As humans are busy gearing up to colonize Mars, how exactly earthly beings can survive on the Red Planet has become the hottest point of debate. Now an International team of researchers from Florida, Poland and Brazil has talked about the problems humans may face while reproducing in Mars.
"Mars is under consideration as the next planet beyond Earth to support continuous human exploration. Unfortunately, such an endeavour comes with titanic challenges in various disciplines, from space travel technology to medical, biological, social and ethical challenges. We assume that human reproduction in a Mars settlement will be necessary for the long-term success of an outer-space mission," said the researchers in the study report, The Sun reports.
In the June issue of the journal Futures, the researchers suggested that reproducing offsprings on Mars will be more difficult than getting to the planet itself. As per the researchers, the atmosphere in Mars is 1% as thick as earth's and it will make the planet more vulnerable to dangerous solar radiation.
These radiations will not only cause dreaded diseases like cancer but also will reduce the sperm count. It has been previously proved that people who live in a low gravity will have weakened immune systems. It should be noted that pregnant women already have weak immune responses, and it is expected to create major problems.
Earlier, several experiments have suggested that blood pressure will become very low in zero-gravity conditions and since a man's sexual performance solely lies on erection, a drastic fall of blood pressure will affect the proper sexual functioning of men in Mars. To solve all these issues, researchers suggested a genetically engineered new species of humans, which could survive better in the Martian conditions.
However, these genetically modified humans will not be able to live on earth as they will be modified to live comfortably on Mars. Anyway, when these Martians visit earth, they might need technological and health aids to sustain in earthly conditions.
Even though the dilemma of reproduction continues, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX is pretty clear about the government, which may rule Mars in the future. The South African billionaire has previously revealed that the future government on Mars will be based on direct democracy.
"I think most likely the form of government on Mars would be a direct democracy, where people vote directly on issues. Everyone votes on every issue and that's how it goes," said Musk, BBC reports.
Musk has also talked about the vitality of colonizing Mars in the near future to protect the human species from extinction if a nuclear war breaks out.
