Scott Solomon

So yeah, the ability to go between planets, it's gonna be hard because you will be exposed to microgravity, to weightlessness the entire time.

It takes like six to nine months to get to Mars.

So an astronaut that is traveling from Earth to Mars

So in a moment, I want to ask you, how do you make a baby in space?

Yeah, so here's the thing.

Like, if we're talking about truly living in space, like, you know, moving to another place to live, right?

If you're talking about having a city on the moon or Mars, and that's where people live,

and raise their families, it assumes that human reproduction is possible.

And we actually don't know if that's the case.

There has been surprisingly little, or at least I was surprised by how little research has been done on reproductive biology in space.

There have been some studies using animals.

Those include fish, some amphibians,

some insects, and also some rodents like rats.

And the thing is, those studies are kind of inconclusive, partly just because there haven't been enough of them.

But there have been some studies that kind of seem to suggest that reproduction might work okay.

So one of the first was a study on some Japanese rice fish called medaka.

And those fish went through the whole process of fertilization, embryo development,

hatching of the eggs and the fish were swimming around apparently just fine but of course you know fish reproductive biology is pretty different from ours and so it's unclear how you know how generalized that conclusion is and in fact some of the studies looking at rats

were much more concerning.

So the bottom line is that we don't really know whether we can have kids in the conditions of space.