Kid Astronauts?

[alxian]

Quick question:

 

What's your opinion on chidlren being trained as astronauts (being sent up into space very early so they have a greater affinity with microgravity) and doing their studies in space.

 

Wouldn't children get used to being in microgravity faster than adults? Living and working in a 3D environment without a gravity bias?

 

Have their been any studies on how quickly/well children adapt to microgravity?

[Turtle]

Quick question:

 

What's your opinion on chidlren being trained as astronauts (being sent up into space very early so they have a greater affinity with microgravity) and doing their studies in space.

 

Wouldn't children get used to being in microgravity faster than adults? Living and working in a 3D environment without a gravity bias?

 

Have their been any studies on how quickly/well children adapt to microgravity?

 

:eek: :) :doh: surely someone has done a study somewhere on this. maybe the soviets? i think they(we?) have already secretly conceived children in space. whatcha think about that? B)

[TheFaithfulStone]

I guess that makes me too old.

 

Damn.

 

TFS

[InfiniteNow]

Quick question:

 

What's your opinion on chidlren being trained as astronauts (being sent up into space very early so they have a greater affinity with microgravity) and doing their studies in space.

 

Wouldn't children get used to being in microgravity faster than adults? Living and working in a 3D environment without a gravity bias?

 

Have their been any studies on how quickly/well children adapt to microgravity?

 

You will be hard pressed to find much data on children and microgravity, since children and scientific research are a bit like oil and water due to protection and welfare issues.

 

You may wish to search to see if any children have ridden the vomit comet and see if there is a consensus on their ability to acclimate relative to an older human there.

 

Also, if you really want to look at space, you can look into the life science studies which have been done in orbit with rats. More at that at the following:

Life Into Space Volumes 1, 2, & 3

 

 

Last, you can form some general hypotheses by learning more about human biology and comparing the data with that here on Microgravity:

 

NATURAL AND INDUCED ENVIRONMENTS

NATURAL AND INDUCED ENVIRONMENTS

 

 

Enjoy.

[Buffy]

Two words:

 

Liability Insurance

/forums/images/smilies/devilsign.gif

 

My question in response is: why do you care?

 

It would be *fascinating* if it stunted their growth,

Buffy

[alxian]

That's partly the point of the question Buffy.

 

Landlubbers may find it funny if that was the cost of adapting to microgravity environments but if it wasn't a bother to the people in orbit, the health as the main concern. It would mean being in orbit for extended periods of time is only problematic if you plan to return to earth.

 

Some of the sci-fi I've been reading, Chris Moriarty, lately talks about adapting to microgravity or low gravity environments. Humans may not be so badly off in space if they grow up there to begin with. If a kid isn't exposed to gravity for most of their life could they become better adapted to microgravity and low gravity environments?

 

Even if it takes several generations for any such adaptations to manifest themselves I wonder how important it would be to actually start sending kids into orbit (not for that single purpose) and studying how well they adapt to that environment.

 

Space cadet school or whatever.

[CraigD]

What's your opinion on chidlren being trained as astronauts (being sent up into space very early so they have a greater affinity with microgravity) and doing their studies in space.

Since most adults who aren’t unusually susceptible to motion sickness appear able to adapt to microgravity readily enough, I didn’t initially give alxian’s question much thought. However, after a second reading, a substantial ethical concern, unrelated to the risks of spaceflight, comes to mind. Unfortunately, evidence supporting the claim on which my concern based is sketchy, including an episode of the TV show “Brainiac: Science Abuse” (a British science show know for questionable science, including outright faking of “experiments”).

 

Under a certain age (this is the sketchy part – sources give this age as anywhere from 2 year to 5, with, to my knowledge, no supporting experimental data), the vestibular systems of children are incompletely developed, making them neurologically incapable of motion sickness, which occurs when the motion detected by one’s vestibular system doesn’t agree with that detected by ones visual and other sensory systems. As these systems develop in a child, after an initial period of effective immunity to motion sickness, she/he tends to experience a period, sometimes many years long, in which her/his susceptibility is greater than it will be in adulthood.

 

The acquisition of basic perceptual neurological systems tend to be time-critical – for example, cats deprived of their sense of sight (eg: with eyes constantly closed or covered) during a several week period as kittens, are never able to acquire normal visual perception (see “Implications of the Hubel Wiesel experiments for how the blind dream” for more description).

 

I’m uncertain what the effects of a prolonged absence of normal gravity would have on a child’s neurological development. Possibly, they might never be able to develop the normal sense of balance necessary to do such things as walk upright on a planetary surface.

 

Ethical organizations, such as space agencies with the capability of placing a child or adult in microgravity for a long period, are unlikely to risk this – and possibly other - potentially devastating, permanent developmental disorders, unless the risk can be justified against a great potential gain in knowledge or for a particular child.

 

The only child I can imagine who might benefit from long exposure to microgravity would be one suffering from an conventionally incurable condition exacerbated by normal gravity, such as a very weak heart, circulatory system, or musculoskeletal system. Given current manned spaceflight technology, such a child would likely be at unacceptable risk of injury from the high forces experienced when being launched into space.

Wouldn't children get used to being in microgravity faster than adults? Living and working in a 3D environment without a gravity bias?

Possibly. However, such a benefit might require that the child be very young – under two years old. For reasons such as the one I describe above, the risk likely outweighs the potential benefit too greatly for such an experiment to be conducted

Have their been any studies on how quickly/well children adapt to microgravity?

None of which I’m aware.

[alxian]

revives fossil post

 

--

 

Thanks CraigD that actually brings to light more fodder :confused:

 

The other reason I was asking was that current space vehicles are small. The bigger they get the more you'd need to move around actively. Where you could argue that regardless of Mir or ISS or a space shuttle being in space or on the ground, a full gee, the passengers just can't move around that much and might not be able to move around enough to be as healthy as a person free to walk around.

 

So in a much bigger microgravity environment, inhabitants would still need to move around. The more they do, and the more physically active they are in doing so (think of it like swimming or flying, but from point to point. They'd need flee jump from place to place and still need a very acute 3D spacial sense to move around a 3D environment. Granted simply staying upright gives us more exercise than would be needed to float around in microgravity, jumping around and more importantly landing and redirecting, considering inertia could provide as much exercise as a gymnastics tumbling routine would.. but daily. In addition to things like dedicate bone conditioning, starting from a very young age, even though they might not be able to adapt to gravity being a constant thing they need to fight against (getting gravity sick etc). I think It could be managed fo kids born in microgravity to adapt later on to life on the ground.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Battle School anybody?

 

Who else will save us from the buggers?

 

tfs