No human has yet set foot on the Red Planet, yet Elon Musk envisages one million people living on the planet by 2050.
The SpaceX and Tesla boss plans to fly a small group of astronauts to Mars by the end of this decade on his Starship, the biggest rocket ever made.
Eventually a colony of men and women will reproduce there to ramp up the Martian population, the billionaire hopes.
But according to scientists, the difficulties of having sex on Mars make this highly improbable, if not impossible.
Kelly Weinersmith, a bioscientist and author based in Charlottesville, Virginia, says people who want to populate Mars ‘don’t understand how reproduction works’.
Weinersmith, who authored the 2023 book ‘A City on Mars’ with her husband Zac, told the Times: ‘These billionaires think it’s an engineering problem.
‘They think that if they get a rocket that’s big enough, biology will take care of itself – but it won’t.’
Couples could risk the health of their unborn baby by conceiving in space, whether they’re on Mars or orbiting around Earth on the ISS.
‘A City on Mars’ – illustrated by Kelly’s husband, Zach – won the prestigious Royal Society Trivedi science book prize last week.
In the book, the duo address the difficult logistics of both recreational and procreational sex on Mars, as well as masturbation.
On the Martian surface, gravity is around 38 per cent that on Earth, so this low- gravity environment could impede the development of embryos or the movement of sperm.
Meanwhile, Mars’ lack of atmosphere and ozone layer like that of Earth means harmful rays of radiation hit the rusty surface.
Conception could lead to harmful effects of radiation on an embryo, including possible DNA damage which could cause mutations in the womb.
What’s more, even if sex on Mars leads to a successful birth, the testing atmosphere on Mars is arguably no place for a child.
Bringing up children as Martians is perhaps one of the biggest issues of all, fraught with ethical implications as well as practical.
According to Kelly and Zac, even if the issues regarding sex and conception in space are averted, another problem would be getting enough genetic diversity in a Mars population.
A founding population would have to be made up of several hundred humans before they started mating, and even then they’d have to mate with the ‘right people’.
A computer programme or AI would potentially have to compile genetic information on all the space travelers before matching up couples in order to maintain high genetic diversity.
‘It works if we all do what the computer says and no one dies,’ Zac says.
David Cullen, a professor of astrobiology at Cranfield University, has said there are ‘unanswered biological and legal questions’ surrounding sex in space that need to be ‘urgently addressed’.
He thinks the key issue of sex on Mars would be the effect of altered gravity, but there has been a lack of studies to ‘clearly understand what the consequences might be’.
Professor Cullen told MailOnline: ‘A more obvious question is later steps in the full human life cycle such as the effect of reduced gravity on the developments of the musculoskeletal after childbirth, childhood and adolescent developments.
‘We know there is a dynamic effect of the gravity environment and therefore loading on musculoskeletal which affects the development of the musculoskeletal system.’
Professor Cullen added that conception could potentially occur from sex on Mars, but ‘subtle development risks’ during the whole life cycle of a human are unknown.
Professional astronauts might not admit to making sex their top priority as they set up infrastructure on Mars as part of SpaceX’s grand plans, although human nature would surely kick in sooner than later.
Musk recently said SpaceX will send its multi-billion-dollar Starship rocket to Mars in 2026 , although it will be an uncrewed mission.
Two years after that in 2028, Starship will transport people to Mars for the first time – which would mark the first time humans have ever walked on another planet.
Ultimately, Musk wants to make humans a ‘multiplanetary’ species – meaning we live on several planets, not just Earth.
Musk thinks a natural or manmade disaster will eventually bring about the end of civilization, necessitating the relocation to another planet – with Mars ‘being the only realistic option’.
This could be a pandemic worse than Covid, continually decreasing birth rates, nuclear Armageddon or perhaps a direct hit by a killer comet ‘that takes out a continent’.
His highly entertaining research paper published in New Space, entitled ‘Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species’, outlines the company’s vision.
‘History is going to bifurcate along two directions – one path is we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some eventual extinction event,’ he says.
‘The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilizations and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you agree is the right way to go.’
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