Scott Solomon

So what does that mean?

It means that a child born on Mars, as they're growing and developing, their immune system is not going to encounter the vast majority of microbes that kids here on Earth are exposed to when they're young.

If that child on Mars then came back to Earth,

I think that it is very likely that they would be very sick.

I think that those microbes that are generally not harmful to you and me would be really dangerous to a person that had never been exposed to them.

You know, we are creatures of this world, of this planet.

We evolved here and we're really well suited to living here.

But moving beyond our home planet comes with a variety of challenges like those that I think we need to really learn more about before we start actually loading up any rockets and sending people out there.

Yeah, it has.

Yeah.

So this is basically a, it's a simulation.

It's a way of trying to understand what life would actually be like for people living on Mars.

And the way that they're doing this is by they've created a mock-up of a

space settlement.

And they've built it in Johnson Space Center in Houston.

So just down the street from me here, really.

And it's built to be kind of like what they think it would actually be like on Mars, right?

So they actually 3D printed it, which is one of the technologies that

has been suggested for how we might build structures on Mars.

And then a group of, I believe it's four, a crew of four people have entered it, and they are living inside it, as you said, for 100 days so far, but the plan is for it to last a full year.