Speaking about the exploration of the Great Space and the implementation of flights to other planets, not only of our solar system, but also beyond it, a person forgets that he is, in fact, an integral part of the Earth. And how our body will lead outside of its native blue planet is still unknown.
Although you can even guess how. It is no coincidence that Russian cosmonauts used to joke that in orbit a pencil is much more useful than memory, since they noticed that the latter was beginning to malfunction there. And this is still in the orbit of the Earth, but what can we say about flights to other planets …
Experiments show that humanity has not yet matured to the Big Space
NASA is currently conducting a long-term experiment involving astronauts - the single-celled twin brothers Scott and Mark Kelly. The first spent a whole year on the ISS, while the second lived quietly on Earth at that time. Please note that NASA staff, despite Scott's return from the International Space Station, are in no hurry to draw conclusions, saying that the final results can only be expected in 2017.
However, researchers from many countries have been studying this problem for a long time, since the development of astronautics on Earth will largely depend on its solution. And science still cannot give an answer even to such a question, how long a person can be away from the Earth, not to mention many others.
First, a person cannot exist for a long time without the earth's gravity, which is familiar to him, and so far this problem has not been solved. Secondly, modern technology cannot protect an astronaut from the effects of radiation and other cosmic radiation, which literally permeate everything and everyone. Astronauts on the ISS, for example, even with their eyes closed, “see bright flashes” when these beams affect their optic nerves. But such radiation penetrates the entire human body in space, and can affect the immune system and even DNA. Moreover, any protection of the astronaut automatically becomes a source of secondary radiation itself.
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Mice say no to Big Space
Researchers at the University of Colorado recently examined mice that spent two weeks in orbit (aboard the Atlantis shuttle). Just two weeks! And during this short time, unpleasant changes occurred in the rodents' bodies, they all returned to Earth with signs of liver damage. Before that, notes Professor Karen Yonsher, space explorers did not even imagine that it was so destructive for the internal organs of everything living on Earth, including humans. It is no coincidence that astronauts often return from orbit with symptoms similar to diabetes. Of course, on Earth they are immediately treated, but what will happen to a person during a long stay in space, and even far from their home planet?
By the way, scientists are constantly interested in such a question - conception and reproduction in space, since people are planning long-term or even lifelong flights to other planets. It turns out that in zero gravity, eggs, for example, divide in a completely different way, that is, not into two, four, eight, and so on, but into two, three, five … For a person, this is equivalent to the absence of conception or termination of pregnancy at the earliest stages.
True, the other day, Chinese scientists made a "sensational statement" that they managed to achieve the development of a mammalian embryo in microgravity. And although the article by journalist Cheng Yingqi sounds ambitious - "A giant leap in science - embryos grow in space", many researchers were very skeptical about this information.
Disappointing Results Concerning the Exploration of Large Space
So, if you take stock, without even waiting for the results of NASA's experiment with twin astronauts, you can draw a disappointing conclusion: humanity is not yet ready for deep space flights, and it is not yet known when this will happen. Some researchers even argue that we are not even ready for flights to the Moon (from which we can conclude that the Americans have never flown there), not to mention Mars and other grandiose space plans.
Ufologists, in turn, insist on the no less authoritative opinion of other scientists that overcoming outer space, as we are going to do now, is a dead-end path. They are firmly convinced that advanced alien civilizations travel in the Universe in a completely different way, for example, using wormholes - temporal-spatial holes that allow you to instantly move to any point of the Divine universe. Perhaps there are more perfect methods that are not available to our understanding. So far, Earth's space rockets only claim to master the near-earth orbit, and exclusively in all respects, from the turtle (by the standards of the Large Space) movement speed and ending with the complete insecurity of astronauts in these primitive vehicles …