Mars Needs Guinea Pigs!

I remember the presentation my parents attended, decades ago when my father was a heart patient having had his first open-heart surgery (to relieve blocked arteries on the heart).  By-pass surgery was beginning to lose its novelty, and the hot topic at the time was the artificial heart, which involved tubes penetrating the chest wall forever, and a pump in the room that did the work the original organ had done.  It was science fiction from the '40's, alive and well in the '70's (or was it '80's?  All so long ago now....it's hell getting old.).  The patient(s?  I think there was more than one) died within a few days of the procedure, allegedly happy to be human experiments for experiments that completely failed.  Well, failed in the sense that design is no longer used.  Artificial hearts today do keep people alive until donor hearts can be found.

The lecture they attended was about the experiment.  How, the doctor wanted to know, could we condemn Nazi experimentation when we were encouraging experimentation on patients in America?

Years later, my mother-in-law was dying from colon cancer, a disease less treatable then than I understand it is today.  Or maybe the outcome would have been the same now as then; who can say?  At any rate, she was persuaded to try an experimental course of chemo, mostly so her family would think no stone unturned.  It failed, and actually hastened her demise.  I remember standing by her bed one day as the chemo was supplied, and watching her skin turn gray, a color skin should never turn, as the chemicals coursed through her body.  Whatever quality of life she had as a cancer patient was sharply diminished by that, another failed experiment.  Years later her children admitted it was a mistake, and wishing they'd had more time with their mother, time that might have been improved without that experiment.

Consent, the sharp-eyed will say, is the distinction between the Nazis and us; but the phrase is "informed consent."  My mother-in-law got all the information she needed, but I'm not so sure it was "informed consent."  In the legal sense, yes; but the family was in that desperate place where any medical procedure has to be tried, lest you regret later the "if only" you didn't grasp at.  But "if only" sometimes turns to nightmare, and the terrible sense that you tried to play God, and were not at all up to the task.  "Informed consent" is a rather low obstacle, it turns out, because we cannot see the consequences of our actions until too late, can never know which road should have been the one not taken.

And so we get here:

Astronauts commonly report diminished eyesight upon their return home, possibly because the eyeball changes shape in space and tissues surrounding the optic nerves become swollen. Without the constant tug of gravity, bones become more brittle and muscles atrophy.

“Astronauts are going to experience psychiatric problems, because they’re human,” Feinberg says. And not only does NASA need to figure out all the ailments that may befall the human mind in space, but it also has to learn how to cope with them.

It could be possible that the human body and mind simply cannot withstand living in space indefinitely. There may be an upper limit for the amount of time we spend there.

Yes, there could be.  There are problems of micro-gravity (never a problem in science fiction, where it's harder to fake "zero G" than it is to just say "artificial gravity".).  But what about this, then?

Astronauts commonly report diminished eyesight upon their return home, possibly because the eyeball changes shape in space and tissues surrounding the optic nerves become swollen. Without the constant tug of gravity, bones become more brittle and muscles atrophy.

And this?

When Scott Kelly returned to Earth after spending a year on the ISS, he wasn’t quite himself. For a year and a half afterward, he scored lower on tests of his cognitive abilities — tests that he actually improved on while in space. “It’s hard to concentrate when you’re not feeling well,” Kelly told the New York Times.

His doctors don’t really know why he had such a long time recovering his mental capabilities.

There are “so many things,” that could contribute to it, says Mathias Basner, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist who led Kelly’s cognitive testing. There’s the higher radiation exposure, but also just living in an isolated environment could play a role, he says. Plus, it might be mentally taxing going from a microgravity environment to a full-gravity environment on Earth.

That mention of radiation is another problem:

"Radiation doses accumulated by astronauts in interplanetary space would be several hundred times larger than the doses accumulated by humans over the same time period on Earth, and several times larger than the doses of astronauts and cosmonauts working on the International Space Station,” physicists working with the European Space Agency reported in 2018.

When NASA sent the Curiosity Rover to Mars, it found that the one-way trip alone would expose unshielded astronauts to an extra 0.3 sieverts of radiation, equivalent to 24 CAT scans. That’s 15 times the annual radiation limit for workers at nuclear power plants, but not fatal. (For context, one sievert is associated with a 5.5 percent increase in cancer risk; eight sieverts can kill.)

The effects of this radiation — and how to mitigate them during spaceflight — aren’t entirely known. The only astronauts to have spent much time outside the protective bubble of Earth’s magnetism were the Apollo astronauts.

It's a bit of a cautionary tale, says the Vox article:  we have no clue what space does to human bodies, and what we do know is not all that encouraging.  What do to, then?  What else but what we always do!  Experiment!  On people!

But the only way we’re going to find out how to mitigate those risks is for astronauts to continue to undergo rigorous evaluation like in the Scott Kelly twin study. They’re going to have to spend long, lonely hours on the moon or in some place beyond low Earth orbit, and do tests on their bodies, brains, and genetics themselves (they won’t necessarily be able to ship back samples down to Earth for analysis).

There’s a lot to yet discover. Another research gap: NASA scientists would like to know how toxic moon dust is to breathe in. They’d also like to know if the negative effects of low gravity are mitigated on the surface of the moon or on the surface of Mars, both of which have less gravity than Earth. Heck, they’d also like to know if medicines to treat kidney stones work in space. There’s so much to learn.

And we need to start sending people out there to learn it!  Because someday we may be space travelers if we just send enough guinea pigs, er, I mean people, out there to find out what it does to them.  Experiments on a massive scale, all with "informed consent," and if we find we can't live in space well.....they will not have died in vain?

I've been gardening again.  Most of the potting soil I buy for container plants, and the bags of "mix" I put into my flower beds, are composed of organic matter.  Good thing, too.  After five inches of rain in one night, my soil has done what it does best:  turned to clay.  I needed that mostly-peat moss mix to both aerate the soil and give it something for the plants to grow in (clay is good for pots, not as a medium for plants).  I seem to remember something about life on land starting with plants after organic material was laid down there by seas which receded and left it behind.  Plants pretty much grow in top soil, which is organic material accumulated over millennia.  It is not just "dirt."  How do you replace that on Mars?  Ship hundreds of thousands of tons of peat moss?  And water, for drinking and for growing plants?  How do you get that? Isaac Asimov imagined, almost 70 years ago now, what we could get it from asteroids (I'm not making this up).  And what if we can't, hmmm?   "Terra forming" is the latest science fiction magic wand for making non-earth environments habitable for humans.   Nobody has a clue how it works, but it's a way to escape the nest we have soiled to the point of being uninhabitable, so let's go for it!  (We can't do it here, but we can do it out there!)  On the other hand, I remember (even saw it on re-runs the other night) the Twilight Zone episode about the astronaut subjected to isolation so long he almost went mad (and remember one of my favorite '60's Batman stories about Batman doing much the same thing).  Seems the popular culture was concerned then with the isolation of space flight for anything more than orbital missions.  Apparently we're still concerned about it, and no know more now than we did then.  How to solve these myriad problems?

Send people out and see what happens!  What could go wrong?  It's for the good of the race...er, the state!...er, the volk....er....

Maybe we need to think about the "informed" part of "consent" a little longer, huh?