Scott Solomon

And then we don't even know what would happen next, right?

I mean, even if you can go from fertilization all the way through to a healthy birth,

What happens to a child who's born into a lower gravity environment?

There's also a lot more radiation in space, not only out in a space station, but also even on the surface of the moon or Mars.

There's much more radiation exposure there than

than what we have on Earth.

And so we don't really know what would happen to a child's growing body in that lower gravity, higher radiation environment, because everything that we know about how space affects the body has been done on healthy adults.

I think there's reason to believe that it would be very hard for a child born on, say, Mars to come back to Earth, because it's quite likely, in my opinion, that they would not form a skeleton

that would be strong enough to be able to tolerate coming back to Earth where gravity is three times stronger than it is on Mars.

That's exactly right.

So Mars has one third the gravity of Earth.

It's a smaller planet, and that's why.

So if you or I traveled from Earth to Mars, we would weigh only one third as much as we do on Earth.

So that might seem nice, but the reverse is going to be tough because coming from Mars to Earth, you're going to weigh three times as much.

So for a child born on Mars and maybe grows up that entire time in that one third G environment, when they come to Earth, they will weigh three times as much.

And that would be a real problem possibly for anybody, but especially if you also have a weakened skeleton.

almost everyone that has gone to space describes kind of being profoundly moved by the experience of looking out and seeing Earth from the outside and seeing how beautiful it is and also seeing how small Earth is in the vastness of space.

And this has been given a name.

So a philosopher named Frank White coined the term the overview effect to describe what people have

said they have experienced when they've had the opportunity to be in space.