What kind of enhancement would allow human to live in space?

[RainDreamer]

Human body is not adapted to live in space as is now. But if we go full transhumanism and modified astronauts' bodies with all currently available technology, what can we do to make their bodies sutied for space living? 

 

Edited June 24, 2016 by RainDreamer

[PB666]

magnetic feet. 

[cubinator]

Make them not lose bone and muscle mass somehow, that would probably be the first and foremost thing. BTW do you mean "live in space" as in live in a space station in microgravity, or as in people who can literally walk down the driveway on the Moon in their pajamas to get the newspaper and be perfectly fine? The latter is a great deal more difficult, seeing as there's this oxygen thing we need all the time, and the whole "blood boils in vacuum" thing, and all sorts of radiation, and temperature extremes around every corner.

[RainDreamer]

 

11 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Make them not lose bone and muscle mass somehow, that would probably be the first and foremost thing. BTW do you mean "live in space" as in live in a space station in microgravity, or as in people who can literally walk down the driveway on the Moon in their pajamas to get the newspaper and be perfectly fine? The latter is a great deal more difficult, seeing as there's this oxygen thing we need all the time, and the whole "blood boils in vacuum" thing, and all sorts of radiation, and temperature extremes around every corner.

With current technology, I dont think we can do the latter anytime soon. But something that let us start doing like years long trip in space would be a good start.

Edited June 24, 2016 by RainDreamer

[cubinator]

2 minutes ago, RainDreamer said:

 

With current technology, I dont think we can do the latter anytime soon. But something that let us start doing like years long trip in space would be a good start.

Then I stick with what I said previously: Find some way to counter bone and muscle degradation that involves less than 3 hours of exercise per day. Also if there were some way to make us more resistant to high doses of solar and cosmic radiation that would help.

[Elukka]

18 minutes ago, cubinator said:

The latter is a great deal more difficult, seeing as there's this oxygen thing we need all the time, and the whole "blood boils in vacuum" thing, and all sorts of radiation, and temperature extremes around every corner.

There's no issue with blood as long as it's contained by your veins. If it isn't, you have other issues.

However I can't really begin to think how you might modify humans to survive in vacuum. I imagine it'll do to just make lighter, better-to-wear protective equipment, at least for a very long time.

Edited June 24, 2016 by Elukka

[cubinator]

2 minutes ago, Elukka said:

There's no issue with blood as long as it's contained by your veins. If it isn't, you have other issues.

It will still try to get out, and your body will swell and stiffen. If you don't exhale completely and immediately, your lungs will be severely injured too. Then there's the problem that the sun-facing side of you gets burned while the shadowed side freezes.

[RainDreamer]

Can we replace human bones with some sort of metal, wolverine style?

[kerbiloid]

A crystal ball with brain (to think) and gonads (a family souvenir) inside a chest of a synthetic fractal-looking six-legged body.

1 hour ago, RainDreamer said:

Can we replace human bones with some sort of metal, wolverine style?

Has no purpose. 1) Cannot regenerate. 2) Carbon and protein structures can be even stronger than metals 3) Soft parts would be smashed inside an shining metal skeleton anyway.

Edited June 24, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Jovus]

I think the two foremost are some modification to limit or eliminate bone and muscle loss due to microgravity, and something to make our DNA and RNA more robust against radiation. With those, I think we're covered for long-term habitation.

For an actual colony or other permanent settlement, we'd need to make sure that pregnancies and births taking place in microgravity aren't lethal for either mother or baby. We don't now know that they are, but I suspect, as it stands now, the baby's bone structure would not develop the necessary resilience to survive birth.

[RainDreamer]

34 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

A crystal ball with brain (to think) and gonads (a family souvenir) inside a chest of a synthetic fractal-looking six-legged body.

Can we achieve that with current tech?

22 minutes ago, Jovus said:

something to make our DNA and RNA more robust against radiation. With those, I think we're covered for long-term habitation.

Can we constantly repair our DNA with something like CRISPR? Replacing damaged ones with healthy one?

[kerbiloid]

51 minutes ago, RainDreamer said:

Can we achieve that with current tech?

Reanimation equipment supports the brain activity. Of course, it's not such easy to implement this in a mobile device.

Robocop-2 (and the Robocop remake, too) movie contains nice episodes with a nerve system floating in a cylinder.

[p1t1o]

1 hour ago, RainDreamer said:

Can we achieve that with current tech?

Can we constantly repair our DNA with something like CRISPR? Replacing damaged ones with healthy one?

There is already a mechanism in-place. Something like, IIRC, 1000-10,000 DNA repairs are made every day, in each individual cell of your body. It sounds like it would be quite hard to replicate that with CRISPR. Perhaps with future techniques the process could be enhanced somehow.

[Green Baron]

Vacuum breathing, subspace floating and neutrino digestion.

We can achieve that with current ridiculous level.

Edit: science & spaceflight is a refreshing experience every time :-)

 

Edited June 24, 2016 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Vacuum breathing, subspace floating and neutrino digestion.

I.e. gravitationally collapsing.

[rtxoff]

If evolution wanted us to go to space our butts would be rocket exhausts. 

[Basto]

Well as long as you don't plan on returning to the surface it could be an interesting experiment to see how evolution addresses the problem. 

[Jovus]

40 minutes ago, gpisic said:

If evolution wanted us to go to space our butts would be rocket exhausts. 

There's a joke in there somewhere, but pursuing it might get me banned.

[Green Baron]

13 minutes ago, Jovus said:

There's a joke in there somewhere, but pursuing it might get me banned.

?? Pls go ahead, i'm curious .... :-)

[wumpus]

For "living in space", I'm guessing some sort of exercise response to electronic stimulation of muscle (there may be some sort of response possible now, but I suspect you want devices that live up to the advertising.  I suspect this requires upgrading the people, as well as the devices.

For "traveling through space" I would suggest hibernation/cold storage/cold sleep.  I doubt approaching the speed of light is really an option (or even non-hohmann transfers anytime soon), so making the "time cost" go away another way is needed.

[RainDreamer]

5 hours ago, wumpus said:

For "living in space", I'm guessing some sort of exercise response to electronic stimulation of muscle (there may be some sort of response possible now, but I suspect you want devices that live up to the advertising.  I suspect this requires upgrading the people, as well as the devices.

For "traveling through space" I would suggest hibernation/cold storage/cold sleep.  I doubt approaching the speed of light is really an option (or even non-hohmann transfers anytime soon), so making the "time cost" go away another way is needed.

So for the first one - electrode implants in muscles to simulate exercise even in sleep? And rhe second one would need to be some kind of modification to human body to allow it to hibernate like a bear, slowing metabolisms and energy usage...

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, RainDreamer said:

And rhe second one would need to be some kind of modification to human body to allow it to hibernate like a bear, slowing metabolisms and energy usage...

Or better-- like an Alaskan wood frog, which goes completely frozen during winter and thaws out in spring. I feel like coming out of that would hurt A LOT, though...The bear might be an easier thing to replicate.

[DBowman]

a few thoughts drawing on all the above:

Bone loss & exercise: I think the human body adapts to exercise and gravity (via load stress on muscle and bone) by some kind of bio-chemical feedback mechanism. We don't get stronger like steel that is annealed or forged but because our bio-chemistry 'senses' the stimulus and changes / modulates it's response. That means we should be able to hack the sensors or the 'control program' so that it takes less stimulus to get the same result without having to implant electrodes etc. We've no idea how to do that right now, but it seems like the kind of thing we could do soon (especially given the glacial pace of manned space flight).

Radiation: There are some very radiation resistant bacteria; 5 million Apollo missions or five thousand times a human lethal dose. It has 'very active' gene repair and maybe special packing. It seems like there is mid term and long term changes that would be possible. Initially we could take lessons from these kind of organisms and apply some to our own biology. - Not messing with any of the developmental stuff, 'just' adding some low level protective mechanisms stolen from another kingdom. Maybe you could do bigger hacks eventually to make your cells carry dupe/trip-licate copies of chromosomes - though that doesn't work out too well when it spontaneously occurs in nature. Rather that figure out how to 'silence' the extra chromosomes we could make an in parallel storage and error repair mechanism, like adding extra synthetic nuclei that do nothing but check the 'real' genes against their reference copies and repair the real ones. Our genome is full of junk, maybe we could insert even more as redundant copies for the new error checking. Or rework entirely the low level gene encoding, repair, and transcription machinery without changing / understanding the 'meaning' of all the encoded development etc - sort of running out genome on a RAID emulator that is very rad resistant. It seems like there is a lot of scope long term.

Vacuum: Those mechanical compression space suits sound fun. Our skin is already vacuum tight enough. You'd think we could tweak up our collagen etc to provide the elasticity to stop oedema - throw on a helmet and some sun screen and you are good to go.

Gecko pads would be better than magnets and work for geckos. Bring back our prehensile tail, and undo some of the walking adaptations in our feet so we have a basic gross grip again. There are probably some things you could do with the vestibular system to avoid space sickness and vertigo. 

[WestAir]

Nanotube bones and nanites to maintain them as you age. Nanites to repair cellular damage from radiation and complex bio monitoring systems to detect issues before they become issues?

[DDE]

On ‎25‎.‎06‎.‎2016 at 5:08 AM, RainDreamer said:

So for the first one - electrode implants in muscles to simulate exercise even in sleep?

The lack of actual gravity will still be an issue. It can't be fully compensated through muscular exercise.

On ‎25‎.‎06‎.‎2016 at 9:28 PM, WestAir said:

Nanotube bones and nanites to maintain them as you age. Nanites to repair cellular damage from radiation and complex bio monitoring systems to detect issues before they become issues?

At that point we might as well break out Wolverine-style regeneration...