The biomedical implications of living off-Earth

Abstract

Copyright: © 2020 Impey C. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Not long ago, the prospect of humans living off-Earth seemed like science fiction. In sixty years of human space flight, fewer than 600 people have been to low Earth orbit, and just 12 have stood on the surface of another world. The cost and difficulty of liberating humans from the grip of gravity put dreams of living off-Earth on ice. Yet that is rapidly changing [1]. Space entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are perfecting reusable rockets that can ferry people more frequently and cheaply into orbit, and Musk’s company Space-X has announced plans for a large rocket to ferry people to Mars. NASA intends to send astronauts to Mars by 2035, and the Chinese also intend to build a lunar colony followed by a Mars colony. It may only be a few decades before colonists are spending their entire lives on another world. While the space program so far has understandably concentrated on physics and engineering challenges, interdisciplinary groups of scholars are now engaging with the ethical and medical situations the colonists will face [2-4]. This commentary summarizes some biomedical implications of living off-Earth, using Mars as the example.