Scott Solomon

We all love to be around animals.

We have to think about what the world would be like if there wasn't nature around us.

Living on Mars, there's no wildlife.

There's no forests.

Now, presumably, we'll build habitats and environments that allow us to live, and we'll have to grow crops and things like that.

But

I think we're unlikely to bring much in the way of animals with us.

Well, I will say that in terms of what we do know and what we don't know about how space affects the human body and our ability to actually live in a space environment or another world, I think this is the biggest black box, the biggest unknown.

We have done so little amount of research on reproduction

in a lower gravity environment, in a space environment.

That the bottom line is we don't know.

We're sort of assuming anytime we talk about like, you know, moving to Mars or building a space settlement, we are assuming that reproduction is possible, that it will work well enough.

And that's actually something that we can't be certain of without doing more research.

There have been some studies.

So there have been some studies in space going back to the space shuttle days and certainly through the International Space Station era.

Some rodent studies, some studies on fish, some studies on...

other invertebrate animals like sea urchins.

But the bottom line is that it's kind of inconclusive.

Like we really haven't done enough and we haven't done systematic enough studies to know that our own ability to, you know,

To get pregnant, to have a full pregnancy, two-term, childbirth, and then child development.