Scott Solomon

I mean, you know, what's the point?

So I think people will be exposed to more radiation.

And yeah, radiation causes mutations, right?

It causes damage to the DNA, and when the body repairs that damage, it's never a perfect process.

There's always a risk that the repair leads to a change in the sequence of DNA, and that's a mutation.

So that's a health risk, but it also has implications for our ability to adapt over a much longer timescale of many generations.

What does it do to adaptability?

Well, adaptation comes from natural selection and natural selection on its own can only really sift through whatever variation there is.

And so the only way you get new variation is through mutation.

Mutation is the ultimate source of all diversity of all living things.

So I think that what we should expect, if we do nothing else, is that if we're able to live for many generations in a space environment like on Mars, it would mean that basically you are kick-starting the evolutionary process.

It would happen faster.

Why that is something we should maybe be concerned about is that's a very messy and unpleasant process.

You're basically talking about a lot of death.

There's going to be tons of errors.

There's going to be shed tons of errors.

Yeah.

I mean, you're talking about a lot of suffering.

You're talking about a lot of death.

And so that's, you know, it would happen.