stanley Robinson? It does cover the period that you are dealing with. It's been a while since I've read them, but I think he assume that when you goto Mars you are 'exiled' i.e. it is not expected that you would return to Earth - you become Martian. I'd put his story definitely on the tech-optimistic side of things rather than realistic as they progress very quickly and build up a growing society (and atmosphere and oceans!)

I agree with you that virtually all other writers have gone past your moment of the first children born outside Earth. Generally from my reading it is assumed that humans will have to alter, either evolutionary (assisted or not) or via technological aid to thrive in different conditions and we see the fruits of these changes rather than the start of them. 

I think it's a question of viability at first. You would not bring another life into the universe if you were living in a fifty metre square habitat on a hostile Martian surface, where space, oxygen, water, energy and food are precious. But if vast covered areas are constructed and there are plentiful supplies of all of the previous, people will, no doubt, think of families. Also the first ethical decision is not whether to give birth on Mars, but it will be the first colonists who decide to become Martian permanently. They will be the first experiments (albeit one assumes they do so willingly).


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## .matthew. (Mar 15, 2021)

Toby Frost said:


> My suspicion is that, in a fairly realistic near-future society, goods on an off-world colony would be closely rationed, and there would be an unavoidable level of governmental and/or corporate control, if only to stop the year's supply of beer being drunk in the first three months or something. In a far-future society or a more fantastical one, you might end up with the kind of semi-libertarian society like that of Firefly, but I suspect that to begin with, it would be pretty regimented out of necessity.


Yes, that's what I meant by there being no room for neglect. Everything would be accounted for down to the gram.

I will say though, that I doubt any future will exist in which true spaceflight will exist outside of government control. The reason can be summarised as a black ball technology. Basically, any vessel capable of crossing the solar system in a realistic practical amount of time would also be capable of wiping out a city - or station - in a kamikaze type attack purely due to the speed. Any sort of warp drive antimatter containment thingamabob or even basic nuclear fusion would also be far too dangerous to put in civilian hands. All it would take is one crackpot with a ship to kill millions, and if regulations didn't exist before that they most certainly would afterwards.



Venusian Broon said:


> Need more space - build a nice big O'Neil Cylinder - hell, let's start making a Dyson swarm! Problems with microgravity? No problem, design it to give near 1g. Want to hop on a spacecraft and travel places? No problem, we are not stuck deep in a gravity well. There will be bases on the Moon and other worlds, but they would remain temporary quarters for visitors rather than permanent cities. (I think ) There, I don't have your problem...well, not the micro-gravity problem.


This x1000! Artificial gravity on spinning stations makes way more sense than going to Mars, and the Moon I think would exist as purely an industrial base, maybe refineries or fuel depots dug under the surface for security and cheapness compared to stations.


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## Toby Frost (Mar 15, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> Basically, any vessel capable of crossing the solar system in a realistic amount of time would also be capable of wiping out a city in a kamikaze type attack purely due to the speed. Any sort of warp drive antimatter containment thingamabob or even basic nuclear fusion would be far too dangerous to put in civilian hands.



Very good point. I suppose that, if some other form of rule appeared (super-corporations, say) it might be possible for spacecraft to exist outside government control, but it would still be really risky without something that could override the crazy humans - ie a powerful computer. I suspect that serious space travel might not happen until there were suitably sophisticated computers and robots to do the heavy lifting and make sure the humans didn't do anything self-destructive.


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## Montero (Mar 15, 2021)

The implications of growing up in other environments is often hinted at in SF - passing comments about someone having the muscular-skeletal development of a high grav world or a low grav world and the like, but it is usually handled at the level of an interesting bit of colour rather than anything more scientific. Though you do then get additional bits like a high-grav person with more muscle needs more calories. Bujold has people making egg and sperm donations before spending a long time in space, to freeze their genome before damage.

As to the ethics - well as others have said many children are already born into far less than ideal environments which can adversely affect their long term development. Whether this is rickets from lack of Vitamin D, heavy metal poisoning, insufficient food, damp, mildew - all of these have an impact and there is no prevention of child birth if the environment is less than ideal. You also get into arguments over what the definition of ideal is. I'm not going to take that line of thinking any further, especially not with real world examples, as we don't discuss contentious world affairs issues on SFF Chrons - we used to but there were some bad rows so now it is banned. So we do discuss things in the abstract, but if it gets too close to an area which might cause raging arguments the thread is closed.
By the way, are you separating out the impact of the environment on the child from the impact on their descendants if there is permanent genetic change? Would you consider permanent damage to the genome to be more serious than damage to the individual? I think some things in your posts implied you were thinking that way - just not entirely brainy today so wanted to check.


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## .matthew. (Mar 15, 2021)

Toby Frost said:


> I suppose that, if some other form of rule appeared (super-corporations, say) it might be possible for spacecraft to exist outside government control


The words _form of rule_ there still implies some sort of control. Super-corporations would themselves be a form of government unaccountable to democratic ideals and with the wealth to match that of many world powers...



Toby Frost said:


> I suspect that serious space travel might not happen until there were suitably sophisticated computers and robots to do the heavy lifting and make sure the humans didn't do anything self-destructive.


That would be the best way to ensure control but even then, the computers would need to be infallible and at the end of the day, all technology seems to become vulnerable to hacks with time, meaning that even if you make a perfect failsafe today, there's no guarantee it would work tomorrow.

Even self destructs or space-based defence systems probably wouldn't do much good. 

Take the primary example of space traffic, freighters, moving refined metal ingots from the asteroid belt back to Earth. At 3.2AU closest distance (nearly 500 million km) it would have to be travelling at 55,000 km an hour (15 km/s or 15,000 metres a second) to make the trip in a year (not accounting for acceleration or deceleration). That is only 0.00005% lightspeed which is stupidly slow compared to sci-fi _- this conversion might need checking for maths errors but isn't used in the below calculations anyway._

In fact, NASA has gotten a probe up to 69 km/s using slingshot manoeuvres.

If we take Panama sized freighters on Earth as a model (the smallest of all classes except feeder ships), they can hold around 165,000m3 of cargo. In terms of a sphere (as I'm using an asteroid collision calculator) that has a diameter of 64m. Steel weights 7,900 kg per cubic metre so that is the density I'm using and targeting fairly solid rock surface.

*15 km/s. *Even if it was destroyed as it comes down (which at this speed is likely) there's unlikely to be anything capable of stopping the thousands of tons of metal shotgunning the surface.

This would result in a 1.77 km wide crater, 600 m deep (though it would expand and grow shallower as it collapses and settles) and result in a 5.5 magnitude earthquake at a 100 km distance along with shattering glass. 

At a 10 km distance, most wall-bearing multistory buildings will collapse - which I'd say would kill most people within that zone.

*69 km/s.* A 3.3 km initial crater, 1.1 km deep. At 100 km, the fireball will appear 3.8 times larger than the sun, with a 6.4 magnitude earthquake. 

At a 10 km distance, the thermal blast will cause third-degree burns and pretty much set most burnables on fire. The pressure wave will cause steel-framed skyscrapers to suffer extreme frame distortion leading to incipient collapse. Most bridges would also collapse and cars/trucks would be blown over. 

All this purely with speeds we are currently capable of obtaining with vessels that are far smaller than we can already build.

*Note:* I went a wee bit crazy with the research here but I thought it was interesting...


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## Montero (Mar 15, 2021)

Definitely interesting.


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## paranoid marvin (Mar 15, 2021)

It's quite possible that when people sign up for colonisation of another planet, they accept that they and their family are on a one-way trip. This new world would be their home, and for that of their family (and potential children in the future). It's conceivable that travel back to Earth (especially for their children) would simply not be an option. They would have bodies conditioned for living on the planet that they live on, and Earth would be as alien to them as Mars is to us.


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## paranoid marvin (Mar 15, 2021)

As has been mentioned earlier, no doubt NASA have plans for colonisation of Mars, the Moon and potentially other planets. But when we are still not in a position to send an astronaut safely to Mars, the possibility of normal human families living their lives there seems several generations into the future.

As well as the issue of gravity, there are also likely to be lots of other health implications involved in travel to and life on other planets; things that we haven't even considered yet. As a species we have quickly moved away from taking chances; those pioneers of the old West, or those who travelled across the seas to new lands with unknown (and known) dangers. It just doesn't happen any more. 

And is there really any point in people living in confined communities on a planet with no breathable atmosphere for their entire lives; in fact for generations of lives? I just can't see it. Scientists and maybe even employees of industrial firms for fixed contract terms maybe, but not colonists looking for a new life there.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

Toby Frost said:


> Well, if you had a child and didn't feed it properly, there would come a point where that was no longer a matter of parental choice and became child abuse. If you raised a child so that it couldn't survive on most colonised worlds, that could arguably be close, depending on what was expected in its life.
> 
> Democracies will probably have different points at which they consider a crime to have been committed and intervene. So if by bringing up your child in low-gravity you ruin their chances of working/living on Earth, the individual nation may have different views. Basically, what does the country think that every child ought to be able to do? And then there would the social group and traditions of the people around you rather than just the law. I could imagine laws requiring citizens to take exercise to ensure that they could still function on Earth, perhaps with deportation if refusal continued.
> 
> ...



Yes, this brings up the related question of off-world governance. 
The previous US Prez feebly and unilaterally tried to impose a "space force", making this kind of discussion topical, even urgent. Should any one earth government impose force in space? Shouldn't it all be international in some way, ideally?

In connection with this current topic of the ethics around rearing children in micro gravity, it's probably true that governments which impose their will more on their people on the surface will do so in space as well. (hence the importance of the space-governance question). But there are long-standing concepts of _*human rights*_ that are international. IF international control predominates in space, that's one thing, but if national interests, governance, and political cultures dominate, that's another. But either way, we do have world-wide standards that governments, in the long-run are judged against. If the Chinese, for example, build a colonial structure on the moon that yields a generation of children who have health problems that make them unable to choose to return to earth as adults, or, worse have genetic damage that could threaten to spread back into the greater world gene pool, it seems they would be widely condemned and, in the case of genetic changes, attempts would be made to isolate those individuals and change China's future behavior, as it could impact the rest of the world population. In this scenario their behavior goes to practical considerations, and not just ethics. Do the nations of the world allow a neo-race of genetically damaged individuals to be raised and just say, _Well, it's their people, we don't have anything to say about it_? I hope not. And if we can see this problem coming, shouldn't something be done to mitigate it sooner rather than after it has real victims?

In the world of my novel these problems, and others I've not mentioned yet, have been dealt with in particular ways and their "solutions", for better or worse, are central to the story and the characters' motivations and actions.


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## nixie (Mar 15, 2021)

Guys, remember we don't discuss current affairs or social politics here.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

Thanks SO much for your thoughtful response.

A couple points.
Yes, I have developed a POV about these questions for the novel I'm writing, but I want it to be a POV based of logic and facts, so I really appreciate you other writers here pushing against what I'm asserting about humanity's medium-range future in space. 
I haven't been this excited about responding to an discussion thread in my life!

I really am making a distinction between all other big changes in the culture of child-rearing and what I anticipate will be the results of raising children in micro-gravity. Compared with all the other things, many of them horrible, we have imposed on new generations throughout history—through colonization, war, disease, tech advance, religion, and more—though extremely impactful on the lives of the next generation, and none of it of their choosing, the probable physiological and genetic damage caused by micro-gravity is fundamentally different and unique. Never have we been able to completely remove individuals from the gravitational environment in which all life has evolved. Biological evolution being an unbroken chain connecting the past to the future, we are altering that connection for those individuals irrevocably, and we may be embarking on genetic alteration for the entire species that is unprecedented in the history of earth biology. This kind of exploration has no historical parallel in a biological sense.
We can bring along with us much of the biological and cultural environment that has been our history as we can—just as past explorers and colonizers brought their cultures with them as best they could. We can simulate the earth's environment as much as we need to in order to survive and thrive—but we cannot change the gravity, or lack there of, present on the surface of Mars, the moon, or any other natural celestial body, as gravity is a property of mass. 
The only way we can simulate earth gravity would be in artificial structures.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

nixie said:


> Guys, remember we don't discuss current affairs or social politics here.


Point well taken. Thank you.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 15, 2021)

Venusian Broon said:


> Interesting discussion. I think colonising Mars is a bit of a red herring. Or at least, I think it'd be a mistake to go for it aggressively. Governments have plans to put manned bases I'm sure, and Mr Musk (no doubt after smoking a fat doobie) put a grandiose image of millions on Mars but I think everything will be slow to materialise. Bases will be scientific for exploration of the planet from the start and probably for a long time, and the resources that they will use will be expensive or hard won. Having a 'colony' in the sense of interpid independent farmers working hard and raising families, say, would be uneconomic and unworkable, never mind unethical. I'm thinking more like the Amundsen-Scott base at Antartica rather than Jamestown 1607.
> 
> Of course I could be way off in the pace of technology that might aid interplanetary exploration (However, I am somewhat cynical, as we get promises all the time from tech-optimists who are invariably far too soon or like Fusion, we are always '50 years' away from the crucial breakthrough)
> 
> ...



We are thinking similarly on many things.
O’Neil cylinders, or something else that simulates 1 g is where I’m going with my world building. I see the Robinson series and others with a similar “tech-optimistic” slants to be like cautionary tales: we see that possible future, so let’s not go there even if we can. 
And—for reasons both ethical and practical I began this thread with—I also see planetary and asteroid occupation by human individuals as happening only in limited shifts as needed to operate robotic resource extraction, with off-world emigration being only to artificial structures with simulated gravity. No terraforming, as we can never reform the gravity of other worlds to make them truly habitable anyway. I’m going with the conceit of that being a massive deal-breaker.
Maybe in the distant future some humans may choose to become Martians for reasons I can’t fathom knowing the changes it would wreak upon them and their progeny, but for now I am much more interested in the human emotions experienced by people involved in the social and cultural changes brought on by near earth exploration. What will it be like for people involved in making decisions about the changes I see most likely to occur, rather than imagining things that I don’t see as likely or desirable. Even a best-case scenario with no mutants or wars will be challenging for the individuals involved. Just imagining the lives of characters who are part of this next chapter of human outreach into near space presents exciting situations for story-telling possibilities.


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## .matthew. (Mar 15, 2021)

Michael Bickford said:


> In this scenario their behavior goes to practical considerations, and not just ethics. Do the nations of the world allow a neo-race of genetically damaged individuals to be raised and just say, _Well, it's their people, we don't have anything to say about it_? I hope not.


With the other options being war or economic sanctions? either of which would cause more death than the alternative.

Plus governments don't like it when people butt into their affairs and many international treaties are based on the very idea that each country has self determination and territorial rights.



Michael Bickford said:


> What will it be like for people involved in making decisions about the changes I see most likely to occur, rather than imagining things that I don’t see as likely or desirable.


In this case, I'd follow the money. In general, the people making the decisions base their opinions on what is most profitable.

There is also the major issue of (as mentioned above) territorial rights. These rights are often granted and maintained on earth through habitation. Scientific or industrial occupation doesn't count towards them - such as with Antarctic expedition bases. Therefore, it would be in the interests of governments to take the health hits to claim what could later turn out to be valuable land.


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## Parson (Mar 16, 2021)

As to the less important question .... remember that there was a newly married couple who kept their marriage hidden from NASA so that they could fly together on the Space Shuttle. Space Sex Is Serious Business  and there was also a pair of very recently married cosmonauts who flew together. Meet The Only Married Couple To Fly Together In Space  I'll let you draw your own conclusions. 

But as to the real question, the ethics. Ethics cannot be forced. True ethics is the result of decisions to follow a moral code. --- Can you force behavior which is considered by others to be unethical? Any study of ethics and the history of ethics will tell you that the answer is "Only imperfectly." I believe that the only logical response is to provide the best information that you can, and unless you sterilize or otherwise make pregnancy impossible you better expect that it will happen. --- Even going for the sterilization option my bet would be that sooner or later someone will beat it. Making the question of whether it will happen almost certainly an academic exercise if we have people spend years in space. (As a Parson I have no little experience setting up moral principles that "everyone" agrees with only to find considerable people find agreeing with a principle and living by it are two very different things.)

Any realistic story set in space for anything like a life time would almost have to deal with the question of kids to some degree. (I do like *The Expanse's *way of dealing with it.)


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## Montero (Mar 16, 2021)

Incidentally, John Barnes Orbital Resonance might be of interest here. It isn't about genetic problems, but it is about social engineering for running a space station. Quite a lot of John Barnes's work has social engineering in it. I rather like "A Million Open Doors" on how a large number of colony worlds were recontacted after Earth had a bad time and dropped out of contact, and a theme through the story is how colonisation groups were chosen.


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## tinkerdan (Mar 16, 2021)

I would also think that you have to separate exploration from colonization.

Think about this:
We landed on the moon in 1969.
That was just to prove we could do it.
50 years later we have done nothing more than live in a tin can in space.
I really think that many of us living now might not see anything more than a Mars landing.
By the time we even remotely think about colonization, all these things will be hashed out.

However the 'moral' issue here could just put the slamming brakes on all of space exploration for colonization and it might even explain the Fermi Paradox--all the advanced aliens decided it was immoral to send 'people' into space.

I think that we should also ask how morally correct it is to continue to propagate on a single planet and at the same time confine ourselves to just this one planet.

Overall I think that to answer the OP we have to delve into a lot more issues than just the one; because there are  many more issues more important than what's being highlighted here that will ultimately have an affect upon the question.

At some point if things go on as they have; we will have to begin branching out and colonizing the planets around us, or face extinction when we deplete all our resources.
Should we bring children--who have no choice--into a world that might not last their lifetime?
Should we bring children into a world where we have no clear way to say how long they will live?
Should we bring children into a world that rages with wars and sickness and famine and death?
...
I don't want answers to these questions because that really does take us into the area of controversy that shuts down a thread.
However I am bowing out of this thread because I think there are better questions to ask than this one.


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## Dave (Mar 16, 2021)

tinkerdan said:


> By the time we even remotely think about colonization, all these things will be hashed out.


I agree with all you said, but my earlier point was that experience shows that it will not be hashed out until the very last possible minute, and even then some more.

I think that what @Michael Bickford wants it to be hashed out right here now.


Parson said:


> But as to the real question, the ethics. Ethics cannot be forced. True ethics is the result of decisions to follow a moral code. --- Can you force behavior which is considered by others to be unethical? Any study of ethics and the history of ethics will tell you that the answer is "Only imperfectly."


Exactly!

And no one is going to go on record to say how they feel in case they are out of step with the consensus of opinion, but the consensus of opinion cannot be determined until a good number of people go on the record to say how they feel.


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## Danny McG (Mar 16, 2021)




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## Michael Bickford (Mar 16, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> Yes, that's what I meant by there being no room for neglect. Everything would be accounted for down to the gram.
> 
> I will say though, that I doubt any future will exist in which true spaceflight will exist outside of government control. The reason can be summarised as a black ball technology. Basically, any vessel capable of crossing the solar system in a realistic practical amount of time would also be capable of wiping out a city - or station - in a kamikaze type attack purely due to the speed. Any sort of warp drive antimatter containment thingamabob or even basic nuclear fusion would also be far too dangerous to put in civilian hands. All it would take is one crackpot with a ship to kill millions, and if regulations didn't exist before that they most certainly would afterwards.
> 
> ...



Yet huge private interests are already involved in planning and executing those plans. I agree that this should not be a private sector venture at all, but the decisions on this are being made *now. *I'm not sure there are enough people even thinking about this stuff to make a difference unless—or until—some kind of disastrous error is made—perhaps taking out a city by mistake? Or something horrendous. Until there is a good reason, world public opinion is just gonna let the private sector have its way and existing governments will take the private money as a way of reducing their costs.

Is this too political, moderator? I'm not yet sure where the line is here.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 16, 2021)

Montero said:


> The implications of growing up in other environments is often hinted at in SF - passing comments about someone having the muscular-skeletal development of a high grav world or a low grav world and the like, but it is usually handled at the level of an interesting bit of colour rather than anything more scientific. Though you do then get additional bits like a high-grav person with more muscle needs more calories. Bujold has people making egg and sperm donations before spending a long time in space, to freeze their genome before damage.
> 
> As to the ethics - well as others have said many children are already born into far less than ideal environments which can adversely affect their long term development. Whether this is rickets from lack of Vitamin D, heavy metal poisoning, insufficient food, damp, mildew - all of these have an impact and there is no prevention of child birth if the environment is less than ideal. You also get into arguments over what the definition of ideal is. I'm not going to take that line of thinking any further, especially not with real world examples, as we don't discuss contentious world affairs issues on SFF Chrons - we used to but there were some bad rows so now it is banned. So we do discuss things in the abstract, but if it gets too close to an area which might cause raging arguments the thread is closed.
> By the way, are you separating out the impact of the environment on the child from the impact on their descendants if there is permanent genetic change? Would you consider permanent damage to the genome to be more serious than damage to the individual? I think some things in your posts implied you were thinking that way - just not entirely brainy today so wanted to check.



Good points. Thanks for responding.

And thanks for the reference to Bujold. I think this is already being done by current astronauts, but that's conjecture. I know it's something I would do if I knew I was going to be subjected to long-term high radiation levels and wanted to have children later. 
I'm not as concerned about the radiation exposure in the medium term for space exploration as it is completely subject to mitigation. My thing is that the effects of micro gravity do not seem to be. 
The big differences between previous historical examples of subjecting children and future generations to damage—as has been done throughout history—is that this damage—both to the individual born and raised in micro gravity, and to their genes, and therefore the genes of their offspring, is that this has no historical precedence, and that in the past explorers and colonists were not nearly as capable of clearly understanding the consequences of their actions as people are today.
Yes, I am making that separation, but I also see them as causally linked, and I see the preventative imperative as being the similarly linked. Damage to an individual that could have been prevented is both an individual tragedy _and_ a moral/ethical error. Damage to our gene pool may or may not be so tragic for the initiallly damaged generation, but could have horrendous long-term consequences to our species and and to future individuals and so is also ethically questionable.

The argument has been made here that, to paraphrase, _People can choose to do what they want, _that _You can't stop people from procreating, _etc. But this is a qualitatively different form of colonization we are contemplating. People literally _walked _to occupy most of the world. Africans, Asians and Europeans could just set sail in existing ships as Old World explorers did. Emigrants and frontiers people could just pack up a covered wagon and move west. But neither individuals, families, nor most nations can just pick up and go explore the solar system. It will require coordinated efforts at the highest levels of human technology. It therefor *must *be organized and planned as no exploration or colonization efforts have ever been. So we not only have the opportunity to do it humanely and intelligently, but the responsibility to do so.


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## .matthew. (Mar 16, 2021)

Michael Bickford said:


> Yet huge private interests are already involved in planning and executing those plans. I agree that this should not be a private sector venture at all, but the decisions on this are being made *now.*


That is true, but we've yet to see any real results from this. Yes, they can launch rockets with satellites and soon manned missions, but that's a far cry from a sci-fi world where space travel is more commonplace. The vehicles they are currently building are also incapable of causing large scale destruction, mostly because the size is still constrained by the need to build on Earth and then launch them.

That said you are probably right about it taking a disastrous event to force future politicians to act against their financial backers.

Either that or military action will force someone's hand. For example, several countries are working on hypervelocity missiles designed to be launched on an ICBM missile before separating and using speed to bypass defences. With militaries aware of the power of this development, I suspect someone important will take note if civilian vessels could be used as a similar weapon. 

It's all very far in the future though and I agree nobody is planning for it 



Michael Bickford said:


> It therefor *must *be organized and planned as no exploration or colonization efforts have ever been.


True but not wholly. The colonisation of the Americas was a hugely expensive undertaking and it really wasn't just a few people in a boat. They required extensive support for many many years. There were also wars fought over the land, both between native inhabitants and rival colonial powers.

It's nothing compared to colonising space I'll grant you, but I would be interested to research the percentage of GDP it cost / predictions for future costs.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> The words _form of rule_ there still implies some sort of control. Super-corporations would themselves be a form of government unaccountable to democratic ideals and with the wealth to match that of many world powers...
> 
> 
> That would be the best way to ensure control but even then, the computers would need to be infallible and at the end of the day, all technology seems to become vulnerable to hacks with time, meaning that even if you make a perfect failsafe today, there's no guarantee it would work tomorrow.
> ...



Yes, interesting.
I agree that the super speeds in a lot of Sci-fi are not obtainable in the medium-term future of the even the next millennium. 
In addition to the physics of the energy required to accelerate massive bodies, there is the issue of the relatively small size of the solar system (compared with interstellar space). That sounds crazy since it is so vast compared with planetary sizes, but even if we could accelerate to, say, several percentages of light speed, the deceleration becomes a problem within the solar system. Like using high speed rail for inner city transit—you’d be using mega-energy to speed up just to immediately begin using just as much energy again to slow yourself down. Space is space: instantaneous chages of location are the stuff of science fantasy, not science-hewing speculative fiction. That’s OK, I enjoy reading it usually, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen unless and until we crack through this particular physical dimension we’re stuck in. Millions of years? I dunno. 

Also, i don’t think we need to worry too much about artificial structures crashing into earth—though there could be a catastrophic errors at some point as even AI will have its failures. Tech will evolve safely because it will happen step by step. I imagine an increasingly complex conversation between us and our AI. I can also imagine scenarios involving break downs and disasters, but they will be quite rare, imo. 
We won’t need massive structures to move payloads of material, I don’t think either, just the  means at one end to connect masses of material together and accelerating them (think “trains” of material being extruded from an accelerating ring), and a means by which to “catch” or synch with them and help the earth decelerate them at our end. Many centuries ahead though.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

paranoid marvin said:


> It's quite possible that when people sign up for colonisation of another planet, they accept that they and their family are on a one-way trip. This new world would be their home, and for that of their family (and potential children in the future). It's conceivable that travel back to Earth (especially for their children) would simply not be an option. They would have bodies conditioned for living on the planet that they live on, and Earth would be as alien to them as Mars is to us.



Yes, I can see it going that way. In a lot of SF this creates “races” that then vie for various reasons and objectives.
That isn’t the world I’m building. Build the world you’d like to see, yuh know? 

It seems that at this point, and for some limited amount of time—100-200 years?—that we have choices to make. There don’t seem to me to be any practical reasons to put people in micro-gravity in perpetuity, since everything we need from Mars or the Moon (why isn’t it capitalized? How bout just the T on “the”: The moon? or all caps: THE moon?) or from asteroids and other bodies can be had by robotics. For earth emigration purposes, it seems like artificial environments with full g simulation will be better for the populations of emigrants and better for the human race in space. Artificial environments would avoid the drama, struggle, and possible wars—that make much of SF so fun, but that would be HELL to live through—so why not choose them over planetary colonization if we have a choice?


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> With the other options being war or economic sanctions? either of which would cause more death than the alternative.
> 
> Plus governments don't like it when people butt into their affairs and many international treaties are based on the very idea that each country has self determination and territorial rights.
> 
> ...



Yet there is more and more international cooperation and condemnation of nations that abuse their citizens. I jus think this trend will grow And that people will continue to become less tolerant of injustice.

Yup, I think you’re on to a probable direction for many—maybe most or all—high-tech nations. I can see a kind of planetary land-grab happening among the space-faring nations, played out, as you say, by attempting to occupy territory on planets.  This is a deep mine of interesting stories. I think most will be tragedies, though, so I’m trying to see my way to the other side, when humanity has learned its lesson on this. Naive, maybe, but that’s where I’m going. But a lot of good stories in the lesson-learning.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> That is true, but we've yet to see any real results from this. Yes, they can launch rockets with satellites and soon manned missions, but that's a far cry from a sci-fi world where space travel is more commonplace. The vehicles they are currently building are also incapable of causing large scale destruction, mostly because the size is still constrained by the need to build on Earth and then launch them.
> 
> That said you are probably right about it taking a disastrous event to force future politicians to act against their financial backers.
> 
> ...



Very interesting!
yeah, they pretty much invented the insurance industry to secure the financing of new world colonization. Expensive and risky. I bet all that data is out there, but what a pain to collate and correlate it all!

The colonizing powers were all at war with one another as well. $$$$!!! Paid for by colonization as just another part of the overall struggle for domination. How stupidly human! Let’s avoid that next time, maybe. 
I think with this new exploration we have a better shot at cooperation. That’s what I’m imagining. Psychedelic-inspired optimism! That’s instead of calling it cock-eyed optimism, which sounds weird and is probably not politically correct anymore. Don’t want to say bad things about other crazy optimists! We’re not crazy! Just too much peyote!


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

Parson said:


> As to the less important question .... remember that there was a newly married couple who kept their marriage hidden from NASA so that they could fly together on the Space Shuttle. Space Sex Is Serious Business  and there was also a pair of very recently married cosmonauts who flew together. Meet The Only Married Couple To Fly Together In Space  I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
> 
> But as to the real question, the ethics. Ethics cannot be forced. True ethics is the result of decisions to follow a moral code. --- Can you force behavior which is considered by others to be unethical? Any study of ethics and the history of ethics will tell you that the answer is "Only imperfectly." I believe that the only logical response is to provide the best information that you can, and unless you sterilize or otherwise make pregnancy impossible you better expect that it will happen. --- Even going for the sterilization option my bet would be that sooner or later someone will beat it. Making the question of whether it will happen almost certainly an academic exercise if we have people spend years in space. (As a Parson I have no little experience setting up moral principles that "everyone" agrees with only to find considerable people find agreeing with a principle and living by it are two very different things.)
> 
> Any realistic story set in space for anything like a life time would almost have to deal with the question of kids to some degree. (I do like *The Expanse's *way of dealing with it.)



Thanks for the references and the response!
I’ve read the first one, but not the second. I’m on it!
I mean, yeah, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me, but I wonder how they, uh-oh... pulled it off? i think even the Russians—especially the Russians—are watched all the time. There is no privacy, so far, in space, outside the toilet. OK, I’m imagining it...

im not suggesting that anyone—some SF writer, far from it!—is able to dictate to any one or any society or culture what is ethical and what is not. Morality, through religion and region-like philosophy, *has* somewhat superseded national boundaries, though. It is wrong to do some things, at least officially, in every nation, and most stick pretty close to a basic code of ethics that even in, say, South Korea or Somalia is far more advanced than, say, Ancient Rome, or Aztec Meso America. What I’m imagining is a combination of a movement against micro g colonization and a reaction to its failures that feeds into that movement. Not a top-down ethical edict. 
Here I’m more or less polling the SF masses to take the temperature of the issue. I’m writing what I’m writing—building a world as I’d like to see it according to my scientific understandings. But moral and ethical questions are not strictly scientific. The speed of light and the boiling point of elements at specific pressures may be constant and known—even unknowns like the nature of dark matter may be known in time—but what is moral and ethical can’t be “known” unless informed by some transcendental force such as that which religions posit. Ethics are what they are among the societies that promulgate them. It’s a social and cultural decision that must be made over and over again anew. What was ethical for Ulysses in the Odyssey is not what the Dalai Lama thinks Is moral or ethical, for example. 
Space colonization will alter human culture forever. Our experiences there—especially our failures—will alter our ethics and morals. I am interested in that. What will we be like as social individuals when we occupy the solar system. I‘m thinking it will depend greatly on HOW we occupy it—what successes and failures we have—what those successes, and especially failures, do to our relationships and our culture, especially the fundamental culture of child-raising and growing up human.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

Montero said:


> Incidentally, John Barnes Orbital Resonance might be of interest here. It isn't about genetic problems, but it is about social engineering for running a space station. Quite a lot of John Barnes's work has social engineering in it. I rather like "A Million Open Doors" on how a large number of colony worlds were recontacted after Earth had a bad time and dropped out of contact, and a theme through the story is how colonisation groups were chosen.



Oooo, that sounds so interesting!
I‘m gonna read that! Thanks for the tip!

I am writing about that long-term loss of contact/reconnection idea myself. I have done a lot of research on the process of speciation—how new species evolve from older ones and at what point and under what conditions they are truly new and different,  separate species. At what point six to eight million years ago did chimps and humans become different species? At what point will humans separated by millennia from the rest of the human race not be human anymore. If we split into two groups that no longer interbreed, which will be human and which will be something else? How different might they be? How similar? Bonobos, chimps, and gorillas are really not that different from us, but we are definitely different species. With different environmental conditions in an alt history, we might be even more similar to them. Where is the line? There isn’t one, really. We humans make all the rules. But if both “species” are essentially human...? 
Thanks for the stimulating thoughts.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

tinkerdan said:


> I would also think that you have to separate exploration from colonization.
> 
> Think about this:
> We landed on the moon in 1969.
> ...



I get that there are a lot of other interesting question, so cool. This is just the one I thought I’d open with since I’m currently writing about it.
Lots of food for thought there. Thanks.
You really highlighted my interest because for that list of questions, the answers are up to the individual who may or may not decide to conceive and bear another individual. Then, how will the new humans be raised, socially and culturally, in the new off-world environment. I’m interested in the experience of character who will be in positions to make those personal decisions as part of colonizing the solar system. What will it do to human culture and what will space society do to the individual and the culture she inculcates her children with. Seems like where the rubber meets the cosmic road. And it seems like it depends greatly on HOW we do the colonization.

maybe I “see” you on another thread.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

Dave said:


> I agree with all you said, but my earlier point was that experience shows that it will not be hashed out until the very last possible minute, and even then some more.
> 
> I think that what @Michael Bickford wants it to be hashed out right here now.
> 
> ...



Kinda brilliantly stating the conundrum!
Hashing it out here is just a lot of digital hot air—but grist for the story mill.
I get that things will really be hashed out in the due course of time, and you’re right that it’s gonna be at the last possible minute or Aahh! Too late! Disaster!
But envisioning those disasters and solutions is what we do here, right. This is what I’m writing about, Im just looting all your minds for material! Nah, I got my own ideas, but this has been tremendously helpful and inspiring.
I’m very appreciative of everyone who’s taken the time and thought to write. Some amazing thinkers here!
I hope in the next few weeks when I start posting pieces of my novel that some of you can respond with more understanding of where I’m coming from, if not where I’m going.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

Danny McG said:


> View attachment 76831



nailed it!


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## CupofJoe (Mar 17, 2021)

Some work [admittedly no on procreation] is being carried out on the physical, emotional and mental effects and affects of Mars missions.








						Astronauts on Mars missions could suffer cognitive and emotional problems – new research
					

High levels of cognitive performance and effective teamwork are crucial to long-duration space missions.




					theconversation.com


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## Parson (Mar 17, 2021)

CupofJoe said:


> Some work [admittedly no on procreation] is being carried out on the physical, emotional and mental effects and affects of Mars missions.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Really, really interesting and a bit troubling as well.


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## CupofJoe (Mar 17, 2021)

Parson said:


> Really, really interesting and a bit troubling as well.


And there was me, thinking that getting the time off work was going to be the biggest issue...


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## Montero (Mar 17, 2021)

One of the comments at the bottom is interesting too - that astronauts regularly spend the same length of time on the ISS as it takes to get to Mars - and they presumably have not had serious problems. The time on Mars with some gravity being theorised to settle things down again for the middle three years.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

CupofJoe said:


> Some work [admittedly no on procreation] is being carried out on the physical, emotional and mental effects and affects of Mars missions.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Hey thanks!  Just the kinda stuff I’m looking for!


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 17, 2021)

Montero said:


> One of the comments at the bottom is interesting too - that astronauts regularly spend the same length of time on the ISS as it takes to get to Mars - and they presumably have not had serious problems. The time on Mars with some gravity being theorised to settle things down again for the middle three years.



Hi, Montero.
ive read the twin study done on Scott and Mark Kelly and it reveals some pretty big changes in just one year, including damaged DNA telomeres. Since it looks like we’re gonna get lots more data, hopefully we can decide about raising kids on Mars (or NOT!) with a lot more data.


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## Montero (Mar 18, 2021)

The really important question though, is can _cats_ be safely raised on Mars? They are after all one of the essentials of life.


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## Toby Frost (Mar 18, 2021)

I have it on good authority that Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids: in fact, it's cold as Hell. And there's nobody to raise them, if you did.


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## .matthew. (Mar 18, 2021)

Copying another post into this thread because it's sort of related to the discussion here... In a very roundabout way since it's a Mars colonisation game.


> The last couple of hours to get Surviving Mars for free from the Epic Store. Ends today at 3 pm GMT.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 18, 2021)

Montero said:


> The really important question though, is can _cats_ be safely raised on Mars? They are after all one of the essentials of life.



next Big Question fer sher

I am interested in that moment when actual pets—not frogs and rodents, but cats n dogs—are brought on board. A dog was one of the first “travelers”, but once humans started launching themselves we seem to forget about our little buddies. It’s gonna change, but exactly how? Could be an interesting story. Who will campaign for the first feline or K-9 inclusion in a crew? Could it happen clandestinely? An astronaut with a mental health companion animal?
We all _know _it’s gonna happen cuz we’ve all seen Jonesy aboard the USCSS Nostromo. Where would Ripley have ended up without her cat?


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## Montero (Mar 18, 2021)

Incidentally have you read Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series? Not worrying about microgravity, but working towards colonisation in space. Interesting series. Quite different from what you've described of what you are planning.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 19, 2021)

No. Noted. Thanks!


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## AlekseiVashchenko (Mar 19, 2021)

"You kids have it easy! Back in my day, on Earth, we had walk to school! And let me tell you, the gravity would make it harder than anything you've ever done in your life here on the moon! Just be grateful for the sacrifices your parent made to get you here.....etc,.etc.


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## Michael Bickford (Mar 19, 2021)

Perfect!
Two things to listen to:
Four Yorkshiremen, Monty Python
and
When I Was Your Age, Weird Al
Same idea
both super-funny


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## paranoid marvin (Mar 20, 2021)

Montero said:


> One of the comments at the bottom is interesting too - that astronauts regularly spend the same length of time on the ISS as it takes to get to Mars - and they presumably have not had serious problems. The time on Mars with some gravity being theorised to settle things down again for the middle three years.



I think this is going to end coming down to trying it out for real. There will no doubt be certain known precautions that can be taken, but until a facility is constructed and landed on Mars, and a team of scientists and engineers has been living and working there for a few years, we won't know where the real dangers will lurk.

The fact that we are still not 100% certain that we can even land a robot on Mars and leave it intact suggest that we are quite some years away from any kind of official base being built there. I would think that we would be better building one first on the Moon and see how that goes before we start trialling on other planets. 

Unfortunately I can see there being casualties in the quest to provide some kind of habitat on Mars , and NASA and other space agencies will have to decide on what will be 'acceptable' losses of life. Taking off, flying to, landing on and then living on Mars is fraught with many dangers and hazards. It's inconceivable to think that mistakes won't be made or incidents occur that put these space-farers in peril, and too far away to be rescued.

What will be interesting is if some independent/commercial group decide to bypass NASA and other space agencies and try to colonise Mars or the Moon themselves. Would they be prevented from doing so?


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## Montero (Mar 20, 2021)

Huh. I don't actually know what the legal status would be about preventing private flights and who has a legal right to control space, if anyone. There doesn't seem to be much limitation on stuffing satellites up into Earth orbit. Colonisation of other planets by non-governments hasn't really come up until recently, because for a long time only governments could afford the bill. The way Antartica is handled might be a model to work from. My vague understanding is that it is being held in common and protected.


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## .matthew. (Mar 20, 2021)

Montero said:


> Colonisation of other planets by non-governments hasn't really come up until recently, because for a long time only governments could afford the bill.


Ahh yes, back when companies actually paid their taxes 



Montero said:


> The way Antartica is handled might be a model to work from. My vague understanding is that it is being held in common and protected.


My vague understanding is a petty bickering match where nobody has enough to gain by taking it any further...


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## Montero (Mar 21, 2021)

.matthew. said:


> My vague understanding is a petty bickering match where nobody has enough to gain by taking it any further...



That would work. Might not be shiny, sf glamourous, but it would work.....


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